Miller Jonah - Generation chef: risking it all for a new American dream

J onah Miller bounded up the steep narrow stairs, each tread worn at the center from more than a century of use, the only reminder that this place had ever been anything but his. In fifteen minutes, when the doors opened for the first time, it would be Huertas, a Spanish restaurant that had the twenty-six-year-old chef almost $700,000 in debt before he sold his first beeron paper, at least, as restaurant investors knew how bad the odds were of repayment, let alone profit, anytime soon. Everything but the stairs was new, a practical compromise between the dream Jonah had carried in his head since he was sixteen and the realities of building codes and water lines and oven vents and his partners input and, always, the budget. He had managed to erase the storefronts past as a pizza place that simply stopped paying rent and gave the keys back to the landlord, a Korean place that preceded it in failure, and before all that, a vague something else. Now all he had to do was not fail as his predecessors had, in a business where it happened all the time.

Jonah was ten pounds lighter than usual on an already beanpole frame, skinny enough to catch his mothers attention and inspire his fiance to make sure there was always takeout in the refrigerator for a late-night meal. His professional kitchen philosophy boiled down to keep your head down and do the work, and he wasnt a screamer like some chefs, so the stress of opening his first restaurant turned inward, instead, and eroded his appetite. He referred to the space that way, as his first restaurant, because there was no chance hed stop at one.

At six foot two, hed developed a slouch in deference to kitchen soffits that might want to knock him in the forehead or coworkers who preferred eye contact to staring at his chin. He was, he said, too tall to be a chefwhich made him laugh, because he had never really wanted to be anything else. The slump was part of an overall concession to the fact that cooking always came first. Jonah had gone to the same East Village barbershop for the last five years for a $15 adult version of a kids buzz cut, because it spared him having to make aesthetic decisions or to engage in mindless conversation with someone who considered himself not a barber but a stylist. He had no tattoos, even though they were as ubiquitous as clogs in a restaurant kitchen. He wore anonymous dark cotton pants that were baggy enough to be comfortable on a fifteen-hour shift, and equally nondescript T-shirts and hoodies; no outlier colors or styles that required him to devote conscious thought to what he put on in the morning. His shoes were broken in and built for comfort.

What stood out was his new chefs shirt, blindingly white, its creased short sleeves not yet softened into shape by repeated washings. Jonah could have worn a more formal and more expensive double-breasted chefs coat, embroidered with Huertas and Executive Chef Jonah Miller, but he chose the same shirt that the cooks and dishwasher and porter wore, and told them not to call him Chef. Better to lead by example, he figured, than to insist on respect before hed shown them what he could do. Hierarchy didnt mean anything. He was going to earn their admiration.

He took his place at the pass, a marble counter at the front of the narrow open kitchen and a particular source of pridesix old pieces of marble set into a steel frame, held in place with some adhesive, twelve and a half square feet of work space for $200, the price of a single square foot if hed insisted on a pristine new slab. He checked the inanimate objects that hadnt budged since the last time he looked, because he had to have something to do: a large Spanish ham on a metal skewer set into a wooden frame; little mismatched vintage dishes, one of Maldon salt and one of lemon wedges; a canister of tasting spoons; a metal spindle to hold completed order tickets; a jury-rigged rail that wouldnt last the week, to hold tickets that were still in play. He checked the fill level on his squirt bottle of olive oil, retied his long apron, and refolded and retucked a towel at exactly the right position on that apron tie, just behind his left arm.

He walked back past the roast and saut station and the fry station, peered inside the refrigerated drawers at the mixed greens and portioned proteins, and headed up to the wood-burning oven to survey the prep work of the one cook Jonah couldnt see. The oven had been there when he leased the space and he wasnt about to spend money to move it, so theyd ended up with a bathroom between it and the kitchen. Until everything was running smoothly, hed shuttle back and forth to keep an eye on things. While he was up there, he reviewed the glass jars of citrus wedges that sat on the bar, to make sure they looked good enough to suit him.

Jonah had played high school baseball, starting out as a pitcher until a chipped bone in his shoulder exiled him to shortstop and third base, and the pitchers habit of minuscule last-minute adjustmentsonce the microscopic repositioning of fingers on the ball, now the equally fine placement of a knife on a cutting boardhad stayed with him. It was a nice, familiar way to dissipate some of the tension.

If Jonah was rightand he had bet his professional future that he wasHuertas was exactly what a healthy range of people were looking for, from the East Village millennial crowd that cruised First Avenue to serious diners old enough to be their parents, to neighborhood residents looking for a regular haunt. He was going to serve them Basque food because he loved it and because it had newness going for it, offered in two distinct formats that gave people a range of choices, from a drink and a snack to a multicourse meal.