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

“It’s so weird, though, right?”

“Not really—you put ketchup on your fries, right?”

“Yep.”

“Well, what’s in ketchup, Grant?” He said this with a swooping voice, emphasizing that he was stating the obvious.

“I don’t know, tomatoes?”

“Well, yeah, but what else? There’s a ton of shit in there, right?” He walked over to the shelf and grabbed a bottle of Heinz. “Here, read the label, little man.”

“Tomatoes, corn syrup, vinegar, salt, sugar . . .”

He cut me off, “Right. And what is in pickles?”

He grabbed the five-gallon bucket of “burger blanket-style” pickles and put it down on the stainless-steel counter with a wallop for emphasis.

“Okay. Now read these ingredients to me.”

I started, “Cucumbers, water, vinegar, salt, sugar . . . hey, what is that?” I pointed to the calcium chloride.

“No idea! Come on. See what I’m getting at? All the same stuff in there. They just swapped out the mashed-up tomatoes for some cucumbers, and bam, you get a pickle. In London they shake vinegar on their fries.”

“Really? Gross. But this tastes good!”

“Of course it does!” he bellowed as he flipped his side towel off his shoulder, twirled it up, and snapped me in the thigh.

By the time I was nine the Achatz Depot had settled into a steady and more predictable pace, and my dad put the systems in place that allowed him some free time. He was still working eighty hours a week, but he found time to spend with me outside the restaurant.

He enrolled me in karate, and every Tuesday night we’d go together to the dojo.

We’d strap on our helmets and I’d jump on the back of his Honda V65 Magna, wrap my arms around his torso with a death grip, and we’d shoot down St. Clair Highway. He would yell over the noise from the air whizzing by our heads about how to improve my form or the strategy needed for an upcoming sparring session.

One night he was explaining how you don’t have to hit someone hard to take them down.

“Aim for the nose or the solar plexus, and down they go.”

He was midsentence when he stopped instantly. In the newfound silence, he pointed out a deer standing in a cornfield. The man noticed everything. He was aware. He had an attention to detail that I marveled at.

I loved the competitive environment of karate, but more than anything I was just trying to find something that I was really good at. Success in karate seemed simple to me—you trained, learned the required forms, and tested for belt advancement. It was clear at a glance who was better than you were because they were wearing the proof around their waist.

On sparring days the goal was even simpler, if a bit more brutal : beat your opponent. Victory provided instant gratification. I was fiercely competitive, accepting challenges from older kids, knowing that I would get my ass kicked, but knowing too that I would get in a few good blows.

I also knew that my dad was watching.

With the Achatz Depot thriving, my parents tried to buy the building, but the owner refused repeated requests to sell. Minor problems that could be easily fixed turned into bigger problems, and the irritation of having a landlord took a toll, even though the rent was cheap.

Once they realized that the purchase would never happen they began looking for a bigger space to capture the excess demand. A co-op-owned restaurant that was inside of a 95,000-square-foot farmers’ supply store a few miles away presented an opportunity to expand.

My parents made the move.

When we took over the new space it was a complete disaster. The owner wanted to be gone in a bad way, so he literally walked out to the parking lot and handed my parents the keys, leaving garbage in trash cans and food in the refrigerators. A small team was hired to begin the cleanup while the current crew kept the Depot running until the new restaurant opened. I helped my parents clean the filthy kitchen and declared the walk-in refrigerator my personal project. I went in armed with rubber gloves, a bucket of soapy water, and a jug of bleach. The previous owner had only been gone one day, but what I found there made it seem like it had been months. Five-gallon pickle buckets sat one-quarter full of tomato sauce with a thick moldy crust on the surface. Iceberg lettuce heads were liquefying in the cardboard box they came in. Then I came upon a partially unwrapped hotel pan of what seemed to be a meatlike substance that smelled so bad I ran out of the cooler to keep from vomiting. I took a deep breath, ran in to retrieve the pan of rotting flesh, and ran out to the Dumpster as quickly as I could. It was the single most disturbing thing I have ever seen in any kitchen, and the smell haunts me to this day. Some people just don’t have standards. I learned that at an early age, spending the better part of three days scrubbing down that walk-in until the smell lingered no more.

The Achatz Family Restaurant opened one month later in March 1983 to a flood of business. Revenue grew 30 percent that year and the next, and when, after two years, investors bought out the co-op, the opportunity to expand presented itself once again.

My parents borrowed $175,000 from a local bank at the stratospheric interest rate of 17.5 percent, signed a ten-year lease, and expanded to 4,000 square feet. The dining room was gutted and all-new booths, fixtures, carpet, and wall coverings were added. After a major six-week renovation, the place could now accomodate 165 people. Our little diner was not so little anymore.

When the restaurant reopened, the whole town showed up and pretty much never left. My parents had to hire nearly every one of our relatives to keep up with demand, and the Achatz Family Restaurant