Life, on the Line (37 page)

After a few days of waiting, I was finally able to sit down with a stern, overworked processor who was literally buried behind two huge stacks of license applications. She did not look happy to see me. “You know, you can hire an attorney to do this for you. It's the best way. If you can't afford one, then there are city agencies that can help.”

“I do know all of that. I'm here today personally because I want you to know how critical it is that we get a liquor license by May 1st. We could open without one like everyone else does, but we're aiming far higher than that.”

I told her the full story of Alinea. She ate a sandwich. I was now a pleasant diversion, a crazy guy who was building a restaurant who thought it was going to be great. I finished up.“All I want you to do is review what I have here, right now. Then I can make any corrections necessary and it skips that first stack. Then I hand it right back to you, we know it's correct, and you can send it on its way right now.”

She smiled and stuck her hand out. Everything was neatly subdivided in an accordion-fold legal folder. She grabbed a red pen and went through it all. She asked questions, made a few notations, and handed it back to me. “You can work over there,” she said, motioning to an empty desk in the corner.

An hour later, all of the information that was incorrect or problematic had been fixed. She looked it back over, grabbed three stamps and an ink pad, and started stamping like crazy. She handed it back to me. “You gotta go file it at the State building. Pay the county money here first, though.”

Everything was filed in time for the inspectors to be cajoled into showing up the day before we opened. They walked through the restaurant, jaws dropped. “Where's the bar?” they asked.

“We don't have a bar. Just wine service and some spirits as part of the menu or perhaps an after-dinner drink,” I said.

“Fancy shit, huh?”They looked at each other and laughed. It felt more like a tour of the restaurant than an inspection, but once we had everything we needed, I sent someone off to get the actual license.

It felt like a coup. I was told over and over again that “no one opens with a liquor license.” We never had a contingency plan. We joked that we would hand out bottles across the street as people pulled up, but really, we just knew that somehow we would make it happen. “MIH” was our mantra.

One by one the inspectors came, and one by one we got the stamps needed for our occupancy placard. I thought we were done when we got a knock at the front door.

“Buildings,” was all the man said as he rushed past me in the front hall. He was short and wide, in jeans and work boots. He had a wallet on a chain and a big inspection badge hanging around his neck.

“Hey, nice to meet you. I'm Nick Kokonas.What are you here to inspect?” I really thought we had crossed everyone off the list. I had no idea who this guy was or what he was doing there.

“I need the plans for the building. I literally just got back from Florida. Vacation. I am not happy to be here, but they rushed me over. Give me your plans, please.”

“Okay. One second.” I went to the basement and gathered up the master set of blueprints and handed them over.“Do you mind if I follow you around?” I asked.

“Do whatever you want.”

He started walking through the restaurant quickly, pointing at the ceiling, then at a door, without saying anything. He headed upstairs, toward the back dining room, and said, “This is a storage room? Ha!”

The City of Chicago counts every fourteen inches of banquette as a “seat,” or a person. No one could believe we only intended on seating fifty people upstairs. So we had to make the back dining room temporarily into a “storage room” and put fire doors back there. As soon as the inspectors left, of course, we were going to pull them off and had already designed a cap that looked like a fancy molding to hide the mounts. We even signed an affidavit stating that we only wanted an occupancy of fifty upstairs, even though according to the city's math we could get one for one hundred. This guy saw through that ruse, because it was clear that we intended to operate that room as a dining room. There was fancy carpeting and a built-in service station. He made a note on his pad.

“Where are the third and fourth means of egress?” he asked.

I led him to our back staircase. “This is fucking steep!” He pulled out a tape measure and sized up the treads. I was ready for this one.

“That is a preexisting, nonconforming staircase,” I said with confidence.

“What did you do, tear the whole place down except for this one staircase?”

“Yes, basically. All of this has been approved by the city inspectors and we have had every other inspection necessary. All the stamps are on there,” I said, pointing to the blueprints that were getting crushed under his arm.

“I really don't care. There is no way you are opening in two days. No way. You don't have a fourth means of egress, you don't have emergency lighting, that stairway back there is a joke, and I am wildly curious how the hell you got these plans approved with all of that.” He started heading down the stairs and out the front door. I ran ahead of him and stopped him.

“Look. This is a span-concrete construction, a b-3–rated fire building. We only need three means of egress. The emergency lighting is some fancy shit that retracts into the ceiling. We didn't want it to look bad. Please, take a moment and go inside and I can explain your objections. Do you like espresso? I think you need a double.” He softened, considered the coffee, and headed back inside. I found Grant busy in the kitchen training some cooks. “Come here, now. We are fucked. This guy from Buildings is a crazy man and was about to head to City Hall with our set of stamped plans. Call Rugo. Call our attorney. Get them over here immediately.”

I ran upstairs, grabbed a waiter I hadn't yet met, and ordered him to make a double espresso, pronto. I led the inspector to a table in the upstairs front dining room and asked him for the blueprints, which he reluctantly gave to me. I opened them up on the table.

“Hi. Let me reintroduce myself. I am Nick Kokonas. For the past year, almost to the day, building this restaurant has been my life's work, twenty-four hours a day. There is a young chef downstairs who has been working toward this day since he was a kid, literally. Now I know none of that matters if we have something that is not to code or is dangerous. But I assure you that is not the case.”

He had calmed down and I was able to walk him through the plans, starting with the demolition plan that showed clearly that the back stairs were preexisting. Then I went through the approvals from the city for the special emergency lighting, the fire rating of the floors and cinder walls, the type of drywall we used, and the lowered occupancy permit. “You mean you fought to get a lower occupancy?” he asked. “No one does that.”

“This is not a normal restaurant. As I said, this is going to be a very unique place.”

A sudden look of awareness crossed his face. “Hey, what did you say the name of this place was again? And your name?”

I told him.

“Shit. I know who you are. You're friends with Bobby Meltzer, right? This is that fancy place he was telling me about.” The espresso arrived, and right behind it came our architectural team and lawyer, who had rushed over. I waved them off subtly to go away. I was pouring sweat but trying to look calm.

“Yeah, it is. We did everything right here, I swear. It's not a typical build-out, but it is to commercial grade and it's well hidden by intent. We wanted it to look like an old brownstone that has been here forever, but it was originally built as a crappy Mexican restaurant in 1989. Please, take your time and go back through after you look over the blueprints. But enjoy your espresso first.”

“I just have one question,” he said.

“Okay, shoot.”

“How long after I leave do those fire doors come off back there,” he said, laughing.

“Ten minutes, tops.” I smiled. “But we will be well under the occupancy, I assure you.” I knew then that we were all set.

An hour later we had our last stamp. I sent someone to go get the occupancy placards, walked downstairs to the front dining room, stretched out on the banquette, and went to sleep.

 

The staff of Alinea gathered together for the first time. I asked everyone to form a semicircle in the kitchen and I stood between the passes in the middle. It was the moment. We were four days from opening night. Some of the staff were people I had worked with for the past four years. Others I was seeing for just the second time.

Everyone grew silent. I took a long pause before addressing them, gathering my emotions and thoughts.

“I grew up in St. Clair, Michigan, flipping eggs at my parents' diner. It was all I loved to do growing up. It became who I am. And at some point, for a reason I don't even know, I began to dream that one day I would own my own restaurant. And eventually I began to dream even bigger, that one day, by the time I was thirty, I would own a restaurant and it would become a great one. The best in the country, maybe the best in the world.

“My thirtieth birthday was a week or so ago. So I missed that goal by a bit.” Everyone let out a bit of a laugh.

“You have all arrived here in the past few weeks, and Joe Catterson has done a great job of letting you know what to expect here. But there is more to it than that. That is just the start.

“What you see here started with a conversation over a year ago. Nick Kokonas, that guy over there, and I met and started to work on this. Curtis Duffy and John Peters joined us in working on this every day for the past eight months. Joe, our GM and wine director, has put together a great group of people. It has been a real push to get this done in time and make it as amazing as it is—you can still hear the pounding downstairs. We killed ourselves to get this done on time.

“But all of that is meaningless. Our goal here, together, is to make this the best restaurant in the country. I know what it means to work at a place like that, and I saw what it takes firsthand when I was at The French Laundry. I want Alinea to be better than that. I demand that Alinea become better than that.

“Anyone here who is not on that program should leave now. This is not a restaurant, or a paycheck, or just your job. This is our statement, our measure of what we can be.

“This is my dream. I am lucky enough to have a shot at it. And it will require all of us working together in a singular fashion to pull it off.

“Thank you for joining me. Alinea means a new beginning and a new train of thought. Let's keep that in mind as we start tomorrow.”

I paused and everyone clapped. I saw Joe Ziomek, one of our longtime waiters from Trio, looking at me with emotion. Nick, who was sitting on the pass next to me, legs dangling down, was slack-jawed.

“I should add that I owe a great deal of thanks to Nick for having the faith in me to make this happen. He quit his job, put up a ton of money, and has killed himself over the past few months to help get this built. Nick, do you want to say something?”

He was incapable of speaking. He had lost nearly fifteen pounds in the past two months, was exhausted, and was not even expecting the whole staff to gather that day. But it is really rare when he has nothing to say. The man likes to talk.

“I. Well. I simply know that this is, well, it's going to be great.” He was choked up and waved his hands saying he was done.

No one said anything else.

 

The two “friends and family” nights had gone well. Or well enough.

I sat down with Dagmara and friends each night and ate through the twenty-five-course Tour menu one evening and the twelve-course Tasting the next. Both took forever. Waits between courses were so long that at one point I feigned going to the bathroom simply to peek into the kitchen to see what was going on. Grant was working frantically at plating food and simultaneously directing cooks on other courses. It looked far more chaotic than I expected.

The food was good, but not at Trio's level. A few of the servers were spot-on—they were veterans who had worked with Grant for years. Others had a style that was completely off, either too formal or too casual. Many were making amateur mistakes: serving across a diner, placing the forks and knives on the “pillow” serving piece the wrong way, or missing a wine pour before the food was coming.

After the second preview night I hung around until everyone had left and sat with Grant. “Chef, it felt rough out there,” I offered up cautiously.

“Yeah, ya think?” he said, half laughing, half exasperated. He went on to explain that it took years to get Trio to the place it was. “We've been at this now three days. No one knows what they're doing yet. Half of the dishes are being plated wrong. It's going to be rough for a while. That's why we're limiting reservations. Exactly what I've been saying all along.”

Demand to dine at Alinea in our opening month was crazy. We only had two phone lines set up and they were both jammed constantly. I was answering calls during the day and telling people that we were booked, but when I looked at our reservation sheet I could see that we had tons of room. Grant had notes that popped up on the screen reading “Limit to 45” and “Limit to 40” and occasionally “Limit to 52.” None of it made sense to me at the time. But after sitting down to dinner I could tell that neither the kitchen nor the front of the house was ready.

But May 4, 2005, was upon us.

 

We were being very public with the development of every aspect of the restaurant, and because of our postings online the world had a front-row seat to the risks we were taking with the project. There was no denying that no restaurant had ever put so much out there to create something so conceptually different in this country, especially right out of the gate. And with that came the speculation.