Life, on the Line (20 page)

Barry Holton, the guy I quickly came to know as Earl/Driver 2—the name of the character he briefly portrayed in an episode of
Walker, Texas Ranger
—cleared his throat. “Um, with all due respect, this all tastes pretty good, but how are we going to sell mushrooms cooked with cigar ash to people? This stuff is pretty out there.”

Henry quickly spoke up and tried to defuse the skepticism by reassuring the team that people would react positively to creative cuisine. As he launched into his belief in me and Trio's history of embracing food as art I quietly slipped back into the kitchen. I didn't like how this was all going down so far.

“Did the pasta dough get made?” I barked as I walked down the middle of the line. Dave could read my frustration and fired back with a respectful but aggressive tone.

“Yes, Chef!”

“Great, get a pot of water on. We're adding the Black Truffle Explosion to the tasting right now.” As irritated as I was, I knew I had to get them back on my side.

And I knew that the BTE would do just that.

 

Henry did his best to get the local media fired up about my arrival, but the only thing that they had to go on was my connection to the Laundry. There wasn't much of a story at this point—just another young cook running his first kitchen. There were a few tiny write-ups in the local press, but that was about it.

Trio was not a large restaurant. The two dining rooms sat a total of sixty-two people. I thought it was reasonable to expect fifty diners per night, at least to start, and then once the word got out maybe we could fill the place and turn a few tables. Henry cautiously held such hopes as well, but he warned me not to get discouraged if the guests didn't knock down the door right away.

Joe Catterson, who had worked at Trio the first three years it was open, was brought back part-time to help run the wine program. He was far more realistic and told me that even during the heyday of Trio they could barely get fifty people in there on a weeknight.

Trio reopened for business on July 7, 2001, with fifty-one covers. It was a typical first night of service for a restaurant. We got totally crushed trying to figure out what we were doing on the fly. The wait times between courses were too long and when the food finally did leave the kitchen it often headed to the wrong tables. Well into the night I took a bite of the crab mixture that was the filling for the clear lemon raviolis garnishing the snapper dish and had to spit it out. It was full of shells. The intern, Jesse, simply decided not to pick them out, and Nathan and I were so busy that we failed to check it during the day.

Worst of all, perhaps, was the prep for the one dish I was certain everyone would love. Chris Sy's Black Truffle Explosions exploded all right, but not in the diners' mouths. Instead, as soon as they hit the simmering water that they were being cooked in, they popped and turned the water an inky black from the truffle juice.

After the kitchen was cleaned and our postmortem meeting was complete, I sat in the office with Henry to go over the night. It was, by my account, a disaster, but Henry was a veteran of restaurant openings and was unfazed. I mentioned that we might want to consider capping the reservations at forty covers or so for the first week until we worked out the kinks. Henry agreed and reached for the reservation book. As he flipped through the pages a look of despair crossed his face.

“I don't think that'll be necessary,” he said grimly. We had twelve booked for the next night and only seven for the following Wednesday.

 

Weeks passed and the refinements continued. The kitchen began to learn the prep, the front-of-house staff learned the descriptions and service techniques. But the customers did not show up. Days with single-digit cover counts were common. I couldn't understand why Phil Vettel and Dennis Ray Wheaton, the two most prominent local food critics, hadn't shown up yet and penned their reviews. We desperately needed people to know that Trio had changed and that the food was new, exciting, and delicious.

And then when things seemed that they couldn't get worse for us, they did. And not just for us, but for the country and the world as a whole. Nearly two months to the date of our opening the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon took place and the restaurant industry, like the rest of the country, folded up. Trio was limping along financially, and the understandable reaction to 9/11 made a bad situation far worse. The phones went from barely ringing to not ringing at all. Days went by without a single customer.

The staff went from generally nervous to almost panicked at the growing uncertainty, and the anxiety at home was intense as well. Angela was ready to pop. At any moment I was expecting a call letting me know that she had gone into labor. The situation evoked emotionally charged conversations. Here we were, living together in a nascent relationship, spending virtually no time with one another, and about to have a child. The country had just been attacked and the economy was in the tank. Angela was rightfully concerned that Trio would close and I would lose the job for which we had just spent everything we had to move across the country. Our relationship, such as it was, was more strained than ever.

But while the rest of the industry backpedaled to accommodate the financial and emotional downturn and the prevailing notion was a return to comfort food, Henry and I decided to do the opposite. We decided not to change Trio at all. We didn't change the cuisine, lower prices, create lunch specials, or change the hours of operation. We thought instead that people might actually enjoy being pulled into an experience allowing them to forget about the outside world, even just for a few hours. A Black Truffle Explosion would reinvigorate their lives more than wallowing in their sorrow with a plate of mashed potatoes.

Trio barely survived, but Henry's dedication to the staff and the vision for the restaurant became a source of inspiration. There were days the team would come in and prep the entire menu for a single table of three diners. I explained to the kitchen staff that we were in this for the long haul and that we were not going to panic. Instead, I reassured them, this was a time to work harder and to take advantage of the slow days by cleaning and painting the kitchen, and more important, by developing new dishes and concepts.

Things didn't recover all at once, but slowly the days with only a table or two booked gave way to a slow but steady business. The team worked six days a week from ten in the morning until midnight. I was the first one in and the last one to leave every day.

On Monday, September 24—the only day of the week that Trio was closed—and with impeccable kitchen timing, Kaden William Achatz was born.

I returned to work, on time, the next morning.

 

Trio's business returned to what Henry and Joe deemed “normal.” To me it felt like we were barely keeping our heads above water. The lack of consistent covers made operations difficult. Weekdays we would bounce between twenty and thirty covers, and Saturday would always spike up to nearly eighty. With only six cooks and an ambitious menu, anything above a fifty-person night was pushing the redline. Saturdays were a battle we would sometimes lose, but we could not afford to turn people away. Trio was barely breaking even.

A few small reviews began to trickle out and were favorable: the
Chicago Reader,
the
Pioneer Press,
and a luxury, ad-laden magazine called
Chicago Social.
But still, there were no reviews from
Chicago
magazine or the
Chicago Tribune
. Finally, a call came in from Phil Vettel to do a fact check and an interview with Henry and me. I was relieved and nervous at the same time—the importance of this review was undeniable. Trio had managed to stay afloat during a chef transition, a reconception, the biggest attack on America since Pearl Harbor, and a recession, but anything less than a gushing four-star review from the venerable
Trib
would surely be the final nail in our coffin.

When the review was due to come out, Henry and I huddled around the office computer knowing it would get posted online some time after midnight. We did eleven covers that Thursday night during the first week in January. Henry took a deep breath and looked at me before striking the “Enter” key and accessing the website.

“Are you ready?” he asked.

A flood of emotions swept over me: excitement, fear, helplessness, responsibility, and a few I didn't even recognize. “Wait,” I said, stopping him at the last second. “I want to thank . . .”

Henry interrupted me. He knew what I was going to say, and like a father he made it easier on my by letting me off the emotional hook. “Whatever this says, nothing can take away what we have accomplished here already,” he said. “We have all worked hard to realize a vision. There aren't too many people who, one, have that creativity, and two, are willing to take a chance to make that happen.”

I looked at him and nodded slowly, and we both turned to the screen to see our fate.

It didn't take long to figure it out. The headline said everything we needed to know:

“Dining at this four-star restaurant is akin to enjoying participatory theater.”

Henry leaped out of the office chair, sending it flying across the room, and yelled, “Yeah, baby!” As I stood up he grabbed me in a bear hug and shook me back and forth. “We fucking did it, man—we did it! Congratulations.”

The review was a grand slam. The fourth paragraph read:

“With the installation of its third-ever chef, Trio has definitely reembraced its wild side. Grant Achatz (pronounced, and it's worth remembering, ‘AK-etz') is the most dynamic, boundary-stretching chef to hit town in a long, long time. If you've been putting off luxury-dining lately, let me suggest that now is the time to jump back in the game.”

And that is exactly what people did.

When I arrived at ten the same morning, I found Peter Shire intently listening to the voice mail while scribbling notes. He was giddy with excitement—the mailbox was completely full. The phone rang constantly in the background.

As the cooks arrived, each one would walk in the door with a copy of the paper in one hand and a coffee in the other. Ceremoniously they slammed the paper down on the wood counter close to the door of the kitchen, forming a pile, then shook my hand and offered some verbal encouragement that included some insanely profound and creative profanity.

The review was something. Once I saw it in the paper, I couldn't believe how much space they had devoted to it. The entire front page of the Friday section was a picture of the black truffle ravioli dish and huge block letters spelling out TRIO with four stars embedded in the “O.” The review also dominated the front page of the dining section. If that weren't enough, William Rice wrote a feature on me in the Tempo section. It seems that the
Trib
was impressed.

The energy in the restaurant was palpable.

I gathered the cooks in the dining room once everyone had arrived and we took a second to bask in the reward for our hard work. Then I warned them of the consequences of the review. It was obvious that we were going to get a lot busier—we could all hear the phone ringing nonstop in the next room—and I reminded them that now we would be working harder to keep up. And yet just keeping up was not good enough, because there were real expectations. I thanked them all and then said, “Let's get to work.”

I grabbed a roll of green tape that we used to label containers, ripped off an eight-inch-long strip, and wrote: “What Does Four Stars Mean To You?”

Hanging from the ceiling in the middle of the hotline was an antique pot rack that we used to display small copper pots. It was one of the few things that went unchanged during our kitchen makeover—we kind of liked it and left it there. I walked behind the line and placed the strip of tape on the vertical crossbar—so it was out of view of the rest of the kitchen but readily apparent to everyone standing on the line—as a reminder of who we were and what we were trying to achieve.

A few days later a large box arrived from Yountville, California. I opened the box to find a card from Thomas and a Methuselah of champagne.

I guess Trotter had not yet kicked my ass.

W
idely known as the tougher of the two major Chicago critics, Penny Pollack at
Chicago
magazine followed suit and awarded us four stars, which legitimized our status in the industry.

The positive press relieved the financial strain on the restaurant and allowed more creative freedom. Both reviews praised the innovative cuisine, calling it revolutionary, and this helped us to set people's expectations for the boundary-pushing food and meant that we could take more risks. We created dishes that showcased manipulations of ingredients like Atlantic squid “In Textures,” where the seafood was fried, dried, pureed, braised, candied, and served raw. This highlighted the different mouthfeels that could be achieved with a single protein. We would also feature unusual flavor combinations that pushed expectations, such as a chocolate dessert that used strawberries and niçoise olives as supporting components.

This was the moment I began to define my own cuisine, the first major shift in my style of food. When I arrived at Trio, the food was certainly unique among contemporary restaurants in the United States, but it was still recognizably derivative of The French Laundry. Now we were clearly forging our own path.

The imagination of our kitchen exploded. Instead of a vague goal of making innovative food with new techniques, it shifted to an all-out mission to take food and dining further and further. I began thinking about food constantly. I would wake up at eight and play with Kaden for an hour before heading to Trio, usually arriving between 9:30 and 10:00. While I spent plenty of time on
mise en place
for the night, I also spent at least a few hours each day testing new ideas.