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

The staff of Alinea gathered together for the first time. I asked everyone to form a semicircle in the kitchen and I stood between the passes in the middle. It was the moment. We were four days from opening night. Some of the staff were people I had worked with for the past four years. Others I was seeing for just the second time.

Everyone grew silent. I took a long pause before addressing them, gathering my emotions and thoughts.

“I grew up in St. Clair, Michigan, flipping eggs at my parents’ diner. It was all I loved to do growing up. It became who I am. And at some point, for a reason I don’t even know, I began to dream that one day I would own my own restaurant. And eventually I began to dream even bigger, that one day, by the time I was thirty, I would own a restaurant and it would become a great one. The best in the country, maybe the best in the world.

“My thirtieth birthday was a week or so ago. So I missed that goal by a bit.” Everyone let out a bit of a laugh.

“You have all arrived here in the past few weeks, and Joe Catterson has done a great job of letting you know what to expect here. But there is more to it than that. That is just the start.

“What you see here started with a conversation over a year ago. Nick Kokonas, that guy over there, and I met and started to work on this. Curtis Duffy and John Peters joined us in working on this every day for the past eight months. Joe, our GM and wine director, has put together a great group of people. It has been a real push to get this done in time and make it as amazing as it is—you can still hear the pounding downstairs. We killed ourselves to get this done on time.

“But all of that is meaningless. Our goal here, together, is to make this the best restaurant in the country. I know what it means to work at a place like that, and I saw what it takes firsthand when I was at The French Laundry. I want Alinea to be better than that. I demand that Alinea become better than that.

“Anyone here who is not on that program should leave now. This is not a restaurant, or a paycheck, or just your job. This is our statement, our measure of what we can be.

“This is my dream. I am lucky enough to have a shot at it. And it will require all of us working together in a singular fashion to pull it off.

“Thank you for joining me. Alinea means a new beginning and a new train of thought. Let’s keep that in mind as we start tomorrow.”

I paused and everyone clapped. I saw Joe Ziomek, one of our longtime waiters from Trio, looking at me with emotion. Nick, who was sitting on the pass next to me, legs dangling down, was slack-jawed.

“I should add that I owe a great deal of thanks to Nick for having the faith in me to make this happen. He quit his job, put up a ton of money, and has killed himself over the past few months to help get this built. Nick, do you want to say something?”

He was incapable of speaking. He had lost nearly fifteen pounds in the past two months, was exhausted, and was not even expecting the whole staff to gather that day. But it is really rare when he has nothing to say. The man likes to talk.

“I. Well. I simply know that this is, well, it’s going to be great.” He was choked up and waved his hands saying he was done.

No one said anything else.

The two “friends and family” nights had gone well. Or well enough.

I sat down with Dagmara and friends each night and ate through the twenty-five-course Tour menu one evening and the twelve-course Tasting the next. Both took forever. Waits between courses were so long that at one point I feigned going to the bathroom simply to peek into the kitchen to see what was going on. Grant was working frantically at plating food and simultaneously directing cooks on other courses. It looked far more chaotic than I expected.

The food was good, but not at Trio’s level. A few of the servers were spot-on—they were veterans who had worked with Grant for years. Others had a style that was completely off, either too formal or too casual. Many were making amateur mistakes: serving across a diner, placing the forks and knives on the “pillow” serving piece the wrong way, or missing a wine pour before the food was coming.

After the second preview night I hung around until everyone had left and sat with Grant. “Chef, it felt rough out there,” I offered up cautiously.

“Yeah, ya think?” he said, half laughing, half exasperated. He went on to explain that it took years to get Trio to the place it was. “We’ve been at this now three days. No one knows what they’re doing yet. Half of the dishes are being plated wrong. It’s going to be rough for a while. That’s why we’re limiting reservations. Exactly what I’ve been saying all along.”

Demand to dine at Alinea in our opening month was crazy. We only had two phone lines set up and they were both jammed constantly. I was answering calls during the day and telling people that we were booked, but when I looked at our reservation sheet I could see that we had tons of room. Grant had notes that popped up on the screen reading “Limit to 45” and “Limit to 40” and occasionally “Limit to 52.” None of it made sense to me at the time. But after sitting down to dinner I could tell that neither the kitchen nor the front of the house was ready.

But May 4,