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

do with it. I ducked into the walk-in to see what we had. When I opened the door to the walk-in a waft of rosemary floated out and hit my nose. At the time we were buying herbs that were still growing in dirt. This rosemary was particularly fragrant, and Nate had just unpacked the shipment and put it away. I grabbed the rosemary and headed back upstairs.

I asked the cooks if they had any extra mise en place that I could work with and Chris offered up some roasted bell peppers. Bell peppers, lobster, and rosemary made sense, but felt safe and boring. I threw a pot of vinegared water on the stove to cook the lobster, covered it with a sheet pan, and started looking through the freezer for lobster stock. I went back and lifted up the sheet pan and a cloud of steam bellowed up and surrounded me, the vinegar stinging my eyes. I threw the lobster in, turned to my cutting board, and caught another whiff of the rosemary on the counter.

That was it.

Instead of vinegar steam we can do rosemary steam. Rosemary vapor surrounding the lobster.

I grabbed a handful of rosemary, threw it in the pot with the lobster, and breathed in while leaning over the pot. Out of the corner of my eye I noticed John looking at me. He cocked his head and smirked. I dipped into the cabinet that held our plateware and grabbed a large, flat-bottomed soup bowl and a smaller bowl that we used for canapés. After covering the bottom of the large bowl with rosemary branches I placed the small bowl on top of them, in the center of the larger bowl. By now the rest of the cooks noticed something was going on and gathered around. I explained that we could fill the little bowl with food that was going to be eaten by the guest and place it within any aromatic we wanted. The table service team would then pour hot water into the large bowl, activating the aromas and producing a vapor that would “flavor” the dish solely through smell.

I knew instantly that this would be fantastic.

Later that evening we served the course to Bryan and his father. After the meal he walked back to the kitchen to show his father around and introduce him to the staff. He walked up to me to say thanks, and a giant smile came over his face. “That lobster course is off the hook, Chef. It’s badass. Everything was great, but that’s another level.”

The increased business translated into the ability to hire a few more cooks, buy more kitchenware that was much needed, and trade our overworked Costco-bought FoodSaver vacuum sealer for a real commercial-grade Cryovac machine. But I was growing restless.

On a cold Saturday morning in February, while the team was in full swing prepping for the night’s service, the phone in the kitchen started to beep. Everyone knew this noise, and it was usually an unwelcome interruption of the kitchen pace. Peter was, once again, paging us. “Is Chef there?”

“Yes, Peter, I’m here.” The annoyance in my voice was hardly disguised.

He asked me if I wanted to take a call. Peter knew that I rarely took calls during the day. Basically, I only stopped work when Angela would help Kaden call so he could hear my voice. So this must have been important. “Who is it?”

“Some woman named Dana Cowen. She claims she is from Food and Wine magazine. Might be an advertising call.”

I set my knife down slowly and wiped my hands. “Yeah, I think I’ll take that one, Peter.”

Rumors had been floating around for a while that the editors from the magazine were in town scouting for the annual Top Ten Best New Chefs issue, and we knew that a few had been in to dinner.

“Hello, Grant, I have some exciting news that I wanted to call and tell you myself. You’ve been chosen as one of this year’s Food and Wine best new chefs. Congratulations!”

The top ten had been a goal of mine, but I was still surprised to hear the news. I thanked Dana profusely, hung up, and went to tell Henry.

As part of winning the Top Ten I flew to New York City for the announcement party and in July traveled to Aspen for the Food & Wine Classic. There I was responsible for producing a tasting-size portion representative of my food for six hundred people. Six hundred portions of anything requires a giant effort from any chef, but the fragile, detail-oriented cuisine we were producing at Trio made the task seem impossible.

After Henry and I returned from New York, I sat with the team to figure out what we would produce for Aspen. I knew that Henry would want to attend, which would mean that I wouldn’t be able to bring a cook along on the trip. I wanted to serve a course that represented our philosophy, but we had to take into account the limitations of traveling with prepared ingredients, the limited space we would have to work in, and the manpower—just me—to pull it off.

One of our recent additions to the team, Michael Carlson, suggested we do the Parmesan and olive oil ice-cream sandwich that we were currently offering as an amuse. If we could prep the six hundred-plus orders at Trio and somehow transport them frozen, already cut into small pucks, I could bake the cookies on-site, assemble the sandwiches, and wrap each in a small foil wrapper.

This seemed insane. We had limited kitchen resources, and producing six hundred of these would be nearly impossible. John reminded us that we would have to make the ice cream as close to the ship date as possible, otherwise ice crystals would form as the ice cream sat. And, of course, the ice cream had to be made, spun, laid out in trays, frozen, and then punched out with a ring cutter and immediately refrozen.