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

and expression of creativity. Please accept my invitation to dine at Alinea.

I would love to show you what we are doing here in Chicago.

Sincerely,

Grant Achatz

After completing the e-mail draft I saved it and returned to working on the spring menu. I didn’t feel completely right about sending it off yet, so I decided to sleep on it. If I felt good about it the next morning, I told myself I would let it fly. And so I did.

I was peeling sweet potatoes for a new tempura course that I had been working on when Joe came walking toward me with a grin on his face. Joe is not one to smile much, especially in the morning, but he was clearly smitten with something and was looking forward to telling me.

“Good morning, Chef. I know you don’t enjoy having large parties in the restaurant, but we got a request today for one that I thought might interest you. A woman from Gourmet called and wanted a table for fourteen. She claimed Ruth was going to be in the party, apparently a bunch of them are in town for some type of event.”

Jesus.

We hated large groups, so much so that we made it our policy to try to avoid booking them except on the rare occasion that we were slow due to the post-New Year’s Eve season. Fourteen was our absolute maximum size. It fit comfortably into our downstairs dining room, but it was stressful on the kitchen and service. The nature of the Alinea experience does not lend itself to big parties.

But we couldn’t say no. “Do you think she’ll really be in the party, or is this a marketing event that is trying to leverage her name to get a party booked?” He shook his head. The call came in from New York, caller ID said it was Condé Nast, and the girl made it a point to say Ms. Reichl would be dining.

“We have to do it then.”

“Okay. I’ll block the downstairs room. Do you want me to handle it as per normal? Take a thirty percent deposit at booking, etc.?”

“Yes,” I replied. “Standard procedures.”

“Any price breaks, or quote them the normal room charge, etc.?” Joe asked, just to be sure.

“Same as always,” I replied.

I was excited but freaking out at the same time. Apparently my e-mail had put a bug in her ear about Alinea, or maybe it was just a coincidence. But either way she was coming—as a 14-top! Jesus.

I immediately walked over to Alex Stupak, our pastry chef, and told him the party was booked.

“Fourteen? Fourteen? How can we do a perfect dinner of our food for a fourteen-top?” he exclaimed.

“I’m not sure, but we have a few weeks to figure it out.”

We engineered a menu that was the best representation of what the kitchen had to offer and what we thought we could produce for a 14-top on a busy night. We had to consider everything. Not only the output of the kitchen and service, but things like whether we had enough serviceware to accommodate a 14-top along with a normal service. Sure, we had around thirty of every piece, but we had to assume that many of those would be in use at the exact moment we needed them to fulfill the Gourmet party. If we had thirty specially designed pieces from Crucial Detail in inventory but twenty were sitting on tables when we needed to pick up the fourteen VIPs, we would be in trouble.

We knew this would be a very different type of dinner than it would be if Ruth were to come in with a smaller group. Would they be talking business? Would many of the diners have special requests? Would all of them even be into food? Typically when a food writer comes in, the reaction of the chef is to shove as much food down their throat as humanly possible. In this case I intentionally held back. I knew this was a different animal, and I suspected at some point, despite how much she clearly loves food, she must get sick of being force-fed. I knew if we did it right she would return, and I knew the limitations of Alinea. It was my goal to make every course we sent perfect. Quality over quantity.

The dinner went incredibly well. Ruth did in fact show up, and we served the 14-top a seventeen-course meal that we paced impressively. The ticket came in the kitchen at 8:13 and the last course walked at 10:54. The anticipation for her arrival had been building for days prior, and the team was incredibly fired up. In the staff meetings leading up to the dinner I had explained to the team the backstory of the article she wrote for the Times about The French Laundry, and how much I respected her. They knew we needed to not only perform perfectly, but also to do it under less then ideal circumstances.

After the last course left the kitchen, I walked over to Alex in the pastry station and shook his hand.

“What do you think?” he asked.

“Given the circumstances, I don’t think it could have gone better.” He raised an eyebrow, smirked, and shook his head. A few minutes later Ruth Reichl was standing in the kitchen. She didn’t say much, and I was of course a bit timid about engaging her. Standing at the end of the kitchen she watched the cooks still in full swing of a busy service with a seemingly permanent smile on her face. I didn’t know what to think. Surely she has seen dozens of kitchens, many of them the best in the world, but somehow she had a curious and pleased calmness on her face. It was like she didn’t know what was happening, but somehow loved it.

We chatted briefly and I thanked her for coming. After she turned and left the building Joe came up to me and asked what she had said. “Not much, Joe—and I think