Life, on the Line (21 page)

For me, the ultimate dining experience involved long menus composed of many small, sometimes one-bite, courses. Over the years I had helped to craft menus of twenty-five courses or more by adding small canapés for the beginning of the VIP menus at the Laundry. But the basic offering was only nine courses. In order to receive the ultimate experience you had to either be in the industry, know the chef, be famous in some manner, or best of all, arrive as a single diner. I wanted to be able to offer every guest the most expressive menu the kitchen could produce—to democratize the VIP menu.

We introduced the first Tour de Force menu shortly after the reviews. It was eighteen courses long and composed mostly of the five-course menu and the nine-course menu smashed together. We priced it at $175 and billed it as the complete current repertoire of the kitchen. Now anyone could be a VIP.

Each of our staff was encouraged to dine at the restaurant once a year, free of charge. We thought it was both a nice bonus as well as a way for them to experience the restaurant from the diner's perspective. Bryan Black, a recent addition from Trotter's To Go, requested the evening off to dine with his father. It was customary to surprise an employee by creating a special course that they had not seen before, since it added the element of surprise that a typical diner would have.

That morning during prep I started to daydream about my meal at elBulli a year earlier and was reminded of a course where Ferran suggested that the guest lift a vanilla bean to their nose before each bite of a vanilla-scented potato puree. I enjoyed the course but didn't like the repetition of lifting the bean up to my nose. It felt somehow inelegant to present it that way. I really wanted to find a way to present an aroma constantly throughout the consumption of a course without asking the guest to do anything except eat.

I ordered lobster the night before, thinking it would fit nicely into Bryan's menu, and that we would figure out something to do with it. I ducked into the walk-in to see what we had. When I opened the door to the walk-in a waft of rosemary floated out and hit my nose. At the time we were buying herbs that were still growing in dirt. This rosemary was particularly fragrant, and Nate had just unpacked the shipment and put it away. I grabbed the rosemary and headed back upstairs.

I asked the cooks if they had any extra
mise en place
that I could work with and Chris offered up some roasted bell peppers. Bell peppers, lobster, and rosemary made sense, but felt safe and boring. I threw a pot of vinegared water on the stove to cook the lobster, covered it with a sheet pan, and started looking through the freezer for lobster stock. I went back and lifted up the sheet pan and a cloud of steam bellowed up and surrounded me, the vinegar stinging my eyes. I threw the lobster in, turned to my cutting board, and caught another whiff of the rosemary on the counter.

That was it.

Instead of vinegar steam we can do rosemary steam. Rosemary vapor surrounding the lobster.

I grabbed a handful of rosemary, threw it in the pot with the lobster, and breathed in while leaning over the pot. Out of the corner of my eye I noticed John looking at me. He cocked his head and smirked. I dipped into the cabinet that held our plateware and grabbed a large, flat-bottomed soup bowl and a smaller bowl that we used for canapés. After covering the bottom of the large bowl with rosemary branches I placed the small bowl on top of them, in the center of the larger bowl. By now the rest of the cooks noticed something was going on and gathered around. I explained that we could fill the little bowl with food that was going to be eaten by the guest and place it within any aromatic we wanted. The table service team would then pour hot water into the large bowl, activating the aromas and producing a vapor that would “flavor” the dish solely through smell.

I knew instantly that this would be fantastic.

Later that evening we served the course to Bryan and his father. After the meal he walked back to the kitchen to show his father around and introduce him to the staff. He walked up to me to say thanks, and a giant smile came over his face. “That lobster course is off the hook, Chef. It's badass. Everything was great, but that's another level.”

The increased business translated into the ability to hire a few more cooks, buy more kitchenware that was much needed, and trade our overworked Costco-bought FoodSaver vacuum sealer for a real commercial-grade Cryovac machine. But I was growing restless.

On a cold Saturday morning in February, while the team was in full swing prepping for the night's service, the phone in the kitchen started to beep. Everyone knew this noise, and it was usually an unwelcome interruption of the kitchen pace. Peter was, once again, paging us. “Is Chef there?”

“Yes, Peter, I'm here.” The annoyance in my voice was hardly disguised.

He asked me if I wanted to take a call. Peter knew that I rarely took calls during the day. Basically, I only stopped work when Angela would help Kaden call so he could hear my voice. So this must have been important. “Who is it?”

“Some woman named Dana Cowen. She claims she is from
Food and Wine
magazine. Might be an advertising call.”

I set my knife down slowly and wiped my hands. “Yeah, I think I'll take that one, Peter.”

Rumors had been floating around for a while that the editors from the magazine were in town scouting for the annual Top Ten Best New Chefs issue, and we knew that a few had been in to dinner.

“Hello, Grant, I have some exciting news that I wanted to call and tell you myself. You've been chosen as one of this year's
Food and Wine
best new chefs. Congratulations!”

The top ten had been a goal of mine, but I was still surprised to hear the news. I thanked Dana profusely, hung up, and went to tell Henry.

As part of winning the Top Ten I flew to New York City for the announcement party and in July traveled to Aspen for the
Food & Wine
Classic. There I was responsible for producing a tasting-size portion representative of my food for six hundred people. Six hundred portions of anything requires a giant effort from any chef, but the fragile, detail-oriented cuisine we were producing at Trio made the task seem impossible.

After Henry and I returned from New York, I sat with the team to figure out what we would produce for Aspen. I knew that Henry would want to attend, which would mean that I wouldn't be able to bring a cook along on the trip. I wanted to serve a course that represented our philosophy, but we had to take into account the limitations of traveling with prepared ingredients, the limited space we would have to work in, and the manpower—just me—to pull it off.

One of our recent additions to the team, Michael Carlson, suggested we do the Parmesan and olive oil ice-cream sandwich that we were currently offering as an
amuse
. If we could prep the six hundred-plus orders at Trio and somehow transport them frozen, already cut into small pucks, I could bake the cookies on-site, assemble the sandwiches, and wrap each in a small foil wrapper.

This seemed insane. We had limited kitchen resources, and producing six hundred of these would be nearly impossible. John reminded us that we would have to make the ice cream as close to the ship date as possible, otherwise ice crystals would form as the ice cream sat. And, of course, the ice cream had to be made, spun, laid out in trays, frozen, and then punched out with a ring cutter and immediately refrozen. Then, after all of that, it would be packaged and shipped halfway across the country.

“There is no way to pull that off,” John said. “We can barely serve forty of them per night here. Our freezers are more like refrigerators. How are we possibly going to keep seven hundred of them frozen? We would have to buy another freezer here just to keep them ready. And what happens when FedEx loses the box or the ice cream melts en route?”

Carlson chimed in, “Chef-man, you get me a two-hundred-dollar chest freezer and I will bang this shit out. That
amuse
is killer. We have to show well in Aspen, Chef, we have to. You cats focus on service, I'll do the rest.”

I thanked Michael for his dedication, but voiced the same concerns as John. “It will take you days to do this by yourself.”

“I got it, Chef. I got it. This is Trio, guys. Come on. Quit being a bunch of pussies.”

Mike was right. He was on fire, smiling, and he was right. Everything we had accomplished to this point happened because we took risks. I knew Mike would kill himself to get it done on time if he said he would, and for that I had to back him up. I told him, “Let's do it.”

Carlson showed up early, stayed late, and came in on his days off to get all the
mise en place
for ice-cream sandwiches done, packaged, and boxed up with dry ice, all the while holding down his station during our normal service. The FedEx driver loaded up the boxes on a hand truck and our 725 ice cream sandwiches left for Aspen. The extras were just in case.

I headed to Aspen with Henry. The boxes arrived shortly after we did in perfect condition, and Henry and I stood in a giant walk-in freezer colder than Antarctica wearing layers of clothing and assembling and wrapping the sandwiches.

“Man, if the guys could see us now,” I said to Henry, chuckling as my breath formed clouds.

 

In the matter of a year I had gone from an unknown young chef in his first kitchen to the cover of
Food & Wine.
Then I got nominated from a national pool of chefs under thirty years old for the James Beard Rising Star Chef of the Year Award. All of the good press begat new good press, and more articles began hailing the food as avant-garde, or even “molecular gastronomy”—a term that I had never heard.

When I was in Aspen I met chef Michael Anthony. He and co-chef Dan Barber had made the list from their work at Blue Hill restaurant in New York City. Michael asked me if I read any of the food forum websites that had begun to come out recently, and if so, how I was reacting to the public reviews online. This piqued my curiosity. I did a Web search one night after service and found the site eGullet, where I was surprised to find that there were more than a few comments about Trio. Most were great, but a few were wildly misinformed. Posters to the site would be arguing over dishes that neither had ever eaten. Their speculations prompted me to join under the name “Chefg.” I started a new Trio thread with the subject line:

IF ANYONE HAS ANY QUESTIONS REGARDING THE FOOD AT TRIO, ASK ME.

The statement was as absurd as the fact that I wrote it in all capitals. I was a computer idiot and a Web neophyte who didn't know any of the etiquette and had no real idea of the wealth of information and the power of the online crowds. But I saw in the posts that people were passionate about food and more than a little curious about Trio. Plus I figured I could entice a few to drive up to Evanston and check it out in person.

Every day during staff meal and after service was complete I diligently logged onto eGullet and answered the questions that had been posted that day. I enjoyed the unfiltered and immediate interaction, and many of the questions were thoughtful and thought-provoking. Typically, if a chef were to talk to a guest it would be briefly after their meal in the kitchen. These interactions online were very different, far more academic, and forced me to really think about what we were doing at Trio. The exchange of ideas began to inform our creative process. I learned about other chefs throughout the world who I hadn't previously heard about who were also pushing the envelope. Guys like Andoni Aduriz at Mugaritz, Quique Dacosta at El Poblet, and the Roca brothers in Spain. eGullet was at the time the ultimate research guide to all of the best restaurants in the world, and it was full of authentic reactions to the food.

After four weeks of steady posts with tons of detail the site administrators took note and invited me to participate in a formal Q&A session where the subjects would be sorted, grouped, and focused. They offered to help with the legwork and promotion, and in return I promised to spend a good deal of time answering the questions.

The eGullet sessions were a turning point of sorts. I realized quite suddenly that despite my successes at Trio and the recognition I was receiving, I was barely scratching the surface of the interested audience. And the level of knowledge and passion exhibited by these people posting from all over the world was inspiring.

I felt a sense of freedom that I had not felt previously. eGullet allowed me, by writing down my thoughts, to focus my attentions and create a written philosophy of my ideas. This was something I would never have done on my own, and the process was incredibly instructive.

It made me want to push the boundaries much further outside the norm. And suddenly I had a small but vocal crowd letting me know that that was not just okay, but hugely exciting.