The Reach of a Chef (16 page)

This truly earned, among chefs and cooks, the ultimate devotion—made you, in a way, untouchable. And it explained more than anything why Grant, for all his Midwestern humility and PBS elocution, commanded a deep respect from the kitchen staff: Not only did he run this restaurant, not only did he do the hiring and firing, not only was he a nationally respected chef and culinary innovator, Grant Achatz could, at any instant, take over your station and work it better and faster than you could do it yourself on your
best
day.

Grant Achatz was all but born into restaurants. His entire family worked in them or ran them. There were—he had to squint, really thinking about it—eight different food and beverage operations within the family at various points, beginning with his grandmother, who, after working in restaurants for many years, opened a place of her own, Achatz Café, in 1976, at the age of fifty-five. When Grant’s mom went into the restaurant on Saturdays to bake pies, Grant went, too. He couldn’t reach over the edge of the dish sink so he stood on a milk crate to wash dishes. He was five and a half. In 1980 his parents opened a restaurant, Achatz Depot, and Grant started working there. By age twelve he was a prep cook. By age fourteen he was working the line a couple of days a week after school and on weekends, and when he got his driver’s license, every day after school and on weekends.

Grant always loved to work. He didn’t like to go out much, but when he did he was glad he had money—he equated money, and the feeling of having it, with work, he said. His parents instilled in their only child a good Midwestern, Germanic work ethic, or perhaps it was simply part of his genetic fabric. He did well at school when he liked a subject (art, architecture) and not well when he didn’t (English, math). He liked cooking more than school. Cooking was immediate.

But by the end of high school, Grant understood the limits of what he was doing and the limited nature of the food. He was flipping burgers and eggs at a Midwestern family-style restaurant. When he served gravy, it was, he said, “whitewash—flour and water.” The food had descended from his grandma, who’d grown up during the Depression and World War II. Her motives were based on economy, and culinary innovation was based not on infinite possibilities of gastronomy but rather on restrictions and deprivation. She’d grown up in an era, for instance, when fat was too expensive to use to make a roux for a gravy.

A food revolution was under way in America, and Grant needed to learn about food and cooking in the best and fastest way possible. Beginning at the CIA in 1993 not long after he finished high school, he graduated in 1994, not yet twenty-one years old. Because he wasn’t of drinking age while in school, he wasn’t even tempted to go out, nor was he inclined to, anyway. He preferred to stay in his dorm room and read cookbooks. He was very naive, he says, when he went to culinary school. He didn’t know what Michelin signified. He’d tried once to do an emulsified butter sauce and it hadn’t worked (“I didn’t really learn to do that until the French Laundry,” he says now). But he did well at the CIA, liked almost all his classes, especially wines and the Escoffier Room. He didn’t like breakfast cookery because he and the chef didn’t get along (he thinks it was because he could flip eggs better and faster than she could).

Immediately after school he returned to his extern site, the Amway Grand, mainly because they promised to send him to Europe if he did, but he wasn’t comfortable there. So he applied to and ultimately got a job at Charlie Trotter’s in Chicago. He’d been carrying around the April 1995 issue of
Wine Spectator,
which named Trotter’s the country’s best restaurant, and so he applied there. Why would you start anywhere other than the top? Kind of a no-brainer for Grant. He worked there a year, but he never felt comfortable in the kitchen—just didn’t feel right, didn’t like it, wasn’t happy. There was an antagonistic relationship among the brigade because they all had to fight their own way just to get through service. “You get there at nine,” he says, recalling that kitchen, “just so you can get everything done and then at three o’clock Charlie changes the menu. It’s chaos.” Grant just assumed this was the nature of kitchens at that level. He promised himself he’d last out a year, and he did. But when he was finished, he was so discouraged by the experience that he was debating with himself whether or not to keep cooking at all. If this was cooking at its best, was this what he wanted to do?

To clear his head and to “regain my balance,” he says, he and a girlfriend bought plane tickets to Europe—“the Holy Land,” he describes it—and traveled. He ate at several two-and three-star restaurants, and was uniformly disappointed by them—too fussy, condescending, and overpriced. He and his girlfriend joined a bike tour in Italy and one day were cruising the hills outside Florence. The six of them decided to stop at a small restaurant for lunch. “I don’t remember the name, I don’t know the town, and I’ll probably never go there again,” he says now, “but it was one of the top five meals of my life.” It was a completely organic experience, he explained: romantic, a beautiful day, a rustic restaurant in the Italian hills with an actual grandma back in the kitchen and long communal wooden tables so worn by diners that they shined. You could see the old woman putting the brick on the chicken, dropping the pillowlike gnocchi into the water. It was his first-ever experience of authentic regional European food, and it blew away the Michelin stars by a mile. “It was exactly what it was supposed to be,” he says, meaning the perfect fulfillment of what it set out to be. That meal was a revelation.

Part of the impact was the surprise of it, the chance encounter, of falling into one of the greatest meals of one’s life by accident, not expecting it, and suddenly,
Wow,
a new understanding of what food—cooking it and serving it and eating it—was all about. That is exactly the kind of impact he’s striving to achieve with his cooking and space-age food, and it was shown to him, ironically, by rustic fare and centuries-old techniques in the hillsides of Italy.

After his return, Grant began to apply to the best restaurants in the country. He still hung on to that
Wine Spectator
issue, now more than a year old. The other top restaurants mentioned in it were the Inn at Little Washington, outside D.C.; Valentino, in L.A.; and Masa’s, in San Francisco; as well as the Lark, a respected restaurant near his home in Detroit. So he applied to them. In another part of the magazine was a blurb about a two-year-old restaurant called the French Laundry. The food sounded kind of cool. It was by now the summer of 1996. Thomas Keller that spring had won the James Beard Foundation award for Best Chef California, and the French Laundry, with its unusual name and romantic location, had begun to develop its own mystique among cooks throughout the country. For the French Laundry, Grant did something he didn’t do for the four others: He created a stack of letters addressed to Keller at the French Laundry in sealed, stamped envelopes. He still can’t explain why, given how little he knew about the restaurant, which wasn’t nearly as renowned then as it would be in a year, when
The New York Times
called it “the most exciting” restaurant in America.

“One of the most bizarre things in my life,” he says now, when asked to explain.

By August, Keller had had enough letters and contacted him, saying, more or less, as Grant puts it, “All right, all right. What the hell’s your problem?”

Grant went out to trail for two days. “I had no idea what I was getting into,” he says. The first time he set eyes on Chef Keller, the man was sweeping the kitchen floor. Grant had never seen a chef sweeping his kitchen floor—it was always an underling who swept the floor—and this guy was supposed to be the best in California. Grant worked for two days and when it was over, Keller asked, “Do you want a job?”

He did, and this move, more than any other, has directed his life and his mind.

In the fall of 1996, Grant drove out to Yountville, in the heart of the Napa Valley. His dad accompanied his only child to help with the drive and see what this place was all about. Grant had been trying to describe what he’d seen there, what Keller’s food was all about, but he had a hard time articulating it. When the long drive was over and they’d unpacked the car, Grant called Keller to explain the situation: My dad’s here, I want him to understand the food and where I’ll be working, he’s leaving tomorrow, is there any chance at all we could get a reservation? (Chefs are almost uniformly hard on the lowest ranks of the cooks; you’ve got to keep them in their place, treat them like serfs—on your
good
days, if you’re feeling
generous
—otherwise they’re lower than dirt and don’t let them forget it. This is protocol—all great kitchens are like this, and Keller’s was no different.) He told Grant he didn’t know what the situation was but he’d find out and call back in an hour. He hardly knew Grant, the twenty-two-year-old who was beginning in the kitchen as a
commis,
a prep cook, the lowest rank. But Grant had asked anyway and was surprised—as surprised as Keller to receive daily letters from Michigan, surely—to hear Keller say that they should come in at 7:30.

Grant had gotten lucky—Keller was feeling generous. Keller said that kind of offer was a matter of chance, what was going on that day and his mood.

“It was the most amazing meal of my life,” Grant says now—was then and remains so, the turning-point meal in his career as a cook and a chef. He got the Oysters and Pearls, what has since become one of Keller’s famous dishes: a warm tapioca sabayon served in a small elegant dish, on top of which floats a layer of oyster juice and a fat belon oyster. On top of the oyster is a quenelle of sevruga caviar, garnished with chives. It’s an absolutely fabulous dish. Grant remembers thinking he had never seen so much caviar on a single dish. Garnish! He had the rouget with parsley puree, a
palette d’aix
(a mixture of poached garlic and hard-cooked egg yolks, shaped into a disk, breaded with panko, and fried), garlic chips, and parsley leaves, another French Laundry classic, one of Keller’s favorite dishes to cook over and over again, beautiful to look at and lovely to eat. Grant would one day be cooking it over and over again, too. But that night, he marveled that every tiny pinbone of this little Mediterranean fish had been removed—the effort and care it showed. This food, wine, and the relaxed service, combined with the romance of Napa, the French Laundry garden, and the stone building—he’d never experienced anything like it. A perfect meal.

And then Keller came out to say hello. This was rare in those days—Keller didn’t like to come into the dining room, preferred to keep the two worlds completely distinct. When the
mignardises
were delivered, Grant and his dad said thank you and asked for the bill. “You’re all set,” the server said with a smile. “You’re not getting a bill.”

Now Grant was completely floored. No bill? This, truly, was another world.

What moved Keller to be so generous to a virtual stranger that night in the fall of 1996? Grant wondered aloud if it didn’t have something to do with Keller’s seeing a father and son together. Keller’s parents had divorced when he was young, and he’d never been close with his father (a situation soon to be reversed), and Grant thought maybe Keller saw a relationship between a father and a son that he wished he’d had as a young cook.

Grant is still amazed and grateful for that meal and Keller’s generosity. It was the beginning of the critical professional relationship in his career, one that is now a great friendship. When Grant won the Beard award for Rising Star Chef of the Year, Keller was ecstatic. “I think he was more excited when I won the Beard Award than I was,” Grant recalls. “He was jumping up and down. I swear to God, I’d never seen the guy show emotion like that.”

You could say that Keller has no kids of his own, but in fact he does. A lot.

Thus began Grant’s four years at the French Laundry, during which he rose from commis to sous-chef and was forged into the cook and chef he is today. Truly those were his Kung Fu years—he, Grasshopper; Keller, his Master Po. He learned pretty much everything there—from how to handle foie gras to the importance of mincing your own shallots and sweeping the floor.

“I grew up in the French Laundry kitchen,” Grant says. “Thomas taught me how to cook in the philosophical sense. In the literal sense as well, but more about how to treat food, how to express yourself through food, get excited about it. Being submerged in that environment for so long made me realize a lot of things about what it is to cook. There’s a lot of cooks in the world. There’s a lot of cooks who just cook, and there are cooks who think about what they’re cooking, care about what they’re cooking, understand what’s happening with their cooking, have a vision for the final step of the cooking. I think that’s what he projects really well, that this isn’t a mechanical execution, or that that’s a small percentage of it. It starts up here”—he touches his temple, pausing for the words. “From emotion, whether it’s passion about a particular ingredient, the process that you’re going to use to manipulate that ingredient, or the end result once you have it in your hands. I had never seen that before.”

While the cuisine Grant does now at Trio doesn’t look anything like Keller’s food, Keller’s food is clearly reflected in the technique. How Grant learned to tie the torchon of foie gras, for example. “We use that technique to mold various things as well. How we make veal stock, how we sauté fish. It’s all encompassing. If, in the act of doing something, I check myself and say, Where did I learn this? Nine times out of ten it’s gonna come from the French Laundry and him.”

But there was also the more intangible, and powerful, lesson of how to be a cook. “Like the push,” he says. “Very few people push themselves to their limit. Me and Eric and Gregory”—Eric Ziebold and Gregory Short, who would also become sous-chefs along with Grant—“we were in awe of the way Thomas pushed himself.”