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

“Cumin Candied Corn. Please eat the lozenge in a single bite.”

Nobody moved. Nobody lifted their spoons. Everyone simply stared first at the lozenge, then looked up at me blankly. Finally, Henry blurted out, “Eat it, folks!”

It was a delicious bite—that much I knew—but I could tell that this ambiguous-looking morsel did nothing to alleviate the staff’s concerns about me. The tasting went on: strawberries laced with wasabi, shot glasses filled with bright orange carrot juice floating atop translucent green celery-flavored liquid, crab with clear raviolis made from lemon tea, and tomato salad with olive oil ice cream. A few in the group began to drink the proverbial Kool-Aid, but the majority showed signs of nothing so much as fear. By the time I got to the last course of the tasting, Rib Eye of Beef with Prunes and Wild Mushroom Perfumed with Tobacco, someone finally had the guts to voice the group’s thoughts.

Barry Holton, the guy I quickly came to know as Earl/Driver 2—the name of the character he briefly portrayed in an episode of Walker, Texas Ranger—cleared his throat. “Um, with all due respect, this all tastes pretty good, but how are we going to sell mushrooms cooked with cigar ash to people? This stuff is pretty out there.”

Henry quickly spoke up and tried to defuse the skepticism by reassuring the team that people would react positively to creative cuisine. As he launched into his belief in me and Trio’s history of embracing food as art I quietly slipped back into the kitchen. I didn’t like how this was all going down so far.

“Did the pasta dough get made?” I barked as I walked down the middle of the line. Dave could read my frustration and fired back with a respectful but aggressive tone.

“Yes, Chef!”

“Great, get a pot of water on. We’re adding the Black Truffle Explosion to the tasting right now.” As irritated as I was, I knew I had to get them back on my side.

And I knew that the BTE would do just that.

Henry did his best to get the local media fired up about my arrival, but the only thing that they had to go on was my connection to the Laundry. There wasn’t much of a story at this point—just another young cook running his first kitchen. There were a few tiny write-ups in the local press, but that was about it.

Trio was not a large restaurant. The two dining rooms sat a total of sixty-two people. I thought it was reasonable to expect fifty diners per night, at least to start, and then once the word got out maybe we could fill the place and turn a few tables. Henry cautiously held such hopes as well, but he warned me not to get discouraged if the guests didn’t knock down the door right away.

Joe Catterson, who had worked at Trio the first three years it was open, was brought back part-time to help run the wine program. He was far more realistic and told me that even during the heyday of Trio they could barely get fifty people in there on a weeknight.

Trio reopened for business on July 7, 2001, with fifty-one covers. It was a typical first night of service for a restaurant. We got totally crushed trying to figure out what we were doing on the fly. The wait times between courses were too long and when the food finally did leave the kitchen it often headed to the wrong tables. Well into the night I took a bite of the crab mixture that was the filling for the clear lemon raviolis garnishing the snapper dish and had to spit it out. It was full of shells. The intern, Jesse, simply decided not to pick them out, and Nathan and I were so busy that we failed to check it during the day.

Worst of all, perhaps, was the prep for the one dish I was certain everyone would love. Chris Sy’s Black Truffle Explosions exploded all right, but not in the diners’ mouths. Instead, as soon as they hit the simmering water that they were being cooked in, they popped and turned the water an inky black from the truffle juice.

After the kitchen was cleaned and our postmortem meeting was complete, I sat in the office with Henry to go over the night. It was, by my account, a disaster, but Henry was a veteran of restaurant openings and was unfazed. I mentioned that we might want to consider capping the reservations at forty covers or so for the first week until we worked out the kinks. Henry agreed and reached for the reservation book. As he flipped through the pages a look of despair crossed his face.

“I don’t think that’ll be necessary,” he said grimly. We had twelve booked for the next night and only seven for the following Wednesday.

Weeks passed and the refinements continued. The kitchen began to learn the prep, the front-of-house staff learned the descriptions and service techniques. But the customers did not show up. Days with single-digit cover counts were common. I couldn’t understand why Phil Vettel and Dennis Ray Wheaton, the two most prominent local food critics, hadn’t shown up yet and penned their reviews. We desperately needed people to know that Trio had changed and that the food was new, exciting, and delicious.

And then when things seemed that they couldn’t get worse for us, they did. And not just for us, but for the country and the world as a whole. Nearly two months to the date of our opening the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon took place and the restaurant industry, like the rest of the country, folded up. Trio was limping along financially, and the understandable reaction to 9/11 made a bad situation far worse. The phones went from barely ringing to not ringing at all. Days went by without a single customer.

The staff