Life, on the Line (7 page)

At the end of the phone call he asked why he should hire me.

“I am a highly motivated cook and will do whatever it takes to do things right.”

Trotter chuckled. “I have an entire restaurant full of people like that. What makes you different?”

I was floundering. I had nothing to add. I thought, “Ask me something about your food! I know it cold. I can cite the awards, the press, and quote you to yourself. Ask me something I know, dammit!” But he knew that I knew all that, so he didn't ask.

I muttered something about “being prepared each and every day,” and to my surprise he abruptly ended the call with an invitation to try out at the restaurant. Two days working in the kitchen would be followed by a mystery-box cook-off. The chef de cuisine would give me a box of ingredients and I had to produce four courses for four people—chef Trotter and the three sous chefs—in three hours. He asked if I had any questions.

“Is there anything special I need to bring?” I ventured.

“Your A game,” he replied.

 

Over the next two weeks I studied his book maniacally. I located the hotel closest to Charlie Trotter's and booked my stay there, regardless of the cost. I reserved a table at the restaurant the night before my tryout so I could taste the food. I was doing my homework. Despite the fact that I couldn't afford the meal, I wanted a chance to see the plates I would have to work with, study the flavor and seasoning profiles he preferred, and even peek into the kitchen to see the layout and equipment. These were naive plans.

I arrived nervous and on edge. Everything about the neighborhood and the restaurant made me uncomfortable. I was a small-town kid and the drive into Chicago was enough to freak me out.

The dinner was revelatory. I had never eaten food like that before. I surprised the staff by ordering two bottles of wine that fit the menu and were reasonably good values, but that I clearly could not afford. I couldn't drink all of the wine so I had a glass or two of each and left the rest for the staff. I thought I was being clever by giving them a gift.

I looked ridiculous. I was twenty-one years old, in a cheap, frumpy suit, armed with too much knowledge about the food and not afraid to ask questions that were too pointed. I was being overly observant and was far from relaxed. I wondered the whole night whether Charlie knew who I was and whether he was throwing curveballs at me. Was he giving me food that wasn't on the regular menu? Presenting it abnormally? Noting what I was eating so that those ingredients would not be in the mystery box? I hadn't spent a moment in his kitchen, but Trotter was in my head already.

Despite the wine, I didn't sleep well that night.

After two walks around the block to get the timing just right, I arrived at the back door of Charlie Trotter's precisely at 9:30 A.M. on a Friday morning in July. A chef named Reggie greeted me. Reg was both gregarious and standoffish at the same time. “So, you the tryout?” he asked.

I reached out my hand and said, “I'm Grant.”

“Whatever. I don't remember names until you have been here three months. Too many people break and run, ya know?!” He laughed, clearly enjoying his chance to intimidate the new guy.

I walked in and surveyed the space. It was spotless. I didn't know kitchens could be this clean. I thought that they must have a dedicated cleaning crew that kept it like this.

Reg liked to talk and wasn't shy about imparting little bits of wisdom, but I wasn't listening. I was too busy studying the kitchen. He showed me the rack full of perfect tomatoes, tiny onions, and fresh squashes. “Wow, produce at room temperature the way they should be,” I thought. They were all perfectly lined up on sheet pans instead of jammed on top of each other, still in cardboard boxes in a giant walk-in refrigerator.

“No. No walk-in here, G—the food comes in, the food goes out. Same day. No playing here.”

The Bonnet stove with the brass fixtures and rails gleamed. The rows of copper pots hung in size order overhead, and glass cabinets held jars of spices and beautiful French porcelain. Reg opened one door and showed me the mushroom cooler.

“Uh . . . all you keep in there is mushrooms?”

“Yessir.”

A fucking mushroom cooler . . . a cooler just for mushrooms. No shit.

“I am the guy. You need to know something about this place or Charlie, you come to me. I've been here since day one. Started out washing dishes.” That meant Reg had been here seven years. This place can't be that tough, I thought.

“And by the way, I am the only one who calls the man Charlie. Me and his mom, Donna. You best call him ‘Chef' and you best say a polite hello to him.”

After the tour, Reggie walked me back into the kitchen, which began to fill up with cooks. He introduced me to a few of them, one of whom was the chef de cuisine, Bill Kim. At that point, Reggie passed me off to Bill. Chef Kim looked down at me expressionless, his height accentuated by his toque. He spoke quietly, almost in a whisper, trying to impart a sense of calm to an otherwise chaotic kitchen.

Chef Kim asked me if I was ready, and for the first time he let a little smile creep onto his face as I nodded. He introduced me to the pastry chef and said, “I think you can start here.”

The pastry chef, a young woman of twenty-eight, looked me over quickly and said, “Here's a rondeau of water and some peaches. Just blanch and peel them for me.”

Her tone was frigid and I could tell she was stressed.

After I took the first batch of peaches out of the hot water and placed them into the ice water, shocking them to make them easier to peel, I quickly started on the second round. As any cook knows, you have to have two things in order to blanch a fruit or vegetable correctly: boiling water and ice water. I had both on the first batch, but loading the pot too soon with peaches the second time killed the water temperature. The pastry chef came running over and slid to a screeching halt next to me, grabbing the spider out of my hand. She quickly removed the peaches from the warm water and got them into the now not-so-cold ice bath to cover the error. It was too late.

A familiar voice said quietly, “Sorry to interrupt, Chef.”

[Long pause.]

“Is that how we blanch peaches?”

[Longer pause.]

“In warm water?”

I turned to see Charlie Trotter standing before me, head tilted to one side, peering over his John Lennon-style glasses. His hands were together in front of him like a praying mantis, and he leaned forward slightly to intimate that he was looking into the ice bath, even though his eyes were on the pastry chef.

I cringed at the thought that the first impression I made on the
best chef in the country
was that I didn't know how to do something as simple as peel a peach. But I didn't have much time to worry, as his fury was not going to be directed at me. It was about to be directed at the pastry chef, who had nothing to do with the error but whose responsibility it was to look after me.

His voice began to crescendo. “You are disrespecting these beautiful peaches! You have no idea how to cook. This is basic cooking and you have failed. Perhaps you should waste more money and go back to culinary school because you obviously didn't absorb the mediocre education you received the first time you were there.”

Each sentence grew louder and each was a massive blow to her already fragile ego. I stood there and watched him yell at her, the poor pastry chef who drew the short straw and got me for the day. Trotter knew full well that she wasn't blanching the peaches. He spotted me supervising the failure from across the room. He knew exactly who I was and why I was there. But I was invisible to Charlie Trotter. I didn't exist yet.

He walked away from the pastry station and announced loudly to the whole kitchen in a grand gesture with arms flailing upward, “We will not be serving the dessert with poached peaches this evening because we don't know how to properly remove the skin from the fruit.” He paced around the kitchen so that everyone could look him in the eye.

Then suddenly he stopped, frozen in the center of the kitchen with all eyes on him. He turned, walked back over to the pastry station, and stopped squarely in front of me.

He reached out his hand and introduced himself.

“I am Charlie Trotter. If you give a shit.”

 

Cleanup every night in a four-star kitchen meant scrubbing every surface intensively. The whole kitchen staff participated. The stainless steel is washed and buffed and then the entire kitchen is literally wrapped in cellophane before a power washer is used to clean the floor.

The worst job of the day—after a sixteen-hour shift no less—was reserved for the FNG. The Fucking New Guy. The veterans called it “going up,” which meant climbing on the Bonnet stove, the flattops still radiating heat, and cleaning the inside of the hoods right up to the point where they meet the black iron. With the heat climbing up your legs, getting trapped inside your pants right at your crotch, you sprayed the degreaser and were enveloped in a cloud of toxic gas. Even if you managed to hold your breath, it would make your eyes sting and water. It was exactly what you didn't need after a long day.

If there was one upside to the task, it was that it afforded a degree of privacy. Despite the shit-cloud of chemicals, the shelter of the hoods provided the only place of refuge in the kitchen where you could speak freely with another cook. Mike, the not-quite-so-fucking-new-guy, and I were bobbing in and out, alternating spraying the degreaser and dipping outside the stainless box to take gulps of fresh air.

“Mike, this is nuts, man. I have to go,” I found myself saying.

“You leaving so soon, G? You just got here! Total pansy. I told Bill you couldn't hang. Too bad. I was pulling for you, fellow Michigander and all.” Peer pressure, comfort in numbers, and typical kitchen machismo—but still, this is how you help a young cook through.

Mike had just crossed over the year mark at Trotter's and was singled out for the next sous chef opening. Although he acted like it was a burden, he secretly liked the fact that he was assigned to watch over and train me from day one. It gave him the opportunity to show the arrogance that top chefs are known for. Despite his exaggerated attempts to act overly tough, he managed to pull it off. In my eyes at least, he was a badass. He never flinched when Trotter was twisting him up, messing with his mind. He worked clean and tight and he had made it a year. The pressure of the service, the shit job of scrubbing the Dumpsters, and the sheer marathon of five days in a row of 10:00 A.M. to 4:00 A.M. never seemed to bother him. In fact, he somehow seemed energized by it all.

One hundred and eighty-nine covers was the record number served at Trotter's until a day shortly after I arrived. On this particular night, somehow, even more were booked. At the peak of the push, with the kitchen becoming completely overwhelmed, Trotter began yelling for food. Bill and Reggie reacted in a way that I had never seen. As Trotter directed his fury at a particular cook, Bill stepped between Trotter and the poor chef and absorbed the verbal lashings in a primal, almost parental fashion. He knew that if Trotter succeeded in mentally unhinging a cook in the midst of this service the kitchen would fall into a terminal avalanche. Bill and Reggie made sure that didn't happen.

At the craziest moment of the night, with the optimum opportunity for disaster, Mike and I ran out of space on the pass to plate our food. The queued plates had grown to a point where the pass was covered with partially finished platings. The cooks were spinning in circles, growing more frustrated and unable to think clearly enough to take a task to completion.

“What do we do, Mike?” I whisper-barked in his direction, knowing that even a pause would be a crushing break in rhythm.

“Make the shit happen, G!” he said with a grin. He was loving this.

Mike stretched upward and grabbed a stack of plates on the shelf above our station and with a single deft motion spun left while tucking them under his arm like a football. With his free hand he snagged a spoon out of the
bain
and removed eight nuggets of lobster that had been poaching in an orange-infused broth and placed them on a drain rack. Without breaking stride he slid over to the dish machine, and again using his free hand, squeegeed the water off the rack and started laying plates down.

I thought to myself, “Holy shit, this guy is going to plate food on the dish-machine drain board! No fucking way.”

As Trotter began to call for lobster—gleefully anticipating another problem—Mike was saucing the seventh plate. He had a shit-eating grin on his face.

Trotter bellowed, “How long? How long? Will I get some food from you tonight? These poor people are hungry!”

“Now, Chef!” Mike called back. He turned immediately and placed the first two of the eight on the pass in front of chef Trotter.

Perfect.

Mike was the shit.

“Just don't break and run, man,” Mike said to me. “You have to give notice. It has nothing to do with Charlie. It's about us cooks. Don't leave us dry, G. It will make our lives that much harder. Bill is going to be pissed . . . so tell him first, then Charlie. Poor Bill.” Mike shook his head with genuine worry.

After we finished the hoods I approached Bill and told him I wanted to talk to him after we were finished with the scrub-up.

Bill knew. He put his head down and sighed, “You too?” It was barely audible.

“Bill, I just gotta go,” I said with a shaky voice. “I am a better cook than I am performing now. Something about this place . . . it is making me worse, not better.”

Clearly, this was not the first time Bill had heard this. He didn't say anything other than, “You have to talk to the man. He's in his office. I'll call over there and see if he'll talk to you now.”