The Reach of a Chef (17 page)

“You never questioned it,” he continued, recalling the crushing workload, because Keller was doing it himself. “You just fucking did it.” (The only time I’ve ever heard Grant swear.) “You’ve got a hundred and two reservations and nineteen VIPs, and he looked at you and said, ‘Do you have time to do this dish?’ You didn’t even
think
about not saying yes.
He
knew you didn’t have time.”

But, Grant says, “If he gives you the nod of approval, that’s
it
—you’re
golden.
Life is good.”

Life was especially good when Chef was happy. Ultimately, Grant learned to read his tells. When he heard the double click of Keller’s clogs—the heels go
click-click
—or when he saw Keller pick up a chive tip and stick it in his mouth like a toothpick, he’d look across the pass at his friend and fellow cook Mark Hopper, who’d heard and seen it too, and they’d exchange an easy grin, because they knew it was going to be a good night.

He remembers with ultra-clarity the night Ruth Reichl ate there, the meal that compelled her to pronounce, as only
The New York Times
can do, that the French Laundry was the most exciting (read: “best”) restaurant in the United States, launching this near-mystical place into the stratosphere. September 1997, a Thursday night, a group of eminent food writers in town for a symposium, not just at a single table but scattered throughout the restaurant. The energy in the kitchen was high and good. Thomas was writing the menu for the most important table, the four-top containing the restaurant critics of
The New York Times
—and the
Washington Post
. (The
Post
’s Phyllis Richman told me she had organized the meal and, with a lingering trace of annoyance at her prominent colleague, said, “She scooped me!”) Thomas looked over to Grant on garde manger and said, “Grant, make me a pasta dish.” So Grant decided on a ravioli, stuffed with sautéed chanterelles, a piece of seared foie resting on top, and a sauce—looking back, he thinks it was almost too simple, but at the time he thought it was “really cool.” But even more than the creation was the fact that Chef had asked him, basically a young line cook, to give him a new dish to serve to the exalted table.

Sixteen-hour days, five days a week, working at that level, it’s hard, but it was also thrilling to move up through the restaurant as the restaurant itself rocketed into orbit. After two years, various tensions within the French Laundry family told him he’d better leave while the going was good, and so he left to work for a Napa winery, La Jota. Keller is fiercely loyal to his employees, and he expects the same loyalty back. Grant had left too early and for the wrong reasons, and Keller was furious.

This was late 1998, when we were completing
The French Laundry Cookbook.
Among the final duties I had by then was to write Keller’s acknowledgments. All three sous-chefs—Grant, Gregory Short, and Eric Ziebold—had worked hard with Susie Heller (who was writing all the recipes) and Deborah Jones (who shot the photographs), taking time out of their day or using their days off to make dishes for Heller and Jones. Keller thanked Gregory and Eric, but refused to include Grant—he was too angry.

After a year, Grant returned to the French Laundry. And Thomas, admitting that he was wrong not to have acknowledged Grant, included his name in the fourth printing. Grant stayed on another two years as a French Laundry sous-chef, and when he felt that it was time, finally, to leave, he spoke with Keller, who this time gave him his blessing.

It is time for you to leave, Grasshopper.

When Henry Adaniya (who began as a cook more than twenty-five years ago, moved into service, and then became a restaurateur and the owner of Trio) read Grant’s résumé and application, he didn’t throw it away, but he did put it aside. Adaniya was losing his chef, Shawn McClain, and had posted a want ad on the Internet. Grant had responded to it. Adaniya saw Grant’s age and thought,
Yeah, a lot of young line cooks at hot restaurants are looking to make a name for themselves. No thanks.

A bit later, though, Adaniya was talking to a purveyor and Grant’s name came up. The purveyor urged Adaniya to check out Grant. So he did—he sent him some exploratory e-mails with a range of questions, everything from menu details to how he’d run a business to what kind of junk food he ate. He was less interested in Grant’s specific answers, Adaniya says, than in understanding “what is the essence of his character.” And it was through e-mail that Grant first distinguished himself to his future boss. “He writes beautifully,” Henry told me. “His vision is clear. He was honest. He knew where he wanted to be, and how he wanted to do it. He also had a manner that expressed wisdom.”

So he told Grant, OK, we’ll bring you out. Grant sent a very clear list of what he needed, and plane tickets were arranged. A few days before his tryout, in March 2001, Grant called Adaniya and said he didn’t know if he’d be able to make it. Adaniya didn’t know what to think.

Nor did Grant. After two days of working his usual shifts at the Laundry, but with a high fever and severe chills, Keller sent him home. The next day he was still unable to shake the chills and fever, so Angela took him to the emergency room, where doctors were urgently concerned about his rocketing white-blood-cell count and worried about possible bacterial meningitis, an illness that causes potentially fatal swelling around the brain. Grant did what any self-respecting cook would do. He called his boss and asked if he needed him to come in to work that night. He’d never called in sick—you just didn’t do that.

“Where are you?” Keller asked.

“The emergency room,” Grant said.

“You’re crazy, Grant—don’t come in.”

Grant spent several days in the hospital and recovered, though the doctors never isolated the cause of the illness.

Instead of going back to work, though, Grant took off three more days to fly to Chicago and try out at Trio. Now he
really
felt guilty.

Arriving gaunt, gray, and weak, having lost nearly 20 of his 160 pounds, Grant began to cook. He continued to impress Adaniya before Adaniya had even tasted a thing, first by his demeanor and organization, then by the critical fact that he served the food when Adaniya had asked for it. Unlikely and unbelievable as it may sound, in many tryouts, Adaniya said, chefs sent out the first course at 3:00 and at 7:00, he was still waiting for the rest of the meal. Grant was good to the minute—first course at 3:00, second course at 3:12, and on through seven courses, all French Laundry stuff, Grant recalls, except for a little morsel of foie gras. (While I’d been hanging out in the Trio kitchen, Grant gave me a small disk, about an inch in diameter, a half inch thick, and said, “This is why I got the job.” Foie gras, encased in a paper-thin chocolate-sugar tuile—it was strange and very delicious, the complex chocolate acting as a seasoning for the rich foie, the delicate sweet crunch a textural contrast to the foie’s smooth richness, plus the little engineering mystery: How did he get that coating around the foie?)

Adaniya’s response throughout the meal: “This is something I haven’t seen before. This is out of the box.”

He intended to offer Grant the job, but when Grant explained his vision of the restaurant (what it has become today), Adaniya said it was too radical for what he described as “an extremely conservative town.” Grant wasn’t interested in catering to the conservative diner, and the two parted ways.

But, as Adaniya continued his chef search, chef after chef served him meal after meal of the same old fine-dining dishes. Each time a new plate came, he thought,
This is just the same as everything else. I want something unique.
So he resumed his conversation with Grant.

“It was really, really risky,” Adaniya recalls. “How do you serve this new space-age food? My staff was afraid of it. They didn’t know how to present it to the guest.”

“If I hadn’t done the stage at El Bulli,” Grant says, “I’d still be cooking French Laundry.”

In the summer of 2000, Keller intended to take his three sous-chefs to Spain during the French Laundry’s summer break. He suggested that Grant go early to El Bulli and spend some time in the kitchen led by Ferran Adrià. Grant accepted. He flew by himself not knowing how he’d make his way to El Bulli, on Spain’s Costa Brava. By chance—and this is one of the lucky things about being a chef, part of the chef karma—in Barcelona’s airport, he bumped into a group of prominent chefs, including Suzanne Goin of Lucques in L.A., Paul Kahan of Blackbird in Chicago, and Wylie Dufresne, who would soon open WD-50 in Manhattan, which would serve out-there food as well.

Grant said, “Where are you guys going?”

“El Bulli,” they told him.

And so he piled into a bus provided by the Spanish cultural group funding the American chefs’ trip and joined them for dinner that night. While it surpassed the expectations he’d gotten from reading about the place, his colleagues, with the exception of Dufresne, were not as receptive to the “space age” cuisine.

He began his stage the next day and was disoriented from the start.

“It was all so unfamiliar to me,” he said. “I felt like I had been exposed to some great restaurants in this country, and I thought I had a good understanding of the highest-end kitchen. As soon as I walked into that kitchen my feet were off the ground. I couldn’t see a sauté pan, I couldn’t see a stockpot simmering, the smells, the sights, right down to the language—I had no idea where I was. Aesthetically, it didn’t look like any kitchen I had been exposed to. The ingredients were all very different and the techniques that were being applied were all very different. It was almost like I was on a different planet all of a sudden. There’s nobody butchering meat, there’s no veal stock going, there’s no this, there’s no that—what the hell is going on here?!”

It was here and at Adrià’s “lab”—“They want people thinking they’re back there with test tubes and Bunsen burners but that’s not what’s going on; looked like an apartment when I was there; a couple couches, a TV, a cooking suite, big library”—that Grant got his first serious taste of experimental cooking, agar and alginate and unusual sugar work (including the sugar “tuile” technique), reducing solids to liquids and reshaping them as solids again but in a different form and playing with heating and freezing. It was like a light switched on in his head, he said.

At the end of his five-day stage, Grant, Thomas, Eric, Gregory, and their respective spouses met for dinner, and now Ferran did what any chef would do for one of America’s most famous and revered chefs—sent him and his staff everything the kitchen had to offer and then joined them at the table for another four hours, though he speaks almost no English and the Americans spoke kitchen Spanish at best.

Grant’s reaction to this meal was more complicated than what he first experienced a week earlier. While he felt more comfortable talking about the food with his fellow cooks than he had with the chefs he’d met, something restrained him. Keller was there, who’d more or less raised Grant as a cook. This was not the kind of food any of them had encountered before. Grant loved it but, he said, “I felt like I couldn’t express my exuberance.”

I asked him why.

“I felt a certain sadness that I enjoyed it, because it felt disrespectful,” he said. Such was his devotion to his mentor.

But when he returned to the French Laundry, the El Bulli experience grew in his mind and, having always been inclined to push even French Laundry dishes to the edge, he now pushed even harder. El Bulli “showed me that there’s another way to do this,” he says, “another option.”

He remembers the night it became clear that he had to leave the French Laundry, remembers the very moment. He was training a new cook on garde manger and ended up working that station. A group including Hiro Sone, chef-owner of the restaurant Terra, up the road in St. Helena, arrived for dinner, and, always generous to their colleagues, the French Laundry chefs planned to send out several VIP courses. Grant can’t recall exactly what the two dishes were that he described to Keller for Keller’s approval, but they were El Bulli–inspired, and one included foam. What they were wasn’t the point; it was the way Keller looked at him when he described the dishes—he could see it in Keller’s eyes.

“He didn’t have the heart to say, ‘This doesn’t fit here,’” Grant remembers. “At that moment, I thought,
This is it.
”

It didn’t happen immediately, of course, but it happened inevitably. This time Keller couldn’t have been kinder about his leaving. Grant remembers his final two weeks at the French Laundry, early in the summer of 2001, as the best and sweetest of his whole career there.

Grant took over the Trio kitchen in July 2001 serving food that seems by his standards today to be not simply traditional but archaic, no matter how French Laundry–derivative they may have been—items such as saddle of lamb for two with
pommes Maxime.
The restaurant was full until September 11, when business at Trio, as at restaurants throughout the country, vanished. By late in the fall, they were doing eight covers a night. It’s hard to prep for eight covers. On the other hand, the lack of business, which remained grave all the way up until Valentine’s Day, gave Grant time to think and experiment, hastening the innovations that would lead to his twenty-eight-course Tour de Force menu, shrimp cocktail–in–mouth spritzers, glass tubes, “pizza,” “squids,” and “antennas.”

It’s one thing to watch someone prep and cook dishes, another thing entirely to work with the food yourself. You can take all the notes you want, paying close attention with all your senses, carefully noting aromas, listening for clues of moisture levels and heat, but cooking is a physical manipulation of actual materials. Touch and feel account for at least half the information you absorb when making a dish. When you just watch, you’re only getting
half
of what you need to know.