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\n Eddie Huang (left) with Russell Steinberg (middle) and Roman Grandinetti, his business partner, on the right.
\n Photo: Courtesy of the subject\n <\/p>\n
In this series, \u201cLooking to Settle<\/a>,\u201d Eddie Huang chronicles his search for a downtown restaurant space. <\/p>\n The day before I relaunched the Flower Shop<\/a> as its executive chef, I got a text from my old friend, Stretch Armstrong.<\/p>\n \u201cMy partner is in commercial real estate and aware of your property hunt. Unsure the status of that but if you\u2019d entertain a convo with a great guy, he\u2019d love to speak to you.\u201d<\/p>\n I was in a bad place because ICE had grabbed<\/a> my lead line cook, Daniel, two days before. If I wasn\u2019t doing prep or picking up his shift on the line, I was talking to attorneys and journalists trying to help locate him.<\/p>\n In that particular moment, I was questioning my return to the kitchen, much less opening another spot, but I grew up listening to Armstrong\u2019s radio show Stretch & Bobbito<\/a>, and even if I was going to curve his homey, I told him, \u201cFeel free to give him my math.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cNamed Manny, will link.\u201d<\/p>\n For the next few days, I blocked out all the noise and worked doubles until we found someone to pick up Daniel\u2019s shifts. People in the dining room were happy, but as is the case in most restaurants, they were unaware of the chaos in the kitchen.<\/p>\n One cook who said he was experienced promptly cut his thumb open on a meat slicer during his first shift. Another guy with fake Cartier buffs<\/a> on his face and a quart of cranberry juice in his hand was unaware he had set parchment paper on fire because he was trying to talk to me about his burgeoning career as a digital content creator. Yet another asked to leave his shift early because he wore Jordan 11s to work and his feet hurt.<\/p>\n I wanted to throw my Kunz spoon<\/a> across the kitchen but didn\u2019t because I\u2019m aware that kitchens \u2014 and the world \u2014 have changed a lot since I began standing in front of the stove.<\/p>\n I was also aware that it wasn\u2019t their fault. The real issue was that management at the Flower Shop had denied my request to hire a sous-chef, so I had to make do with the cooks from its previous regime and was only authorized to hire people at the $23-an-hour level, which is fine for a line cook without any leadership responsibilities, but it\u2019s insane to populate the entire kitchen that way. Without the ability to hire another adult in the kitchen, it was a romper room back there.<\/p>\n In the midst of this, I got a call from Manny on a Saturday afternoon. \u201cEddie! How are you? You remember me from Griffin? You threw your birthday party there.\u201d<\/p>\n I distinctly remembered that birthday party because it happened between the release of Coke Boys 2 and Coke Boys 3, which we listened to standing on the couch there. \u201cRight, right, great party. How are you?\u201d I said, getting to the point.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m in real estate now and I know you\u2019re looking for property. I also know Roman, who you\u2019re working with.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cOh, you know Roman? Yeah, whatever I\u2019m doing next will be with Roman, so if you have a relationship there, just let him know,\u201d I said.<\/p>\n I\u2019d quickly learned that Roman Grandinetti was much more astute with real estate than I was. From the moment he brought up the Baohaus idea<\/a>, he\u2019d sent me three to five locations a week. All of them very thoughtful, most of them pocket listings. I hadn\u2019t talked to my original broker in quite some time.<\/p>\n What I realized by then was that once a commercial property hit LoopNet<\/a> or whatever database brokers use, it had already been passed on by the usual suspects. Landlords with a property coming to market would contact successful operators in the area to offer it personally. If someone liked it, they would snag it before it even got listed. Multiple times a week, a broker would offer me space that Roman had already seen.<\/p>\n Not only did Roman have his finger on the pulse of downtown commercial real estate, but he knew how much it cost to build a restaurant. I didn\u2019t have to go see the space, then bring a contractor, an electrician, as well as an architect, and then wait a week for an estimate. Roman would get offered the location, go see the space, and tell me exactly how much it would cost to renovate, and I got to focus on being a chef.<\/p>\n If only Roman were also a goddamned sous-chef, my life would have been fine.<\/p>\n We looked at 700-square-foot spaces on Eldridge, a gigantic clubstaurant space at 99 Stanton that used to be Stanton Social, and a magnificent 17,000-square-foot space on the West Side that needed programming. None of them made sense for what we were trying to do, and I continued to focus on the Flower Shop. From November to January, there was only one night I wasn\u2019t there: December 26, because my entire family had the flu. That night, the kitchen sent undercooked wings and a cold steak to my wife\u2019s cousin. When I was on the line, there were four misfires over four months, but the one night I wasn\u2019t there, we had two; I simply couldn\u2019t maintain quality without help.<\/p>\n The next day, I wrote an email saying that either today would be the day we put up an ad for a sous-chef or it would be my last day at the Flower Shop. Within 12 hours, I had a call with management, where it was revealed that we had increased food sales by 15.5 percent in December alone. They were happy and allowed me to make the hire.<\/p>\n I really didn\u2019t enjoy the stress of opening a restaurant without any other leadership in the kitchen, but in an odd way, I respected these assholes. They were aware of their leverage and drove a hard bargain, and it worked because I supervised every single dish that left that kitchen from November to January.<\/p>\n After stomaching several terrible trails from so-called sous-chefs \u2014 one who showed up with what looked like an antique machete to break down protein \u2014 I got a call from a chef doing privates on the West Coast named Nik Kyler who\u2019d worked at the Mark as well as Achilles Heel<\/a> and had recently left his post as executive chef at Sea Wolf in Greenpoint.<\/p>\n He was aggressive, asking for a lot more money than everyone else, but he was refreshingly coherent. The way he talked about prep, labor, and food cost had me feeling like I would perhaps get to see my family in the near future.<\/p>\n \u201cYou know, chef, I actually spoke to the owner of the Flower Shop the first week of November.\u201d<\/p>\n It made me smile. Dylan Hales, my partner at the Flower Shop, must have tried independently to find me help but simply balked when it was too expensive. It\u2019s the thought that counts.<\/p>\n Within the first 45 minutes of working with Chef Nik, it was clear that he was the guy. The next day, I got a call from Roman.<\/p>\n
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