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

street by street as best we could, then hopped to a different neighborhood and did the same. By the time our meeting with the broker came around we had hit the five major areas that Nick and Dagmara had come up with, highlighted any streets with commercial properties, and had surprisingly little green on our maps. Then he pulled out another set of maps.

“My sister-in-law Anita has a demographic mapping program— she moonlights doing maps for their brother Edgar while she’s in school. She was nice enough to drop these in there. Those stars in blue are all of the three-star restaurants in Chicago according to the Trib and Chicago magazine. The red ones are the four-star restaurants. The overlays are demographic indicators like age, income, stuff like that. Those probably don’t matter much for us. But with the exception of Arun’s way over here, our map lines up pretty well.”

We parked near the gallery district and walked up to the address listed on the e-mail printout from the broker. It was, of course, a closed restaurant.

We met the broker, Kim, out front. A tall, lanky guy with a full head of white hair, he introduced himself to us and couldn’t help but look surprised. I was in my usual attire of black pants, white T-shirt, chefʹs clogs. Nick was in jeans and a pullover shirt.

“So, Edgar tells me you guys are building a restaurant? What kind?”

“Well, it’s kind of hard to explain,” Nick piped up after an uncomfortable silence. “Grant here is one of the best young chefs in the world. It will be ultrafine dining.”

Kim’s eyes nearly popped out of his head. You could tell he thought we had precisely no idea what we were doing. “How many seats?”

“Sixty-five,” I said.

“And how big of a bar area?”

“No bar. Just sixty-five seats.”

Now he was totally confused. “You definitely need a bar. That’s where restaurants make all their money,” he said, as if to educate us. “So it’s like a bistro? You probably don’t need something this big, then. Check average?”

“About a hundred and sixty-five dollars.”

“Per person?!” he nearly shouted. “What the hell kind of food is it? Like Trotter’s?”

“Yeah,” Nick looked at me and laughed. “His food is exactly like Trotter’s.”

We headed inside and it looked like an old nightclub. Lighting fixtures were hanging from the ceiling by cords, and old neon signs were screwed into the wall behind a filthy bar. The space itself was large, but it was bisected by brick arches that made it look like you could at best turn it into a really cheesy Italian restaurant—the kind with a mural of old Italy painted on the wall. We headed to the basement, which looked like a catacomb.

“This would be great for a wine cellar,” Kim offered. “Can you imagine those arches stacked with wine?”

“No, not really,” I said. “Where’s the kitchen?”

“It’s over here,” he said, motioning to a corner of the basement.

“Naw, I don’t need to see it. No kitchens in basements. If the kitchen is in a basement, cross it off your list.”

Nick and Kim looked at me for a second, and then Nick spoke up. “Grant, I bet most of these places put the kitchen in the basement so that they could put the seats on the main floor. They’re just trying to maximize floor space for seating. The basements rent out at half price or less. So if the asking price is forty-five dollars per square foot, the basement might be an extra twenty dollars, maybe less. Sometimes they throw them in for free.”

I paused. No one was considering me in this equation. “Look. That’s great and I get that. But you have to understand; the kitchen is where I live. I spend sixteen hours a day there, sometimes more. I want it to be spacious and to be well lit, ideally with daylight. It has to be well cooled, too. Commercial kitchens are too hot and the people and the food suffer because of it. I want this kitchen to be cool. Our cooks will be happier. I will be happier. No basement kitchen.”

“Okay,” Nick said. “No basement kitchen.” He looked at Kim. “I think you get what we’re going for here, right? This is not a bistro, nor is it really much of a restaurant. Think of it like this: We’re building a gallery that happens to have a kitchen and seating. Find us something like that, with tall ceilings but preferably not rustic or wood. We’re going for modern. And basements are for storage, not people.” He looked at me and made a sarcastic smile.

Kim stared at us for a second as we headed out. He definitely thought we were nuts. We didn’t bother going to look at anything else that day. It was just understood that the rest of them were a waste of time.

I spent a few days driving by myself through the neighborhoods, imagining a restaurant facade in this storefront or that. Nothing seemed right. Nick trolled all of the online real estate sites and came up empty, occasionally sending me a few listings for price reference.

Then he called me and said that Kim had put together a few places that might work. So we set up another meeting on a Tuesday and met him in front of Japonais, a huge and hugely successful restaurant in the old Montgomery Ward Catalog House building, which had recently been converted to luxury apartments and upscale retail.

“They have a few really great spaces in here,” Kim said when we met him. “Totally new, totally blank spaces. Just concrete floors, stubbed-out utilities, and twenty-foot ceilings.”

We met the listing broker and a rep from the building and were escorted into a cavernous space with huge, round pillars. I could easily imagine a grand dining room with a huge kitchen. There was natural light front and back.

“How do you enter off the street?” I asked.

“You don’t,” the listing agent said. “You have to come through that part