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

to the door of the kitchen, forming a pile, then shook my hand and offered some verbal encouragement that included some insanely profound and creative profanity.

The review was something. Once I saw it in the paper, I couldn’t believe how much space they had devoted to it. The entire front page of the Friday section was a picture of the black truffle ravioli dish and huge block letters spelling out TRIO with four stars embedded in the “O.” The review also dominated the front page of the dining section. If that weren’t enough, William Rice wrote a feature on me in the Tempo section. It seems that the Trib was impressed.

The energy in the restaurant was palpable.

I gathered the cooks in the dining room once everyone had arrived and we took a second to bask in the reward for our hard work. Then I warned them of the consequences of the review. It was obvious that we were going to get a lot busier—we could all hear the phone ringing nonstop in the next room—and I reminded them that now we would be working harder to keep up. And yet just keeping up was not good enough, because there were real expectations. I thanked them all and then said, “Let’s get to work.”

I grabbed a roll of green tape that we used to label containers, ripped off an eight-inch-long strip, and wrote: “What Does Four Stars Mean To You?”

Hanging from the ceiling in the middle of the hotline was an antique pot rack that we used to display small copper pots. It was one of the few things that went unchanged during our kitchen makeover—we kind of liked it and left it there. I walked behind the line and placed the strip of tape on the vertical crossbar—so it was out of view of the rest of the kitchen but readily apparent to everyone standing on the line—as a reminder of who we were and what we were trying to achieve.

A few days later a large box arrived from Yountville, California. I opened the box to find a card from Thomas and a Methuselah of champagne.

I guess Trotter had not yet kicked my ass.

CHAPTER 13

Widely known as the tougher of the two major Chicago critics, Penny Pollack at Chicago magazine followed suit and awarded us four stars, which legitimized our status in the industry.

The positive press relieved the financial strain on the restaurant and allowed more creative freedom. Both reviews praised the innovative cuisine, calling it revolutionary, and this helped us to set people’s expectations for the boundary-pushing food and meant that we could take more risks. We created dishes that showcased manipulations of ingredients like Atlantic squid “In Textures,” where the seafood was fried, dried, pureed, braised, candied, and served raw. This highlighted the different mouthfeels that could be achieved with a single protein. We would also feature unusual flavor combinations that pushed expectations, such as a chocolate dessert that used strawberries and niçoise olives as supporting components.

This was the moment I began to define my own cuisine, the first major shift in my style of food. When I arrived at Trio, the food was certainly unique among contemporary restaurants in the United States, but it was still recognizably derivative of The French Laundry. Now we were clearly forging our own path.

The imagination of our kitchen exploded. Instead of a vague goal of making innovative food with new techniques, it shifted to an all-out mission to take food and dining further and further. I began thinking about food constantly. I would wake up at eight and play with Kaden for an hour before heading to Trio, usually arriving between 9:30 and 10:00. While I spent plenty of time on mise en place for the night, I also spent at least a few hours each day testing new ideas.

For me, the ultimate dining experience involved long menus composed of many small, sometimes one-bite, courses. Over the years I had helped to craft menus of twenty-five courses or more by adding small canapés for the beginning of the VIP menus at the Laundry. But the basic offering was only nine courses. In order to receive the ultimate experience you had to either be in the industry, know the chef, be famous in some manner, or best of all, arrive as a single diner. I wanted to be able to offer every guest the most expressive menu the kitchen could produce—to democratize the VIP menu.

We introduced the first Tour de Force menu shortly after the reviews. It was eighteen courses long and composed mostly of the five-course menu and the nine-course menu smashed together. We priced it at $175 and billed it as the complete current repertoire of the kitchen. Now anyone could be a VIP.

Each of our staff was encouraged to dine at the restaurant once a year, free of charge. We thought it was both a nice bonus as well as a way for them to experience the restaurant from the diner’s perspective. Bryan Black, a recent addition from Trotter’s To Go, requested the evening off to dine with his father. It was customary to surprise an employee by creating a special course that they had not seen before, since it added the element of surprise that a typical diner would have.

That morning during prep I started to daydream about my meal at elBulli a year earlier and was reminded of a course where Ferran suggested that the guest lift a vanilla bean to their nose before each bite of a vanilla-scented potato puree. I enjoyed the course but didn’t like the repetition of lifting the bean up to my nose. It felt somehow inelegant to present it that way. I really wanted to find a way to present an aroma constantly throughout the consumption of a course without asking the guest to do anything except eat.

I ordered lobster the night before, thinking it would fit nicely into Bryan’s menu, and that we would figure out something to