The Reach of a Chef (18 page)

Grant was good enough to include me in as many of the innovative techniques as possible. I began with the sake “wrapper.” Agar, a carbohydrate derived from red algae, which is not new to the pastry kitchen but is to the hot kitchen, is a gelling device. The advantage of agar is that unlike traditional gelatin, it will maintain a gelled state even when piping hot. Here agar is dissolved in sake. The sake is then poured on a sheet of acetate. The sake quickly cools and sets up as an opaque sheet maybe a sixteenth of an inch thick that can be peeled off the acetate. Individual wrappers are cut from this, filled with the seaweed, roe, and cucumber balls that have been lightly pickled, and the wrapper is folded into a package.

Seems easy enough, but what you’d never know without doing it is how very, very delicate the sake sheet is. It will rip at the slightest tension or quiver of the finger.

The next preparation I worked on also used agar. Grant created a cranberry sauce to go with the shrimp. This, too, was gelled but in a pan and at a depth of about a half inch, thick enough to cut into chunks. A chunk of cranberry gelatin was skewered onto a vanilla bean. Next a strip of rind from a Meyer lemon that had been confitted, or salted (which transforms it into a beguiling seasoning device). And finally a delicate Maine shrimp is skewered onto the bean. These are then refrigerated until service. At service, a small amount of tempura batter is mixed (it will lose its lightness unless made just before breading); the shrimp-lemon-cranberry kebab is floured, dipped in tempura batter, and swum in hot oil: You don’t just drop the whole thing in—Grant didn’t want the whole bean deep-fried—you had to hold the end of the bean for the sixty seconds it took to cook. This was a pain if you had other things to do—such as respond to the dozens of orders being called out—or had to cook eight of these at once.

The effect was extraordinary, though. A light, crispy shrimp tempura, which when you bit into it virtually exploded with the hot cranberry sauce, which felt like liquid because of the heat but was still solid (an agar gel won’t melt until about 185 degrees Fahrenheit). Part of the pleasure was the surprise of finding a “liquid” inside something deep-fried, so the use of agar here was very effective.

But—it was a mother to keep on the fat vanilla bean. Just skewering them, the gelled cubes wanted to split on you. And the shrimp, also, they were so delicate they wanted to fall off the bean, too. This was workable during prep time but quite a bit less so during service when you had to flour and batter the things, putting more stress and adding weight to the delicate constructions.

That station also puts together one of the labor-intensive duck garnishes—the radish–hearts of palm structure: alternating coins of each with some mint oil and microgreens rest on a plank of another gelatin. These coins didn’t want to stick together in their arranged red-white pattern. Watching Grant repairing one of these, I was struck by how many items he served that were just on the edge of breaking. You had to have a really delicate touch in this kitchen.

Next I worked with Curtis, who was making the eucalyptus “roe.” This was fascinating and fun. First he brewed the eucalyptus tea, a lovely darkish pink color. When it was cool, he added alginate to it. Whereas agar derives from red algae, alginates derive from brown algae. Alginates also are used to gel liquids; they will only gel, though, in the presence of calcium. What Curtis then did was fill a mini–squeeze bottle with the alginated tea and squeezed out drops of them into a solution of calcium chloride. The drops hit the calcium chloride and their exterior immediately gelled, forming delicate little balls of tea. The larger apricot ball, the size of a chicken yolk, is made using this same process.

Grant explained Trio’s use of alginate and calcium chloride, which he discovered at a food-technology expo in Chicago, to the readers of eGullet, the culinary Web site.

Trio also used various forms of foams. I find foams dubious, and they are especially tricky because they’ve become synonymous with the worst of the new innovations or edge cuisine done badly. At Trio, one foam, the fines herbes sponge, was served as a stand-alone garnish, the soy foam as a stiff sauce, and a hot brothy foam covered his lobster tail like a cloud of sea spume. (I didn’t care for that whole dish, “Maine Lobster
flavors of Thai ice tea, aromatic bread,
” the menu called it, though Luke, the L.A. cook, had eaten that dish and was gaga over it.)

I remained skeptical of foam. I didn’t like the texture. There was something inherently phony about foam. It tried to be bigger than it actually was—a heaping spoonful of foam really amounted to a piddly few drops of actual stuff. It was mostly air. Also, I didn’t like the look of foam. Foam is what you skim off your stock and discard; foam is what you stay away from when you’re swimming in a lake. I don’t want to eat foam.

Grant defended it. “Why is there so much veal stock?” he asked me.

I’m a veal stock fanatic so I tried to keep myself neutral, rattling off the obvious benefits of an excellent veal stock—body, flavor, moisture, richness.

“Exactly,” Grant said. “Foam does the same thing, adds and enhances flavor, body. It’s a sauce. But it also does the opposite of a sauce. It adds lightness.”

I nodded but he saw I wasn’t convinced.

It was early in service when we had this exchange. He was at the pass and he pointed to the pineapple-salmon combo bobbing on the antenna. “How else could I sauce that?”

Here he had a point I couldn’t argue. You wanted a sauce on this thing. It wanted the moisture, flavor, and seasoning that a sauce delivered. But one of Grant’s goals here was to serve a dish that didn’t require using your hands, so the thing was bouncing around on the end of an antenna. A stiff foam was a good solution; the Thai ice tea spume hiding the lobster was another story, but this I completely bought.

“People are scared of things that are different,” Grant went on. “They push food back. In the last five years we’ve created five new techniques”—and by “we” Grant meant the professional chef, the innovative restaurant kitchens working this edge cuisine—“and they’re being challenged on a
moral
level!…It’s like the devil!”

So what are these new techniques? I count eight:

1. 1.
   Agar, the ability to serve gelled food hot, resulting in such dishes as “fettuccine” made from consommé.
   
2. 2.
   Alginate and calcium chloride, the ability to create different-shaped gels and to encapsulate liquid in itself, such as the self-enclosed ravioli or the eucalyptus roe.
   
3. 3.
   Pervasive use of sous-vide cooking, the ability to cook protein very gently and slowly.
   
4. 4.
   Various types of foams, from solid to liquid.
   
5. 5.
   The sugar tuile technique: Three different types of sugars—glucose and isomalt (a sugar replacement derived from beet sugar) and fondant—are melted and brought to the hard-crack stage, about 365 degrees Fahrenheit, poured out, cooled, and ground into a powder, sprinkled out on a special nonstick paper (called “Magic Paper”) in the desired shape, baked, and cooled. The result is a sugar tuile that will melt at a relatively low temperature and encase an object, such as a disk of foie gras, in a very fine, crisp layer.
   
6. 6.
   Aggressive use of aromas—serving shrimp on a hot vanilla bean, for instance, beef with applewood smoke, pheasant with the smell of hay and apples. 7. Unconventional serving devices, such as the “antenna” and the parfait tube.
   
7. 7.
   Unconventional temperatures—hot gelatin, for example, or frozen foie gras.
   

There are other techniques as well that might be included but aren’t unconventional until applied to this kind of food—techniques of dehydration, for example (Grant dehydrates mushrooms, bacon, and other items). Also, edge cuisine might simply be defined by the extent to which food is manipulated—turning shrimp cocktail into a liquid or, in a dish Adrià made famous, grilled vegetables juiced, gelled, sliced, and served like Technicolor piano keys as “grilled vegetables.”

“As a whole,” Grant says, “when you group all these things together, it begins to define the movement. These are going to be the indicators of said cuisine. I think it’s important to keep moving gastronomy forward at this level…. More than anything, they help us express the objective: innovation.

“I don’t want to do what’s been done for a long time,” he goes on. “I want to create. To try to invent, whether it be a dish or a technique. That’s exciting to me. Rather than perfecting something that’s old, I’d rather perfect something that’s new.

“Three years from now, we might not be doing anything with alginate, but the thought process that led us to that will still be intact. If it’s not alginate, it’ll be something else. The thought processes are what’s really important.”

“What’s the downside to all this?” I ask.

“It’s really hard,” Grant says.

I drove out of Evanston soon after, excited for Grant, and with my mind a little more open to the ideas and techniques defining this edge cuisine. I was comforted by what one of Grant’s sous-chefs, David Carrier, had said: “No matter how avant-garde you are, culinarily speaking, you always wind up back in the basics.” Indeed, I’m sure that Grant succeeded at Trio because his basics were as close to perfect as basics can be. He could do whatever kind of food he wanted and would succeed because of this, from bistro to edge cuisine.

Grant would close down at the end of July and enter a peculiar world of nine-to-five, with plenty of time to spend with the family. Strange for a lifelong line cook. He could get everything done that he needed to do each day and still have tons of time on his hands and get enough sleep. It gave him time to think.

Eager to follow the progress of Alinea, I stayed in touch by e-mail. He wrote me in November 2004:

More than a month later, in the week between Christmas and New Year’s Day, he wrote a long e-mail detailing the restaurant’s progress, the design of the space, the kitchen, the serviceware, the wine list, the menu—it was all coming together in an exciting way. The demolition of the interior of the building—on North Halsted Street in Lincoln Park, across coincidentally from Steppenwolf, the famous experimental theater company—had been completed, and the basic concrete-and-steel foundation had been put in place, and chalk outlines of the kitchen had been drawn. It gave him the chills, sometimes. City permits were all granted. He’d hired his kitchen staff, six of whom were at Trio. His two sous, Curtis Duffy and John Peters; his business partner, Nick Kokonas; and a general manager were working full-time, with two days a week being devoted to food development. He was soon to meet a private wine collector, a friend of two investors, who would be making a portion of his collection available to the restaurant. This was extraordinary given that creating a wine list can be among the biggest costs in opening a restaurant, something that most new restaurants must do gradually. Here they were basically borrowing a wine cellar, allowing them to open with a wine list of more than six hundred wines, four times the size they’d budgeted for.

Luck seemed to be waiting for Grant around every corner. “All of this stuff scares me a bit though,” he concluded.