Life, on the Line (29 page)

 

On a Monday morning at ten sharp Nick was out in front of my house in Evanston. He wanted to meet early, before our meeting with a broker. I got in the front seat and he handed me a set of huge maps.

“Dagmara blew these up at Kinko's. These are the neighborhoods we will likely want to locate Alinea in: Lincoln Park. Gold Coast. Michigan Avenue offshoots, maybe the gallery district in River West, maybe West Randolph Street. How well do you know Chicago?”

“I spend a hundred hours a week in a kitchen. Before that I lived in Napa, before that in Michigan.”

“I thought you worked at Trotter's?” he asked.

“Yeah, for a whole eight weeks.”

“Well, we're screwed then. I've lived here my whole life and I get lost five blocks from my house,” he said, laughing. “Anyway, Dagmara knows I'm a directional idiot, so she gave me these maps and three highlighters—red, yellow, green. Mark the good ones in green. Pretty basic, but at least we'll have an idea of which streets might work and which won't.”

“So we just drive around?”

“Yeah. Let's just drive around and see what strikes you.”

We headed east toward Sheridan Road, then south at Lake Shore Drive through Rogers Park and into Chicago. The first place we landed was Lincoln Park.

“This is currently the most upscale neighborhood in Chicago. Used to be the Gold Coast over by the lake and Dearborn east of here. I guess it still is, but now all the younger families with money are building or buying around here. Everything is getting torn down and rebuilt, most of the time on multiple lots.” He pointed to a massive house on a beautiful, tree-lined street. “What do you figure that costs, Chef?”

“I have no idea. Looks sweet, though. Seven fifty? A million?”

“Ha. Three and a half to four is my guess. Could be more; I can't see what kind of yard they have back there. Lots are going for eight hundred at least. No house, just the land.”

“Who the hell is buying them?” I really couldn't fathom it.

“Guys like me!” He laughed at his joke.

“I'm clearly in the wrong profession.”

We turned off the residential street and on to Armitage. “And there is Trotter's, G.”

I hadn't been back since I left, and it all felt so different from this perspective. “Well, we can't locate around here. That would just be stupid. We can't be so close to Trotter's.”

“Why not? Let's just buy out McShane's Exchange across the street from Trotter's and call the place ‘Fucked' instead of Alinea.”

He was waiting to deliver the punch line so I played along. “Fucked? As in we are fucked for doing this?”

“No, Chef. Fucked as in ʹF-U-C-T.ʹ Fuck You, Charlie Trotter.” He wailed with laughter, practically drooling.

I smiled but tried not to laugh. “You won't hear me repeating that.”

“Come on, Chef. You'll kick his ass. He's been here fifteen years. One of the best meals I ever had was at Trotter's in 1994. It opened my eyes to haute cuisine. But it hasn't changed much except to put in more tables, and that's never a good thing. Every fifteen or twenty years a new kid comes to town and takes over. You're that kid. Twenty years from now, some kid will kick your ass. It's the way of the world.”

We went street by street as best we could, then hopped to a different neighborhood and did the same. By the time our meeting with the broker came around we had hit the five major areas that Nick and Dagmara had come up with, highlighted any streets with commercial properties, and had surprisingly little green on our maps. Then he pulled out another set of maps.

“My sister-in-law Anita has a demographic mapping program— she moonlights doing maps for their brother Edgar while she's in school. She was nice enough to drop these in there. Those stars in blue are all of the three-star restaurants in Chicago according to the
Trib
and
Chicago
magazine. The red ones are the four-star restaurants. The overlays are demographic indicators like age, income, stuff like that. Those probably don't matter much for us. But with the exception of Arun's way over here, our map lines up pretty well.”

We parked near the gallery district and walked up to the address listed on the e-mail printout from the broker. It was, of course, a closed restaurant.

We met the broker, Kim, out front. A tall, lanky guy with a full head of white hair, he introduced himself to us and couldn't help but look surprised. I was in my usual attire of black pants, white T-shirt, chefʹs clogs. Nick was in jeans and a pullover shirt.

“So, Edgar tells me you guys are building a restaurant? What kind?”

“Well, it's kind of hard to explain,” Nick piped up after an uncomfortable silence. “Grant here is one of the best young chefs in the world. It will be ultrafine dining.”

Kim's eyes nearly popped out of his head. You could tell he thought we had precisely no idea what we were doing. “How many seats?”

“Sixty-five,” I said.

“And how big of a bar area?”

“No bar. Just sixty-five seats.”

Now he was totally confused. “You definitely need a bar. That's where restaurants make all their money,” he said, as if to educate us. “So it's like a bistro? You probably don't need something this big, then. Check average?”

“About a hundred and sixty-five dollars.”

“Per person?!” he nearly shouted. “What the hell kind of food is it? Like Trotter's?”

“Yeah,” Nick looked at me and laughed. “His food is exactly like Trotter's.”

We headed inside and it looked like an old nightclub. Lighting fixtures were hanging from the ceiling by cords, and old neon signs were screwed into the wall behind a filthy bar. The space itself was large, but it was bisected by brick arches that made it look like you could at best turn it into a really cheesy Italian restaurant—the kind with a mural of old Italy painted on the wall. We headed to the basement, which looked like a catacomb.

“This would be great for a wine cellar,” Kim offered. “Can you imagine those arches stacked with wine?”

“No, not really,” I said. “Where's the kitchen?”

“It's over here,” he said, motioning to a corner of the basement.

“Naw, I don't need to see it. No kitchens in basements. If the kitchen is in a basement, cross it off your list.”

Nick and Kim looked at me for a second, and then Nick spoke up. “Grant, I bet most of these places put the kitchen in the basement so that they could put the seats on the main floor. They're just trying to maximize floor space for seating. The basements rent out at half price or less. So if the asking price is forty-five dollars per square foot, the basement might be an extra twenty dollars, maybe less. Sometimes they throw them in for free.”

I paused. No one was considering me in this equation. “Look. That's great and I get that. But you have to understand; the kitchen is where I live. I spend sixteen hours a day there, sometimes more. I want it to be spacious and to be well lit, ideally with daylight. It has to be well cooled, too. Commercial kitchens are too hot and the people and the food suffer because of it. I want this kitchen to be cool. Our cooks will be happier. I will be happier. No basement kitchen.”

“Okay,” Nick said. “No basement kitchen.” He looked at Kim. “I think you get what we're going for here, right? This is not a bistro, nor is it really much of a restaurant. Think of it like this: We're building a gallery that happens to have a kitchen and seating. Find us something like that, with tall ceilings but preferably not rustic or wood. We're going for modern. And basements are for storage, not people.” He looked at me and made a sarcastic smile.

Kim stared at us for a second as we headed out. He definitely thought we were nuts. We didn't bother going to look at anything else that day. It was just understood that the rest of them were a waste of time.

 

I spent a few days driving by myself through the neighborhoods, imagining a restaurant facade in this storefront or that. Nothing seemed right. Nick trolled all of the online real estate sites and came up empty, occasionally sending me a few listings for price reference.

Then he called me and said that Kim had put together a few places that might work. So we set up another meeting on a Tuesday and met him in front of Japonais, a huge and hugely successful restaurant in the old Montgomery Ward Catalog House building, which had recently been converted to luxury apartments and upscale retail.

“They have a few really great spaces in here,” Kim said when we met him. “Totally new, totally blank spaces. Just concrete floors, stubbed-out utilities, and twenty-foot ceilings.”

We met the listing broker and a rep from the building and were escorted into a cavernous space with huge, round pillars. I could easily imagine a grand dining room with a huge kitchen. There was natural light front and back.

“How do you enter off the street?” I asked.

“You don't,” the listing agent said. “You have to come through that part of the building that we just went through.” She gestured toward the lobby area.

“Can't we just open something up over there?” I pointed to the windows that looked out over a branch of the Chicago River.

“No. The building doesn't want the foot-traffic pattern that way. Bad for the residents.”

“So basically, this is inside of a mall,” I said.

The building rep had clearly heard this complaint before. This was a totally workable space, but hidden inside a huge, huge building. “We are offering a sizable rent credit against build-out costs,” he offered.

Kim seemed surprised that they mentioned this to us so quickly. He and the listing agent were still unsure about us. But I guessed the building rep was desperate. Nick chimed in, “What is ‘sizeable,' exactly?”

“Well, that all depends on how much you intend to spend. But three hundred fifty to four hundred thousand dollars is not out of the question. And by the way, chef Achatz, I have eaten at Trio three times and it's extraordinary. I can't wait to see what you build.”

This was a first. Someone recognized us and knew that we would have big ambitions. And my reputation could work to our advantage. But I didn't want to be stuck in a residential building, hidden from the street.

“Thanks very much,” I said. “However, I don't think this will work, though it is a great space. I really imagine something that has a street presence, that when you think of the restaurant you think of it as a building, not inside of something else.”

We headed toward the door. Nick shot me a look, and when we got in the car he said, “I completely agree that that wasn't right, Grant, but if you tell them exactly what you're thinking all the time, they'll simply stop looking for us.”

This seemed incredibly stupid to me. “Really? Why? Is it so hard to make a couple of calls, dig through the MLS, and set up some meetings? Isn't that what they do?”

“Yeah, it is. But if they think we're going to say no to everything, then we won't be worth their time.”

“Hell, he'll make more on one deal than I do in three months. Seems worth it to me.”

“Okay. But don't be negative. Tell me what you think, but don't tell them.”

“But if I don't tell him, then he won't know what I want!” This was absurd!

“You don't know what you want! You just sound wishy-washy and inexperienced.”

And that much was true. We were exploring neighborhoods and buildings and I was learning by elimination what I didn't want. But now I knew.

“Okay. Here's what I want. I want a building that is all by itself, a stand-alone structure. It needs natural light. The kitchen needs to be on the first floor, and ideally the whole thing is on one floor. So I need a one-story building on one of those streets we highlighted in green or yellow. Thirty-five hundred square feet. You know how much it needs to cost, I don't. So you deal with that part after we find it.”

“I'm pretty sure that the building you just described doesn't exist on those streets. We've been up and down them a dozen times.” We had been at this for a few weeks. News of my impending departure from Trio was starting to leak, and to be sure, I was itching to tell people and the press myself. Nick was constantly reminding me that this might take a year or two, when I kept insisting that we could open in six months.

We went to see two more former restaurants. One was near the Hancock building and had a submarket lease and seven years left but was asking $600,000 to buy a load of crappy tables and kitchen equipment that we would never use. The second space was three doors down from Paul Kahan's great restaurant Blackbird. The public space wasn't bad, but the kitchen reminded me of the co-op walk-in I cleaned out when I was a kid. Whoever left just walked out of the place and left things to rot. Why wouldn't the building owner clean that out before showing it to a prospective tenant? Everyone involved seemed lazy and I was growing exasperated by the process. We told Kim that neither would work and that we really, really didn't want to see any former restaurants since we didn't want to buy stuff that we wouldn't end up using.