Restaurant review, The Graduate.

Restaurant kitchens are famously hidebound, authoritarian institutions, which function, even in this egalitarian era, like medieval guilds. Within this strict hierarchical framework, there are masters and there are apprentices, and an apprentice’s work can go on forever. Witness the impressive résumé of Alex Ureña, who took his first job in restaurants washing dishes at the River Café at the age of 16. After working his way up through a series of menial and ever-more-demanding jobs, he caught the eye of David Bouley. He spent nearly a decade at the famous chef’s eponymous restaurant, eventually running the kitchen. He did the same at Blue Hill, which, along with Dan Barber, he helped open. For a brief time, Ureña was the executive chef at Marseille, in midtown, and, more recently, he spent several months dabbling in the experimental cooking techniques developed by the mad-scientist Spanish chef Ferran Adrià at his famous restaurant El Bulli. Ureña has done it all, in other words, with the exception of one thing. Until now, he has never had a restaurant to call his own.

Read more at http://nymag.com/