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

“Man, you were right,” he said. “This definitely ain’t The French Laundry!” He slapped me on the back hard and it was tough to tell if it was dismay or optimism that he was trying to convey.

Before we left Napa I warned him over and over that Trio was not what we were accustomed to. It was pretty much the same talk that Thomas gave me a few months before. The kitchen was rough, to say the least. Stacks of carbon- and grease-crusted pots were piled in the corner, and thick rubber mats lined the floor. The floor itself was painted purple and was slippery as hell. It pitched four inches into what we eventually called “ditches” on the hot line. All of the equipment was modular, raised on casters with broken brakes that not only moved around any time someone bumped into them but also created gaps where debris would collect, making it difficult to keep things clean.

As we walked down the line, David leaned in to inspect the condition of the stove and smacked his head on the exhaust hood. The ceilings were low and the hood extended down enough to make it an obstacle to any cook over six feet tall. On a far wall were framed magazine covers and old Art Culinare pages—reminders of the Rick Tramanto and Shawn McClain eras.

“Um, can we take those down?” he said to me with a grin.

We began the work of reconfiguring the kitchen ourselves. The shelving that towered above the hot line for holding the finished plates was disassembled, the low-boy refrigerators were rearranged, and a space in the center of the line was left vacant. We found a four-foot-square piece of granite in the basement and placed it on top of some metro shelving that we bought at Home Depot. That became our pass. The heat lamps were pulled out—we wouldn’t need those for sure—and the steam table was converted into a workstation with the addition of another piece of found granite secured in place with duct tape. The line felt more spacious and clean and was an efficient use of an otherwise small kitchen.

Once the rest of our small crew came in, we gave the kitchen a scrubbing that it clearly hadn’t had in years. Then Dave smiled and grabbed recently hired Nathan Klingbail, and a few moments later the two returned carrying rolls of black carpet mats, the same kind that lined the floor at The French Laundry. They rolled out the carpets and all of a sudden the purple floor disappeared.

It was not a high-end, well-designed four-star kitchen, but at the end of four days of cleaning and moving things around, the space worked. More important, the team felt united in the pride of what we had accomplished together—and we hadn’t even fired up the stoves yet.

In the dining rooms, Henry was making the same effort to give Trio a new face. The walls were repainted, the table settings revamped, and new art was hung by his brother-in-law. Within three days it was transformed. The physical changes weren’t dramatic, but to everyone working there the feeling was that we had just created a new restaurant.

As I got to know the team from our time cleaning I started to wrap my head around their placement in the kitchen. I knew I was going to put Carrier on the fish station, both because he was familiar with the mise en place from working as the fish commis at the Laundry and because its central location on the line would give him a good vantage point to help me supervise. Still, I needed to find a great meat cook to anchor the line, because I knew my own time would be stretched over multiple stations.

The group was downstairs attacking the basement and walk-in with bleach and deck brushes when I headed down and asked everyone to come up to the pastry kitchen to clear our heads of the noxious gases. “Who thinks they can cook the meat?”

John Peters took a small step forward while the others glanced at the ground. “I can do it,” he said, his eyes making clear contact with mine.

John was my other linebacker, or perhaps more accurately, my lineman. He was a soft-spoken native Texan with a stature that rivaled Dave’s. Speaking quietly but confidently, he told the group about his time working in steakhouses in Texas before moving on to culinary school at the CIA, and eventually landing in Chicago to work at Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s Thai-influenced restaurant, Vong. Since I had nothing else to go on at this point, I thought to myself that putting a giant guy from Texas on meat made sense.

I placed the others in their respective stations based largely on the same process. It was more about their personalities than their cooking experience. With the help of a local culinary school extern named Jesse, Nathan would hold down the cold garde manger and Chris Sy would man hot garde manger.

I needed to articulate my goals to this small group of strangers. I wanted to turn a tiny restaurant on a sleepy street forty minutes outside of Chicago into a world-class establishment.

I needed them to start believing.

I tried the same method I used on myself to build up my confidence after I accepted the job at Trio. At the end of our first day of fourteen hours spent scrubbing and rearranging the kitchen, we retired to the dining room for a meeting. I grabbed an easel, a few Sharpies, and a giant pad of paper and had the group sit in a small circle. Then I started asking the same questions I had asked and answered in my own head a thousand times.

“What are the five best restaurant cities in America?”

The group shouted out the first two in unison, with Carrier’s voice booming above the others. “New York. San Francisco.”

Then there was a pause.

“Come on, now. I need three