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

you better get back in there, it’s opening night,” he said with a firm nod.

Press demand for opening night was crazy. It seemed that nearly every food magazine in the country wanted to send someone out. But as important as the press was to us, we wanted regular patrons in there as well—otherwise, the whole thing would feel like a press preview. Grant wanted to severely limit reservations on opening night to about thirty-five people, but he didn’t want the restaurant to seem completely empty. So I was reluctantly scheduled to sit down at 6:30 at a 6-top with two investors and their wives. We were the table that didn’t really matter in terms of pacing and mistakes.

Grant gathered the staff, and I saw once again why he was so successful. He talked about execution, excellence, and our goals. He let everyone know who the press was and why Michael Ruhlman being in the house this night was so significant, and he thanked all of the key managers for doing so much in such a short time. The staff was ready to run through a brick wall by the time the doors opened at 5:30.

When the front door opened I heard Chris Gerber say, “Welcome.” I watched from the front dining room as the electronic doors opened and the first diner, Sean Brock, walked a few feet past them, disoriented, then moved back toward the actual entrance, laughed, and came in with a look of wonder. “That worked perfectly!” I thought.

I greeted guests as they arrived and then made myself scarce—I had never worked in a restaurant in my life, and I didn’t have the faintest idea what I was supposed to do. I looked up at Grant as I headed toward the basement office to wait for my reservation time. He grabbed my arm. “In fifteen minutes I want you to go into the teens and make sure they’re putting the silver down right,” he said. “Don’t correct them there. Just make sure it’s being done right.”

“I thought I wasn’t supposed to set foot in the dining room,” I said.

“Gerber’s my eyes and ears. You, you’re something different.”

Grant was calm. Diners were spaced out twenty minutes apart on the sheet, but everyone was arriving early. And that included Melissa Clark from the Times.

I called Dagmara, Jim, and Joel and told them to move our reservation back to eight just to give the kitchen some time. And then I moved from room to room and watched. Everything was new to these diners, and their faces were beaming. Anthony Marty was constantly taking digital pictures. Our servers moved at a slower, steadier speed. Things were going well.

When Dagmara arrived, I met her in the front hall, gave her a kiss, and suddenly made the transition from a worker to a diner. It was an odd transition, and I realized at that moment that Alinea, for me, would never be like Trio. I would never be able to enjoy a meal of Grant’s again. Instead, I’d be working. I reluctantly headed upstairs.

All I could do the entire dinner was listen to the other tables and to watch and gauge their reactions. But my back was to most of the dining room, and directly behind me was Melissa Clark and her guest. Michael Ruhlman was motioning to Dagmara to get my attention, and when I glanced over my shoulder at him, eating as a single diner a few tables down from Melissa, he called me over.

“Is everything okay, Michael?”

“Yeah, it’s great, Nick,” he said as he grabbed my tie to pull me in very close, “but I thought you might want to tell Grant that the guy eating with Melissa Clark is Frank Bruni.” Bruni was the head dining critic for the New York Times. This didn’t make any sense.

“Are you sure?” I asked.

“You should go tell him now,” was all he said.

I walked back over to my table to eat the course that was just presented so as not to draw attention. It was a bison dish served with beets, with smoking cinnamon sticks below it. One of the cooks had once showed Grant a glass Crate & Barrel candleholder, and this provided inspiration for the plating. Four small indentations originally designed to hold tea candles now held the bison, and burning sticks of cinnamon were placed below in a long, cylindrical hollow bottom. I wolfed down the food as quickly as possible and excused myself to the restroom. Then I ran down our back service staircase into the kitchen and up to Grant.

“What’s up?” he said, seeming far more like his usual self.

“That guy with Melissa Clark is Frank Bruni.”

Grant stopped plating and looked at me. “Are you sure?”

“Yeah. Ruhlman told me. He seemed certain.”

“Well, that’s just great.” Grant turned and began plating again with a shrug of his shoulders. I stood waiting for him to say something more but he was done. So I walked back up to the table, worried.

A week to the day after we opened, on May 11, 2005, the New York Times dining section had a huge picture of what they referred to as “A sandwich, of sorts, at Alinea in Chicago, a passion-fruit sponge rests between swirls of dehydrated prosciutto.” I was ecstatic to be getting such a huge article. Until I read the first few paragraphs:

OF THE MANY WAYS RESTAURANTS HAVE EXPRESSED THEIR APPRECIATION FOR BISON, NONE IS QUITE LIKE ALINEAʹS.

The dish might well be called Reefer Mammal. Or Stoned on the Range. Ribbons of bison meat filled eggsize indentations in the surface of a horizontal glass tube, the hollow interior of which contained burning sticks of cinnamon. Smoke seeped from the open ends of the tube, infusing the air and summoning associations well beyond the gustatory.

“This whole thing is like a bong,” said a server.

The next of nearly twenty-five courses, a strip of partially dehydrated, butterscotch-coated bacon, arrived dangling like a Wallenda from a teensy trapeze. My friend and I