Best Food Writing 2013 (50 page)

           
Slowly Curtis re-entered the world, and he seized upon the one stable thing in his life: the kitchen. When he'd first started cooking five years earlier, the kitchen was a place to run away to from the fighting at home, a place that kept him from bullying neighborhood kids.

Now his parents were dead. Every hour focused on cooking was another hour not dealing with his confusion and anger. He dreaded the end of the shift. While other chefs at Muirfield Village Golf Club went out for drinks afterward, Curtis stayed in the head chef's office and dived into the cookbooks. One of those, a new addition to the library, caught Curtis' eye: an oversize burgundy-colored volume by a Chicago chef named Charlie Trotter. That name would stay with him.

In the moments he surfaced for air, Curtis took off in his Jeep with no particular destination, drowning out the whys with the radio's machine-gun guitar riffs and crashing cymbals.

Like his father, Curtis had an idea for a convenient escape. He could leave Johnstown, make the 20-hour car ride back to Colorado. He told best friend Tony Kuehner, “Let's go.” They had one chance to change everything.

When they arrived, Curtis and Tony visited the mausoleum in Colorado Springs where Jan was interred.

Years earlier, Jan had sat Curtis down on the living room floor. She had something important to tell him. His real mother left Bear, Robert Jr. and Curtis when he was 6 months old. You're not my biological son, Jan said, but I love you all the same. Curtis cried all night—not out of anger or betrayal, but for fear of never seeing her again. Jan assured her son: I will always be there.

The best friends also went in search of Bear's ashes, which had been sent to Colorado. Curtis was told his father's ashes were scattered on
Pikes Peak, beneath a pine with a wooden cross on it, and they drove up the mountain looking for it. Curtis stared at the photograph of the tree from all angles, then scanned the snow-blanketed tableau. They never found it.

“I was looking for that reconnection,” Curtis said, “to have that quiet moment and reflect and say a few words.”

After coming down from the mountain, Curtis and Tony were dining at a pizza parlor when the Harry Chapin song “Cat's in the Cradle” started playing.

           
When you comin' home, son, I don't know when,

              
But we'll get together then, dad,

              
You know we'll have a good time then.

It was a song Bear and Curtis had listened to together. Curtis broke down. This was the man who had killed his mother.

In the end, running away to Colorado didn't provide solace. The kitchen jobs paid poorly, and Tony wasn't thrilled with washing dishes. A standing offer from Muirfield Village Golf Club, however, remained. Any time Curtis wanted to come back, there was a job waiting for him. After four months, he and Tony loaded their cars and headed back to Ohio.

His home economics teacher, Ruth Snider, was there for him. The two spoke on the phone often, and in each conversation they let their guards drop lower. “Every time I iron my jacket or sew a button, it reminds me of you,” Curtis told her. Eventually, he felt safe enough to cry when they talked. The subjects of conversations were irrelevant; it mattered to him that she listened.

Meanwhile, there was someone at work. He'd been eyeing the server with the flowing brown hair. Curtis learned her name: Kim Becker. She could sing opera and play the violin. After he'd stockpiled enough nerve to make conversation, he said, “You know, maybe one day I'll become the lead singer of a band.”

“Sure,” he said she told him, “as long as I can give you singing lessons.”

Others at Muirfield Village recognized the signs of a blossoming romance. A co-worker organized a dinner at his home and invited Curtis and Kim. The evening felt effortless. They laughed together
over great food and pours of wine. His hunch grew over weeks and months, and when it passed the point of certainty, Curtis whispered to a fellow cook, “I'm going to marry that girl one day.” Three years later, halfway up Pikes Peak next to a fallen tree, Curtis got down on one knee and asked Kim to make it official. (Attempts to reach her for this story were unsuccessful.)

Gradually, Curtis' ties with his Johnstown past faded away. More time passed between phone calls to Trisha and his brother, Robert Jr., until they barely spoke at all. Curtis was making $80,000 a year at age 24 as chef de cuisine at Tartan Fields Golf Club in Dublin, Ohio. But he equated small-town life with small-town ambitions. The good pay meant nothing if the challenge wasn't there.

“If my priorities stayed in that town, that's where I would be. But I've always wanted something greater than that place.”

Remembering the burgundy cookbook at Muirfield Village, he drove to Charlie Trotter's restaurant in Chicago to volunteer his services for a few weeks. He returned to Ohio humbled. Curtis thought the recipes described in the cookbook were conceptual dishes meant to inspire and provoke. Trotter was actually
serving
those dishes to guests nightly. He had to move to Chicago.

In January 2000, Curtis spent his “Goodbye, Columbus” dinner with—who else?—Ruth Snider. They dined on steaks and offered the obligatory farewell sentiments: Let's keep in touch. . . . Call any time. . . . Don't be a stranger. But at some point during the night, the words “I love you” tumbled out for the first time, him to her, her back in response, natural as an exhale, and it solidified what they knew to be true. Curtis was the son Ruth had never had, and Ruth the mother Curtis had now.

Ascent

Sure, workdays at Charlie Trotter's lasted 14 hours, six days a week, the paycheck was a pittance, and he was fulfilling someone else's grand culinary vision. But Curtis was surrounded by like-minded kitchen grunts, uncompromising in their collective desire to become the best. Not the best in Chicago, but
the best,
full stop. Entry-level cooks traded an $18,000-a-year salary for Trotter's name on their resumes.

In 2003, Curtis went for a meal at the since-closed Evanston restaurant Trio, where a young chef named Grant Achatz—just 15
months Curtis' senior—was making noise with his avant-garde interpretation of fine dining. Achatz remembered that night: This cook from Trotter's kitchen was dining with him, and whenever someone from a competing restaurant visited, he made sure to serve a meal that said, in no uncertain terms:
You're not employed at the best restaurant in town.

After that dinner, Curtis was sold. On a day off from Trotter's, he spent time in Trio's kitchen as a tryout. After seeing Curtis in his kitchen, Achatz told him:

“You don't need to work here. You should be doing your own thing.”

“But I want to work for you,” Curtis said.

“Well, I can only pay you $16,000 a year.”

“Fine.”

At Trio, Curtis ascended from the cold foods station to head pastry chef, becoming one of Achatz's top deputies. The two spoke a common language without uttering a word. Both were quiet figures amid the noise of the kitchen, and when they did converse, it was about the new cuisine emerging from Spain, or the burgeoning usage of laboratory science as a cooking technique. It was a workplace where “No” was no match for “Sure, let's try it.”

When Achatz left Trio to open Alinea in 2005—a restaurant that
Gourmet
magazine would soon deem the best in America—he tapped Curtis as chef de cuisine, his right-hand man.

Curtis' career took on the momentum of a wheel rolling downhill. Faster. Better. More. To lead such an ambitious kitchen, 90-hour workweeks became the norm. Nights, holidays and weekends took Curtis away from home. He'd return from work to find his wife already asleep for hours. Many nights, fear kept him awake: fear of failure, fear of slowing his forward momentum, fear of being second-best.

Then, midflight in his meteoric rise: Kim was expecting their first child. He wished for a son to play baseball with and ride motorcycles together, as Curtis had with his father. But the Duffys were bestowed a daughter, Ava Leigh, and when she clutched her father's pinky finger in the hospital room, Curtis' eyes welled up. Everything would be for her. And when daughter Eden arrived three years after Ava, Curtis felt whole in a way he hadn't since his Colorado childhood.
His family was intact. He thought back to his Johnstown years: My daughters will not sleep on the floor of a closet.

Curtis left Alinea after three years to make a name for himself. His goal of becoming one of the best chefs in the country was, he said, as much about personal validation as providing his family financial security. Curtis took on the top position at Avenues, a restaurant in The Peninsula hotel on Michigan Avenue where dinner for two cost $700.

Finally, he could showcase his food, and his good name would rise and fall with the restaurant's successes and failures. He assembled a team that had to jell quickly in the tight confines of Avenues' kitchen, and members of the Avenues family spent more time together than with their actual families.

On the day the Chicago Michelin Guide was unveiled in 2010, the Avenues team gathered in a suite at The Peninsula. Curtis knew the restaurant was receiving prestigious stars in the international guidebook; the question was how many. The call came to Curtis' cellphone, and a man speaking in a French accent congratulated Avenues on winning two Michelin stars. Only two other restaurants in the city received that honor—one of which was Charlie Trotter's. Alinea and L20 received the highest rating that year, three stars. In the hotel suite, the Avenues staff burst into applause and champagne overflowed.

“I must forge ahead,” Curtis told himself. “I want that third Michelin star.”

He had always worked for someone else. He needed to become his own boss. This was the moment he'd worked for all his life: to become chef and owner of his own restaurant.

Work harder. Push further. Stay that extra hour.

“What about us?” he said his wife asked him. “Nothing's ever good enough. It's always more and more and more. A second restaurant. A cookbook. When will it be about our family? I can't . . .”

Kim had moved to Chicago not knowing anyone who lived here, he said. She'd made that sacrifice for her husband's career. At last, Curtis saw his selfishness.

“You try to look for that balance in your day-to-day life. (You say) ‘I hope and pray that when I get to that point, people will still want to be around me,'” Curtis said.

When he was a teenager, Curtis learned that the key to properly holding a knife was finding the point of balance. At that age, he didn't realize it would become a metaphor.

The kitchen was a place to run away from the chaos of his original family, and it had driven him to pursue a goal. That pursuit ultimately cost him another family—and his 11-year marriage.

“Opening my own restaurant is supposed to be the greatest moment of my career,” Curtis said. “And it's happening at the worst moment of my personal life.”

It took many years to arrive at a place of forgiveness, but Curtis has found that place with his father, insomuch as anyone could with someone who killed his mother. Still, moments of hatred toward his dad surfaced—Bear, for instance, got in his goodbyes without giving Jan the same opportunity. Curtis thought: What a selfish act. But the anger subsides, because love for his parents never goes away.

Once in a while, in his garden apartment a few blocks west of where Kim and their daughters live, Curtis revisits the blue spiral-bound notebook he found at his father's house the morning after his parents died.

Bear addressed each page to a different member of his family. But there was nothing written on them, except for one. The only letter Bear wrote in the notebook was to Curtis.

       
3/1/1994

           
Curt,

           
This is dad. I'm telling you from my heart that you're a very special young man and I wish I could tell you how proud of you I am . . . You'll be a great chef, no doubt in my mind, you'll be one of the best in the world some day . . .

           
Your life is just beginning. Try to do all the right things in it. Make sure if you ever get married and have children, that you show them and your wife all the love in the world. Always take time to be with them and show them love. Your wife should be shown the most love of all. Always take the time to talk to her and hear what she has to say because she'll be the most important person in your life . . .

           
I ask you, Curt, to look back and see how many wrong
things you have seen me do, and please don't walk in my footsteps because you'll be in a world of pain, hate, and sure won't be loved and won't be able to show love. So please be a better person than I was. I know you can . . .

           
Remember I love you, son, and always will.

My love,

Your dad

Tomorrow

When Curtis was still at Avenues, he became a name in the city, and diners started asking for autographs. He pondered what to write. Eventually he signed all menus this way: “It's all about grace.”