Life, on the Line by Grant Achatz (book club reads .txt) 📕

fracturing. They had put so much into running the restaurant while I was dying that they had a hard time dealing with me now that I was alive. The cooks were tentative around me, unsure how to act. That just pissed me off more.

I would go a week or more without speaking to Nick. We would do shoots for the Alinea book, compile recipes, and he would look at the results and comment or make edits in an e-mail chain, but he wouldn’t call me. I knew he came by Alinea because checks were signed and spreadsheets were sent to me, but he studiously avoided me, or simply walked through the kitchen and said, “Hi, Chef” as though he were greeting an intern. What the hell was his problem? Why was he tired and disengaged?

Then, one day after repeatedly reworking a course under my direction, chef Pikus simply told me, “I can’t do this anymore.” I picked my head up only for a second, just long enough to look him in the eye and muster a matter-of-fact “okay.” He slammed his hands into the back door, sending it flying, and walked out. I put my head back down and started working on the dish as he had left it so it would be ready for service that night.

Jeff held this place together while I was on my back, and now a relatively straightforward dish prep sent him off. His always intense, introspective psyche had had enough. Did he crack or did I? Fuck him. He just walked out. I wouldn’t do that; I wouldn’t burn that bridge, I thought to myself. Instead of chasing after him, discussing things, figuring out what went wrong, I just blamed him. As far as I was concerned at that moment, Jeff no longer existed.

While I hit points during the radiation that were spectacularly low, I rarely if ever felt sorry for myself. But months later I did. I questioned whether or not I could be a chef. Can I do this? Can I keep making food if I can’t taste? What if my taste doesn’t come back? Then I’m a charlatan, a faker. Alinea has won enough awards, enough stars. I am beat.

For the first time in my life I wanted to quit.

I wanted desperately to leave and see what else was out there. Alinea was my home, and now it felt like a trap. Could I really do this for another ten years, another twenty? I could take those high-end private cooking gigs and make more money working fifteen days a year than I do working three hundred.

Oprah called. Nick was right. The cancer thing, if you live through it, is perfect fodder for Oprah. We got the irony and had a laugh when the call came in. Still, I felt a profound sense of responsibility to go on there and tell my story, to tell other people who suffer from this insidious disease that there are alternatives to hacking apart your tongue and neck. That they shouldn’t take no for an answer. But when I actually filmed the show, sitting in the greenroom with Heather and Nick, I didn’t feel the rush anymore. A year earlier I would have killed to be on Oprah, to talk about my food, to make the case for my cuisine and restaurant in front of her huge audience. Instead I just sat there and poured a half pint of cream into my coffee to cool it down and fatten myself up.

Slowly, though, I began to realize that I hadn’t died.

I kept waking up and the same people were there supporting me, working beside me, pushing me along. I spoke with my dad more frequently. Heather didn’t go anywhere. She stayed beside me, and that meant a ton. Martin and Lara pulled all-nighters for weeks to complete the Alinea book, even traveling to China to oversee the printing personally. In the end, it was better than we could have hoped for at the beginning. I’m not sure any of us felt vindicated by our decision to create it in-house. We just felt relieved that it got finished.

Nick started talking about what to do next. That’s his role. He doesn’t work shifts at Alinea, but he tries to see around the corners. And so we started fielding requests for restaurants in New York and Las Vegas. And I got the urge to go bigger, to prove I was alive. And that began to consume me.

We headed to New York to look at sites and did the same thing there that we did in Chicago. The difference this time around was that we were a known entity and Keith was in New York and had prescouted a number of locations. The third place we looked at was just perfect.

All of the super high-end restaurants in New York are uptown. This was in SoHo, a great contrast. It was a beautiful vintage building with vaulted ceilings and, amazingly enough, an entire back area that was almost a conservatory. The kitchen, if placed in the back, would have glass on three sides, one of them being the ceiling. This was unheard of in Manhattan. The owners were two older gentlemen who were well aware of Alinea and wanted nothing more than to see us put a four-star restaurant in there. I was ecstatic. After the long search and awful negotiations for Alinea, this seemed too good to be true. Keith was beaming. “I told you guys. This is fantastic, right?”

We were being trailed that day by the writer D.T. Max, who was working on a profile for the New Yorker. It was hard not to be enthused. I talked to him about my goals, about how my taste was slowly coming back. Nick had reiterated to me over and over again that there were two magazines in the world that had truly great writing, and the New Yorker was, in his opinion, one of them. While it may not