The Reach of a Chef (39 page)

The first course was called PB&J, which came off of Mary Radigan’s station. A peeled green grape, still attached to its stem, had been glazed with peanut butter, sprinkled with chopped peanuts, and rolled in a very thin slice of bread, then lightly toasted under a salamander and placed in the arms of the squid, its cylindrical base fitting snugly into the silver-gold disk on my table—a lovely first bite, which led to a series of good to extraordinary courses, always fascinating.

The standout for me was an early course composed of a custardlike bar of raw parsnip, young coconut, and cashew nut that had been frozen and whipped in a Pacojet (the coolest toy in many restaurant kitchens—it freezes, then purees into a delicate ice cream–like texture just about any food). On top of this bar—the mixture had been spread on a sheet pan, kept frozen, then cut—rested a big chunk of crab, long noodlelike curls of sweet young coconut, a dehydrated chip of the parsnip puree, tiny basil leaves, saffron threads, and toasted cashews, with a small spoonful of a saffron vinaigrette. Parsnip-cashew-crab-saffron. Strange and wonderful, a completely comfortable dish to eat and completely new.

Not everything worked. The least successful dish was the most surreal and vivid-looking—julienne of prosciutto were formed into disks, dehydrated, and used to sandwich a passion fruit sponge. Grant rested these constructions in a small patch of living green sprouts called zuta levana, a eucalyptusy-minty herb often used in tea. It was a miniature still life, old wheels abandoned in a suburban lawn. The wheels were really chewy, and I thought the sponge was odd. The food was cool to look at but the flavors weren’t especially good, didn’t seem to go together, and the textures were unpleasant. (I’d find out later where the error lay—Grant tested this in Kokonas’s kitchen and everyone loved them, and the kids ate them like candy. But the requirement to prepare the prosciutto wheels in advance for the restaurant and the humid environment of the Alinea kitchen left them overly chewy by service. The dish didn’t translate from the home kitchen to the restaurant kitchen, and it was taken off the menu.)

Two dishes in particular revealed to me what had happened to Grant since I’d eaten at Trio nearly a year earlier. The first was the turbot. I was glad the delivery had arrived—it’s a great fish to eat. Grant served it in a kind of frothy liquid custard, along with mussels, geoduck clam, and water chestnuts. The fish was perfectly cooked, with great body and flavor, the chestnuts and clam slightly crunchy, the soup-sauce soothing and smelling of the sea, mingling with the spring aroma of the hyacinths floating in a liner bowl that had been filled with steaming-hot water by my server. New flavors and combinations, the unconventional hyacinth vapor, but enormously satisfying to eat. Warm. Comforting luxury.

The second was
HAZELNUT PUREE [medium bubble]: capsule of savory granola, curry.
This was a sweet-spicy-crunchy dish, a sauce and puree in a glass bowl over which was set an enclosed golden brown cylinder. With a tap of a spoon, I broke the cylinder, a pleasant crack, and the contents spilled into the puree. It was nutty and sweet and spicy from the curry, creamy and crunchy. A kind of marvel of textures and flavors that I enjoyed for the sake of themselves until it dawned on me that I was eating a granola and yogurt breakfast, and I smiled at the fun of it. The strangeness had come from within the dish, and from without it was a pleasure of flavors and textures. Unusual and unfamiliar but still sensual and comforting and luxurious, even humorous.

Gone were the bizarre creations like the “pizza” on a pin and the shrimp cocktail spritzer, all those experiments of an innovative chef extending himself that have a cold and distancing effect on the eater, no matter how intellectually intriguing or new. At Trio, Grant had traveled beyond what he ought to have been doing in order to know his right and comfortable mark. He had to reach beyond what he could actually grasp in order to know the true range of that grasp. He’d found it here in Alinea.

Clark and Bruni at the next table talked and chuckled, puzzled and
mmm
-ed (at the artichoke especially, the frogs’ legs, and the foie gras with rhubarb, onion, and walnut), and also shrugged. No matter their response (they liked the meal), what was significant to me was that this thirty-one-year-old chef, opening his first restaurant—in the heartland, no less—had lured
The New York Times.
Bruni’s article that appeared the following Wednesday, a kind of survey of those restaurants plying the edge cuisine that used Alinea’s opening as the hook for the article—a picture of a prosciutto wheel stuck in the grass ran big and bold above the fold—had a slightly condescending tone relative to the seriousness of the intent of the restaurant, but nevertheless claimed that the opening of Alinea “marks a milestone and invites an examination of how meaningfully this kind of cooking, born in Europe and pioneered in large part by the chef Ferran Adrià in Spain, has taken root in the United States.”

Before the summer was out, even Ferran Adrià’s brother Albert had come to eat. (“It was a great dinner and, as I said to you, one of the best of my life,” Albert wrote after returning to Spain. “I have spoken with a lot of people about the quality and precision of your kitchen. You will be well known in Spain in a short time.” His brother Ferran would be coming to the States and to Alinea later in the year.)

More members of the press and chefs were on their way. Ruth Reichl, editor of
Gourmet,
reserved a table. Amanda Hesser was in the same night Jeffrey Steingarten ate there. Steingarten, the lawyer turned eminent and highly respected food author, would write about Grant in his column in
Vogue.
Hesser later called Grant about doing an article for the Sunday
New York Times Magazine
supplement “T-Living.” The
Chicago Tribune
and the
Chicago Sun-Times
were in, of course, as were the
Washington Post
and the
Boston Globe.
And
CBS News Sunday Morning
had called to ask to tape a segment there.

It was hard to imagine a more auspicious opening, with so many of the food elite traveling to Chicago to eat at Alinea. Moreover, business was brisk with reservations holding at seventy to eighty-five each night through the summer (normally a slow season), and the $185 check average was higher than they’d predicted.

I’d become a great admirer of Grant. I’d first watched him as a twenty-something line cook when I myself was just entering this bizarre, intense world, and look what he’d done. Impressive by any standards, even if he used to serve shrimp out of a mouth spritzer. He had arrived on the scene when the culinary climate in America was ripe, and he could cook for a more involved and savvy dining public eager to pay to try new food. Charlie Trotter and Thomas Keller had opened the doors to a kind of new landscape of fine dining in America, offering tasting menus of rarefied ingredients and elaborate technique to a country that knew only the protein-starch-veg meal, and big portions at that.

Grant had fully adopted the standards of these seminal kitchens to the point that their innovations seemed no longer innovations but rather the standard. Perfection doesn’t exist, his mentor had said, because once you reach it, it means something else. So it is, too, with innovation: once meaningful innovation has been achieved, it quickly ceases to be innovative because others imitate it. His new menu, served three months after opening, contained items like
“crispy sheet of foam”
and
“pillow of lavender air.”

Who could say where this would lead? Grant had absorbed his chefs’ innovations in fine dining in America, then found a source of extraordinary inspiration, a spark that would ignite this volatile creative fuel, in Ferran Adrià outside Barcelona, and propel those Charlie Trotter/Thomas Keller standards into new territory. Grant had extended the reach of the chef in America and upped the ante with his intent to make innovation itself the driving force in his kitchen, in work that was an ongoing evolution of creativity in food and cooking.

But he was just one chef cooking in a country bursting with talent and energy. Grant had pursued cooking with uncommon focus and efficiency. He had not only worked in great kitchens under greats from the previous generation but had learned faster and better than any of his contemporaries what that generation had to teach, and with Alinea, Grant was off like a rocket.

Melissa Kelly, a workhorse of a chef serving casual food in the best possible way in her old Victorian on a hill in Maine, not only thrived there but had opened Primos in distant parts of the country—Orlando and Tucson—restaurants that underscored her own convictions about working with farmers, cooking simply with the best ingredients. She’d even bent a giant corporation, Marriott, to agree to plant gardens and initiate a recycling program in those cities.

That previous generation, which trained the Grants and Melissas, were at or approaching age fifty, but weren’t out to pasture. These chefs were using their thirty-plus years of experience to drive this profession forward as well. Keller’s work as an innovator was less visible now. His influence was more in a continual raising of standards, raising the expectations of his staff, his customers, his fellow chefs, and his work was largely creating opportunities for his staff while growing his business. Masa Takayama—he was the same generation as Keller, and he had been cooking as long, but his standards were learned, were grown into him, in Japan, in a 150-year-old sushi house. America had proved such a fertile culinary market that this solitary man could create not one of the country’s most expensive restaurants but rather a restaurant that was unique, dependent on him alone, and expressing a culture of delicacy and artistry in a land famous for its love of meat and potatoes.

How far we’d come in America that enough people would pay $500 for a meal of raw fish and rice to support a restaurant in some of the most expensive real estate in the country. Indeed, in its first two years, Masa’s space was the most profitable of the Time Warner food establishments.

Judy Rodgers, chef at one of the great American restaurants, Zuni Café, makes the point that if food is more expensive, that’s not necessarily a bad thing—“We’d waste less food if it were more expensive,” she says. And this is true, not so much by way of Masa’s example, but of the food we eat on a daily basis. Artisanal food, hand-raised pork, free-range chickens, grass-fed beef, vegetables at the farmer’s markets burgeoning throughout the country—this kind of food is often more expensive than what you can find wrapped in plastic at the grocery store. While some worry that this makes cooking with the best ingredients a form of elitism, Rodgers suggests that if we all had to pay more for our food, we’d take better care of it and better care of ourselves, and she’s right. Expensive food in this fat, resource-rich country has great long-term benefits.

If there’s a female counterpart to Keller, as rustic Melissa is to scientific Grant, it’s Judy Rodgers in her funky San Francisco restaurant. She cooks in a corduroy skirt, stockings, and a sweater, and can’t stand it when her cooks call her “Chef.” She’s also on the brink of fifty and has been a cook all her adult life. She has a powerful voice in the country, imploring us, by the example of her food and her restaurant and her excellent book, to pay attention. It’s not necessarily a good thing to be able to have strawberries in January so we can garnish a deli plate in New York or your Cheerios in a Kansas City Sheraton only to throw the strawberry out.

“That’s what we’re up against,” she says, “that it’s perceived as a
triumph
that you can get strawberries in January as opposed to a catastrophe. Not all choice is good. Even if the January strawberry tastes OK, even if you have a really good strawberry that’s organic, I still know you turned down other things for that to happen.

“Part of not getting tired of food and cooking is not having every option every day, it’s responding to your constraints. You don’t have that much to work with, so you have to be more resourceful. If I were in St. Louis”—her hometown—“I’d have a different palate of flavors to play with, I’d have to be more resourceful, I’d probably be more aggressive about putting stuff up myself during the season, and guess what?
That’s what culinary tradition is
—making the harvest season last all year long. My God, the most unique holiday we have is Thanksgiving. If you really ponder what Thanksgiving is all about, you would really understand
food.
But so many people think it’s about gluttony, the beginning of the eating season—as opposed to truly revering this, your great harvest celebration, and now put stuff up so you don’t starve over the winter.”

This is Keller’s colleague and contemporary with whom he can, through food and cooking, teach this country how to think about food, which of course is only a step or two away from teaching people how to think about life, which of course is the territory of the artist.

Some chefs argue with me for saying that chefs are craftsmen and not artists. Every chef is not an artist, but those chefs like Keller and Rodgers and Masa and Grant and Melissa, who try to tell us, through the example of their food, how we might live, they truly are the artists—artists who happen to be chefs.

But Keller himself said he was not even cooking, that he wasn’t a chef anymore in the old conception of it. What is “the chef” then? What kind of shoes does the chef wear today? What does a chef do? And have we lost something forever because of it?

The chef today is running a company, now composed of many separate businesses. The chef isn’t in the kitchen, he’s in the office. He wears a business jacket, not a chef’s coat. He puts on a chef’s coat for photo shoots and gives interviews to the press that he hopes will be good for his businesses. He meets with or conference-calls the general managers and chefs de cuisine of his various restaurants. Soon these chefs won’t cook either, if they advance. Pretty soon,
they’ve
got on a business jacket. The chef puts on a Brooks Brothers no-iron shirt and a pair of casual slacks and moves into retail. The chef licenses his name to manufacturers, and he visits the factory in France or California to observe the quality of the product and meet with the company’s directors. He puts on a hard hat to view the new restaurant under construction. Flying home he reviews the proofs of the manuscript for the next book, which has been created by another faction of his team.