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

to work all the way out in Evanston. We had no budget. Servers would want to work where they could make more money on more covers.

I wanted to change all of that.

Three days after arriving in Evanston, two of which were spent cleaning, the team touched food for the first time. I had stayed up until 4:00 A.M. finalizing the opening menu and made packets for each cook containing recipes and mise en place lists. I ordered everything the previous night. For the first time in years I was nervous in a kitchen. I realized that I had to demonstrate every procedure to every cook except David. It wasn’t just how to make a foie gras torchon, or how we were going to make avocado soup, it was every minor detail: how to check in the produce order, how we label every container, where to store all of the ingredients, how often to vacuum the floor, which equipment is hand-washed, and how we coil the cord around the blenders after they’re used. The list was endless. The first time we did anything, even the most menial task, was critically important to setting a standard, and the bar had to be set high. “The only way to do it is the right way” was taken directly from the Laundry kitchen, and we made it our credo on the very first day.

Henry and I planned to hold a series of front-of-house training sessions and tastings in the days leading up to the reopening. The cuisine was a major departure from what they had been serving, and we knew that in order to be successful the staff had to be able to present it with confidence.

The menu format was different. The à la carte menu was abandoned, and two tasting menus took its place. The first was a five- to six-course menu with four or five choices in each category, and the other was a nine-course degustation. All of this made the service team quite nervous. Henry had warned them as well that the food we intended to serve would be radically different in appearance and in flavor combinations. Their job would be complicated by the fact that some courses would require special instructions to the guests to get the full, intended effect.

Just after 2:00 P.M. on day three, after the kitchen team spent six hours preparing the mise en place for the dishes, the front-of-house team arrived for their first training session. I had not met any of them formally, and had only seen them when I ate dinner during my tryout. Henry and the office manager, Peter Shire, printed the opening menus and recipe packets for the staff in preparation for the meetings. Henry came into the kitchen to let me know that the team was fully assembled. I lifted my head up as I heard his voice, tied my blue apron snugly around my waist, and nodded to Dave. “I’ll be back in a bit. Keep it tight.” I grabbed my clipboard and walked into the dining room.

It was a joy to listen to Henry speak. He had a thoughtful, poetic eloquence and a Zen-like demeanor that instantly put everyone at ease. As I walked into the room he turned his charm on full blast in an effort to “sell me” to the service team. After a gushing introduction, I thanked everyone for attending and began explaining what it was that we were about to embark upon.

The group I stood before was on average fifteen years older than me and had been in the restaurant business longer than it looked like I was alive. I tried to explain to them how and why we were going to create a dining experience that they had never seen before. The whole thing must have sounded absurd to them, coming as it did from a clean-cut guy who could be one of their kids. I spoke about my upbringing in the diner, culinary school, the brief stint at Trotter’s, and my time with Thomas before I began to explain the philosophy behind the food.

“I want to create an experience that is based on emotions. I want people to be excited, happy, curious, surprised, intrigued, and even bewildered during the meal.” That was my litmus test to see who was in and who was just there for the paycheck. A couple of the staff stared at me intently, a few drifted off, and one guy slyly nudged his friend with his elbow and raised an eyebrow as if to say, “Who is this clown?”

Henry and I took turns explaining how the restaurant would have to evolve and what our collective vision and goals were for this incarnation of Trio. I headed back to the kitchen while Henry went through service-related protocols and got the staff ready for the tasting we had coming up later in the evening.

The plan for the remaining portion of the afternoon was to serve half of the courses on the menu one by one. I would explain the ingredients and concepts behind each dish, we would settle on a wine pairing, the appropriate silverware, and practice descriptions for each. In the kitchen I plated the dishes for the first time and explained the critical elements of the presentations to the chefs while answering any questions they might have about technique or components. The team would then assemble the remaining dishes under my supervision.

We wanted the tasting to follow the progression of the menu as closely as possible, so we started with a small series of one-bite courses slated to be the amuse-bouche for each menu. First up was a course modeled after the one that won me the job. Called “Cumin Candied Corn,” it was essentially a savory corn panna cotta wrapped in a cumin-flavored sugar film. The quarter-sized lozenge was salty and sweet, creamy and crunchy at the same time. David and I made ten of them and walked into the dining room. We didn’t say much except to