Life, on the Line (23 page)

Martin finally sent me his finished design. In the e-mail he hinted that he'd had this idea in mind all along, but that he hadn't shared it because he thought it might be a stretch for me to accept right off the bat. “The Tripod” wasn't a Popsicle holder at all—at least not in the way I would have ever envisioned one. In fact, in many ways, it was the anti-holder, because it wasn't a drilled tray, plate, or object that grouped the sticks together.

Martin had rethought the entire idea. The sphere of frozen lavender became the locking mechanism for a set of three collapsible legs that when unfolded displayed the Popsicle four inches above the table. When the guest grabbed the three legs and squeezed them into one stick, they became the handle that the guest would use to eat the frozen tea. It was smart, witty, original, and brilliant.

Trio's budget was very tight, so I had to ask Henry for permission to wire Martin a check to get started. The total was $300 for a one-hundred-piece run, and Martin wanted a $100 deposit.

An incredibly important collaboration and friendship was born with “The Tripod.”

 

Chefs are human, and while few want to admit it, they cook with varying degrees of enthusiasm for different people. Regulars of the restaurant, serious foodies who are enjoying their meal profusely, colleagues, and of course key journalists all get a little extra effort and a different level of gusto put into their meals. While our baseline standards were incredibly high at Trio, we did have another gear we could kick into.

We recognized that we were still climbing a tall mountain and that it was important to take a step with every person who walked into the restaurant. We were far from being in a position of complacency. The kitchen often sent out extra courses to seemingly random tables, and I would urge the front-of-house staff to alert me to any tables that seemed particularly into the experience so I could ratchet it up even more.

William Rice, a longtime supporter of Trio and an extremely influential national food writer, was coming in. Rice had eaten at Trio right before his retirement from the
Tribune,
and he subsequently wrote a feature on me for the paper. I connected with him right away. His eyes were both gentle and piercing at the same time, making him look like Sean Connery, and his dry, whip-sharp sense of humor made him incredibly fun to talk to.

I had no idea who Bill was dining with even after he introduced his friend David to me. And at that point Rice was retired, so this wasn't a meal for an article and I wasn't under the watchful eye of an active food critic. But for me this table was even more important.

My connection with Bill was strong, even though I didn't really know him as a person. I respected his open mind and appreciated that he saw promise enough in what we were trying to achieve during my early days at Trio to support it, and now to bring his friend all the way to Evanston to experience it. It was a huge compliment, and I wanted to return his respect with mine. I wanted to blow his mind.

The team created a twenty-six-course, fifteen-wine, four-hour dinner for the two friends, pulling out every stop and every new technique and presentation we had developed since his last meal. Looking for some spontaneous inspiration, I made contact with one of my favorite purveyors, Kate Lind, a woman who owns a tiny organic farm in Three Rivers, Michigan.

Kate takes a very “Summer of Love” approach to her life, and it carries over to her business. She talks to chefs directly and tells them what looks good on the farm a couple of days prior to delivery, which allows her to avoid the high-technology model of the Internet and FedEx. I would constantly bug her for obscure ingredients that I had read about in old cookbooks, and she would promise to plant or forage for them if they weren't readily available. A few weeks earlier she had reminded me that the angelica I encouraged her to grow was ready, but she explained apologetically that she only had two plants because her husband, James, had mistakenly tilled most of them under. “You know James,” she said. “He gets on that tractor and starts daydreaming and the next thing you know half the field is gone.”

At the time I assured her it was okay and asked her to leave them in the ground. I had no idea what I was going to do with them, and we didn't have a guest coming in who I felt was worthy of the suddenly very rare prize. Until now.

I had Kate gather a bunch of blooming horehound mint, which would become a bite-size gelée paired with lime, fresh-cut evergreens, chanterelle mushrooms, and ramps for the rabbit with evergreen vapor course. And per my instruction, she harvested the two lonely angelica plants.

After extra-early days leading up to Bill and David's dinner, many after-service brainstorming meetings about the pending meal, and consultation with Joe on the menu progression and wine pairings, I felt we were ready. It was our most ambitious menu ever. This was due not only to the number of courses but also to the risks we were taking with some of the concepts. A chocolate dessert used mustard seeds for texture like you might see poppy seeds being used in pastry preparations, and we laced the buttercream with Dijon. We paired caviar with a kola nut ice and steamed milk, while a raspberry and tapioca dessert came with a long-stem rose for the diners to smell before they ate the parfait.

But the biggest risk was the angelica. The plants arrived in pristine condition, standing upright in a cut-off gallon milk jug filled with water to keep them from wilting, the beautiful green leaves nearly as large as my open hand. They were gorgeous, and certainly even more so in my eyes because I knew the story behind them. I knew Kate had sourced the seeds and grown them specifically for me, and that these were the only two we would get from all of her efforts.

Historically the plant's hollow stems had been used as straws for cocktails, perfuming the beverage with their celery-like aroma. So it seemed natural to honor that tradition and have Bill slurp something through the cleaned-up branches. I began removing the plants from the jug with the intent of snipping away the leaves and paring them down to a single straw, when I stopped. They looked like flowers in a vase, they were alive, and they were a part of that small farm in Michigan. We needed to serve them that way. In fact, that needed to be the entire point of the course. After a brief description from the maître d' Chris Gerber, my go-to front-of-house guy, I wanted Bill and David to remove the branches from the glass vase that we would serve them in, contemplate the angelica, its history in gastronomy, and hear about Kate and her tiny farm five hours away. What I put inside for them to eat was almost irrelevant.

I settled on a baked Ashmead's Kernel Apple puree that would be piped into the hollow stem with a syringe. That was it. Nothing more. The apple flavor worked with the anise-celery notes of the angelica, and the apples were grown on Kate's farm.

The dinner went wildly well. While chatting with the men after the meal I sensed an aura of satisfaction coming from them akin to the pleasant surprise of expectations having been exceeded. As we talked, David mentioned that he wrote a weekly column for the
L.A. Times
and wanted to write about his experience. I wasn't sure what that meant exactly, but of course I was thrilled to get more national exposure, especially because it was a genuine surprise.

On October 1, 2003, Pulitzer Prize-winning writer—and unbeknownst to me, the chairman of the James Beard restaurant committee—David Shaw wrote a feature on me and Trio for the
L.A. Times
:

I hugely underestimated the importance of David Shaw's article. It was splashed across the front page of the dining section of one of the nation's most circulated newspapers, with superlative-laced copy, color photos of the food, and two guests smelling roses while eating the raspberry dessert. And this was penned by one of the nation's most respected food journalists. It made its way to all the food forums online and likely the desk of every writer who cared about what was happening in the food world.

As I read the article, my jaw dropped at the quotes.

I sat in the dining room in near darkness, reading the piece over and over in disbelief. In some way I felt like this sealed our fate in some strangely wonderful way. Diners and experienced food journalists were raving about what we were doing. A couple of good reviews could be chance, some accolades might be luck or good PR, but the momentum was now undeniable. More important than that was what we were accomplishing: exactly what we had set out to accomplish two and a half years earlier. We were changing what a dining experience could be.

 

I was excited that the sonogram showed that another boy was coming into my life. Kaden was now just over two and the thought of him having a little brother to play with gave me some comfort. I had been spending a few minutes each day combing baby-naming sites on the Internet for something I liked, but nothing stood out. I decided to grab the phone book and start paging through. I cracked the book open to the natural halfway point, which happened to be the names beginning with the letter “K.” Of course in a phone book the family names are listed first, followed by the given name, and as I began to scroll I figured this might be fruitless. Names like Kane, Kasy, and Keefer clearly would not work as a given name. But as my eyes ran down the page I landed on Keller, James T. “Wow, that works,” I thought to myself. I considered naming my second son after my mentor.

Would people think that was strange?

In the end it didn't matter. It was original in that it wasn't common, it honored someone that was incredibly important to me, and I liked the way it sounded.

On December 19, 2003, Keller Mitchell Achatz was born.

 

Trio had a small but committed group of regular diners who were anxious to see what we would create next. Because we didn't do a ton of covers, it was easy to remember a face, a name, or a phone number of a diner, even on their second or third visit. Most of these regulars were a bit older and lived in the wealthy suburbs just to the north of Evanston, while a few were from Chicago. But one couple stood out. They were younger, laughed a bit louder, and according to our staff seemed a bit more knowledgeable and passionate about the food and wine.

After their second visit, Chris Gerber came back to the kitchen with a smile on his face and said that the Kokonas party had just made a standing reservation for the first Wednesday of every month. That was a first. “Wednesday, huh? That's kinda tough.” Wednesday was the first day of the Trio workweek since we were closed each Monday and Tuesday. That meant that the kitchen had zero
mise en place
ready. What's more, we made it a practice to create new dishes for repeat guests so that they wouldn't see the same concepts over and over. You really can only laugh at a great joke or anticipate a plot twist once. To us, a regular was someone that came in four or five times a year, typically on a Friday or Saturday night. The Kokonas were scheduled to come once a month, and on the day of the week that the kitchen was at its weakest.

I didn't think about it again, figuring that I would make sure their menu three weeks later would be entirely new. Except ten days later they were back.

I didn't know it then, but Nick Kokonas, a guy who had never spent a day in the restaurant business, would soon become my business partner and friend.

Like me, he was a driven only child. He would not only help build a restaurant, he would also save my life.

Toasted hot dog buns with butter—that's what I ate for breakfast nearly every day between the ages of seven and fourteen. The butter had to go on the bun before it went into the toaster oven so it melted, ideally leaving brown crunchy ridges around the spot where each pad of butter had been laid.That and a glass of orange juice was pretty much it.