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

medal around my neck. I walked up to the podium, thanked Henry, the kitchen, and the front-of-house teams, and turned to walk off the stage when I spotted a tall, lanky man standing just out of sight of the crowd. He was jumping up and down like a schoolboy. As I drew closer I realized it was Thomas. He grabbed me by my shoulders, patted me on the back, and said over and over in my ear, “Congratulations. You did it.” I am pretty sure he was more excited for me than I was.

He also had a better idea than I did of what such recognition could do for a chef ’s career.

Shortly after returning home from the Beard Awards, Angela told me she thought she might be pregnant again. I never thought I would have a family. After watching the turbulence of my parents’ relationship and feeling the effects firsthand of a difficult marriage, I never wanted to assume that risk. My father had lectured me about how hard his career choice was on home life and how it forced difficult decisions and sacrifices.

I had begun to compartmentalize my life. Everything in my career was locking into place just as I had hoped, and I made it my mission to see that that didn’t waver. My dedication to cooking was growing daily. And while I didn’t anticipate being a father of two, I promised myself I would do my best at being a father. I kept telling myself I could do both, even though I knew the demanding circumstances surrounding the goals I had for my career would make it much more difficult.

My relationship with Angela continued to strain with the knowledge that we were having another child. Finances started becoming more of a concern, and she urged me to look for a job that would pay more money while requiring fewer hours. I immediately dismissed the notion knowing that the momentum I had now was rare.

Days would go by and we would barely speak. I would tend to my responsibilities as a father, showing Kaden how to cut the grass and shovel the sidewalk, making taking out the garbage a morning adventure, building a gauntlet of Matchbox car racecourses, and going three rounds of wrestling before my escape to work by 10:00 A.M. every day. As time went on, I stayed at Trio later and later after service, sometimes not getting home until 2:30 A.M. I was at home six hours a day and slept through most of them. Angela and I basically became roommates once again.

That compartment in my life was basically empty.

The food, however, was evolving at a rapid pace after the Beard Award. What started as a desire to break away from the model that was instilled in me at The French Laundry became an unquenchable desire to create entirely new experiences and tastes for diners. We had more ideas than we could develop, more creative urges than we could satisfy. This was a good problem to have. Our kitchen team was locked in and feeding off of each other.

As we pushed the food in new directions we began to realize that the plates, bowls, and silverware that had been used to consume food for hundreds or thousands of years did not work optimally for the food we were now creating. The “pizza” was a great conundrum. How does one serve it? You can’t simply put it on a plate, and even if you did it would look absurd. And you couldn’t exactly use a fork. It needed to be elevated so the guests could easily get their fingers under it. At the time, we were presenting the guests with homemade bubble gums of unusual flavors. This was brought to the guest inside a balloon that they had to pop in order to get the gum. Their experience would then be extended, casually, on the car ride home. As I looked around the kitchen to find something to serve the pizza on, I saw the pins. We decided to put the pizza on the head of a straight pin, and to put the pin in paraffin wax at the bottom of a large bowl, thus emphasizing just how small it was.

These were novel solutions that did make good use of minimal resources, but we didn’t create anything truly new. They were fun, but they weren’t innovative.

I turned to the Internet and started searching everything I could find on service pieces, plateware designers, silverware manufacturers, and even jewelry designers. In the span of a few hours after service I e-mailed forty-three designers and companies explaining who I was and what we were trying to accomplish at Trio.

A few days later I received my only response from a designer named Martin Kastner. He explained that he had grown up in the Czech Republic, where every eighteen-year-old male had to do a mandatory two years of military service. After completing his secondary-school studies in blacksmithing and locksmithing, Martin first trained as a paramedic, but after nine months switched to restoring the Horsovsky Tyn Castle, a Czech cultural monument. It was an opportunity for them to get a qualified person at almost no cost. Martin spent time restoring sixteenth-century armaments in a castle out in the country. For good measure, they also gave him a bunch of old padlocks—centuries old—to reverse engineer. There were no keys and he wasn’t allowed to crack them open. He had to learn to think like a lock maker from the sixteenth century, hand forge a test key, and try again. He cracked most of them. In between restoring metalworks, cracking locks, and fixing old gates, he fed the bears that lived in the moat. The local circus had run out of money, and that seemed like a safe place to keep them.

When his service ended he enrolled at the Fine Arts Institute at Usti nad Labem, then went on to the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design