Generation Chef by Karen Stabiner Read Free Book Online

the current equivalent, the warehouse space turned into a big, noisy restaurant, was not how he envisioned the next stage of his life. Bravado and naïveté, and not quite enough money, were enough to get started in 1979, but this time he had to take a more measured approach. If he got really lucky, he could assume the lease of a faltering business, move into the kitchen, and spend money only on the parts of the space that customers could see.
    He was eager to take the chance, because as he saw it, there was no acceptable alternative. Waltuck had run a restaurant kitchen for all but the past four years of his adult life; he had not spent his days talking about other people’s cooking or concepts, but had cooked, created dishes, trained a team to execute them. It was what he did. It was, after a well-intentioned stab at consulting that turned into an exercise in frustration, what he felt he had to do. He wasn’t quite comfortable anywhere else.

3
THE HUNT
    S omeday, when he was successful, Jonah would be able to hunt for a location first, money in hand, and then figure out exactly what to do with it. Once he found a space he liked, he could install the right restaurant from a collection of ideas he already had in his head, waiting their turn like eager students hoping to be called to the front of the classroom. Investors would commit up front to be part of the next project, whatever it was, because they didn’t want to miss out on a good bet, and Jonah would step into the real estate market with ample funds to compete for the good places. Someday he’d lease a vanilla box, which was what chefs called a vacant space—not the remains of a previous restaurant with a sad story to tell but a blank canvas waiting on his vision of what it ought to be.
    That scenario would cost at least $1 million, too big of a wager on an unproven kid, even a talented one with a fast-rise résumé; he had no traction as a business owner. Jonah aimed for half that and so far had just over $400,000 pledged. If he lucked into a great location, he figured he could raise another $100,000, which ought to be enough.
    He needed a space that satisfied a seesaw set of requirements: It should be in a neighborhood where there were already restaurants to attract customers, but not too many, on a street that drew both the drinks-after-work crowd and their older, bigger-spending siblings, one that lent itself to his design ideas but didn’t require extensive repairs. One that he could afford, although cheap was pointless if it failed to meet the other criteria—low rent on a dead block was no bargain.
    He assumed that he’d find such a place in Brooklyn, so he set out to look in the fall of 2012. Week after week, his fiancée went to work—Jonah joked, ruefully, that at least someone in the family was making money, aware that Marina did not want to be a corporate lawyer forever and was making her own investment in his future, one not tallied on the spreadsheets. Jonah hit the street with his backpack full of sketches and plans, to look at listings.
    He spent the fall looking and got nowhere, so he hired a realtor in January and fired him four months later for not paying close enough attention to Jonah’s parameters. He spent the next five months on his own again, looking at what must have been fifty sites, all the while reassuring his investors. No, he didn’t need the cash yet, just the promise of it, but yes, he might need it any day, and sure, he assumed that he would find the right space, even as he went out day after day and didn’t.
    There was a fine line between a young chef on the brink of something big and one more unemployed sous chef, and it had been a year since Jonah had worked a restaurant shift. He did what he could to promote himself—worked catering gigs, participated in a pop-up restaurant downtown with a rotating set of chefs—but this was taking longer than he ever imagined it