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

The team created a twenty-six-course, fifteen-wine, four-hour dinner for the two friends, pulling out every stop and every new technique and presentation we had developed since his last meal. Looking for some spontaneous inspiration, I made contact with one of my favorite purveyors, Kate Lind, a woman who owns a tiny organic farm in Three Rivers, Michigan.

Kate takes a very “Summer of Love” approach to her life, and it carries over to her business. She talks to chefs directly and tells them what looks good on the farm a couple of days prior to delivery, which allows her to avoid the high-technology model of the Internet and FedEx. I would constantly bug her for obscure ingredients that I had read about in old cookbooks, and she would promise to plant or forage for them if they weren’t readily available. A few weeks earlier she had reminded me that the angelica I encouraged her to grow was ready, but she explained apologetically that she only had two plants because her husband, James, had mistakenly tilled most of them under. “You know James,” she said. “He gets on that tractor and starts daydreaming and the next thing you know half the field is gone.”

At the time I assured her it was okay and asked her to leave them in the ground. I had no idea what I was going to do with them, and we didn’t have a guest coming in who I felt was worthy of the suddenly very rare prize. Until now.

I had Kate gather a bunch of blooming horehound mint, which would become a bite-size gelée paired with lime, fresh-cut evergreens, chanterelle mushrooms, and ramps for the rabbit with evergreen vapor course. And per my instruction, she harvested the two lonely angelica plants.

After extra-early days leading up to Bill and David’s dinner, many after-service brainstorming meetings about the pending meal, and consultation with Joe on the menu progression and wine pairings, I felt we were ready. It was our most ambitious menu ever. This was due not only to the number of courses but also to the risks we were taking with some of the concepts. A chocolate dessert used mustard seeds for texture like you might see poppy seeds being used in pastry preparations, and we laced the buttercream with Dijon. We paired caviar with a kola nut ice and steamed milk, while a raspberry and tapioca dessert came with a long-stem rose for the diners to smell before they ate the parfait.

But the biggest risk was the angelica. The plants arrived in pristine condition, standing upright in a cut-off gallon milk jug filled with water to keep them from wilting, the beautiful green leaves nearly as large as my open hand. They were gorgeous, and certainly even more so in my eyes because I knew the story behind them. I knew Kate had sourced the seeds and grown them specifically for me, and that these were the only two we would get from all of her efforts.

Historically the plant’s hollow stems had been used as straws for cocktails, perfuming the beverage with their celery-like aroma. So it seemed natural to honor that tradition and have Bill slurp something through the cleaned-up branches. I began removing the plants from the jug with the intent of snipping away the leaves and paring them down to a single straw, when I stopped. They looked like flowers in a vase, they were alive, and they were a part of that small farm in Michigan. We needed to serve them that way. In fact, that needed to be the entire point of the course. After a brief description from the maître d’ Chris Gerber, my go-to front-of-house guy, I wanted Bill and David to remove the branches from the glass vase that we would serve them in, contemplate the angelica, its history in gastronomy, and hear about Kate and her tiny farm five hours away. What I put inside for them to eat was almost irrelevant.

I settled on a baked Ashmead’s Kernel Apple puree that would be piped into the hollow stem with a syringe. That was it. Nothing more. The apple flavor worked with the anise-celery notes of the angelica, and the apples were grown on Kate’s farm.

The dinner went wildly well. While chatting with the men after the meal I sensed an aura of satisfaction coming from them akin to the pleasant surprise of expectations having been exceeded. As we talked, David mentioned that he wrote a weekly column for the L.A. Times and wanted to write about his experience. I wasn’t sure what that meant exactly, but of course I was thrilled to get more national exposure, especially because it was a genuine surprise.

On October 1, 2003, Pulitzer Prize-winning writer—and unbeknownst to me, the chairman of the James Beard restaurant committee—David Shaw wrote a feature on me and Trio for the L.A. Times:

EVERGREEN VAPOR AND MOZZARELLA BALLOONS

And these are just two courses in what may be the most surreal dining experience in America.

I hugely underestimated the importance of David Shaw’s article. It was splashed across the front page of the dining section of one of the nation’s most circulated newspapers, with superlative-laced copy, color photos of the food, and two guests smelling roses while eating the raspberry dessert. And this was penned by one of the nation’s most respected food journalists. It made its way to all the food forums online and likely the desk of every writer who cared about what was happening in the food world.

As I read the article, my jaw dropped at the quotes.

“Welcome to Trio, the most avant-garde restaurant in America.”

“It was a truly amazing experience. What Achatz is doing in his 13-table restaurant is nothing less than redefining fine dining in this country.”

“Risky and delicious.”

“Every course at Trio seems as much intellectual exercise as culinary experience—as much theater as restaurant. Take our 19th course. The waiter brought to