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

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