Life, on the Line (46 page)

My laptop sat on the beautiful black service table in the middle of the dining room. Joe was up front looking glumly at me. I avoided making eye contact with anyone, and at this point, everyone could see something was wrong. I had never addressed an all-staff meeting; usually it was Grant.

I pinged Grant on iChat and nothing happened. The wireless was new and was having issues, so I logged in again and got a sketchy connection, with his voice cutting in and out. He called my cell.

“What's up with the connection?”

“Ever yone's here, Grant, but it just isn't working right. Let me get a phone in here.”

We struggled for fifteen minutes to find a cord long enough to bring in a speakerphone. I was getting impatient and was worried how this would all go down. Grant kept calling my cell, and I kept ignoring it. Finally, I just yelled out, “Ever yone downstairs to the front dining room.” The room—“the teens”—is designed to hold sixteen diners. We had fifty-six people standing along the back wall, perching on tables, and a bunch of the chefs sitting cross-legged in a semicircle around a small black Panasonic speakerphone. I called Grant.

“Hello?”

“Grant, sorry. I have everyone here. We're crammed into the teens around a speakerphone.”

“What the hell?” he said, laughing. Everyone laughed. But everyone also sensed that this was important and different. Not to mention a bit absurd. Some people were staring at the phone. Others were just looking around, wondering how they would catch up in time for service.

“Okay. So I want to first recognize chef Curtis Duffy. Curtis spent time at Trotter's, then came over to work with me at Trio. He, along with John Peters, was the chef that helped me build the original Alinea menu, worked on the food lab, sourced everything, and has been invaluable in what we have done along the way. As you may know, he will be moving on to take a job that will allow him to spend more time with his new baby and his wife. On behalf of everyone at Alinea, we owe him a debt of gratitude for all that he has done.

“Chef Jeff Pikus will be taking over as chef de cuisine. Jeff has also been with me since the Trio days, and in fact pretty much started his culinary career there. He is tremendously dedicated and hardworking, and I am certain the kitchen will not slow down at all under chef Pikus.”

I thought to myself, “What the hell is he doing?” He's trying to make this sound like a normal meeting, but meanwhile everyone is looking at me wondering why the hell they're staring at a phone that they can barely hear, listening to routine—albeit big—changes in the kitchen.

“Next, I want to welcome chef . . .” Grant continued on, welcoming the stages who were visiting from Europe for the week and apologizing that he could not be there to greet them personally. This wasn't moving along very quickly.

“I want to take some time to talk about menu changes that we were going to put in place this week but will move to next week. . ..” He was losing the crowd. People were literally looking at their phones, or folding the napkins without listening at all. Grant finally paused for a few breaths. We were nearly thirty minutes into the call.

“I suppose you're wondering why I asked everyone to be here today, why I'm talking to you through a telephone. Of course, I wanted to talk to you via the video so you could see that I'm here and fine, but that didn't work out.

“Anyway, three years ago I noticed a small spot on my tongue. It was nothing. I went to the dentist, they took a biopsy, and it came back clean. But it never really went away.” Everyone was listening now; the mood changed instantly. He continued, “About a year ago it started bothering me again, but who has time for these things. . ..” He continued on, telling the story. By now some people were starting to tear up, to cover their hands over their mouths, hiding their dropped jaws.

“After meeting with the doctors at Masonic, Nick did his magic and pulled some strings and got me into Sloan-Kettering tomorrow. We know at this point that I have cancer, squamous cell carcinoma, on my tongue. It's not good, in fact it's stage four. But I'm seeking the best care possible and want to assure you of one thing . . .really just this one thing: Alinea will continue on being the best. It has to. If there is one thing you can do for me it is this: keep doing your jobs, keep Alinea there for me, keep this dream that I had, that we all share, alive. At some point I'm not going to be able to be there, but I want to know—I need to know—that it will be there for me when I get back, okay?”

There was dead silence in the room. It was palpable. Nearly sixty people were in shock; a few quietly cried. Employees who were hired two days earlier and had never even met Grant didn't know how to act at all—they had just walked into a shit-storm. Nathan Klingbail, a chef who was with Grant at Trio, then worked at Schwa, and then recently came to Alinea, looked up at me, mouthed the word “Sorry,” and ran out the back door of the restaurant.

“Is everyone still there?” Grant said after a long minute of silence. “Does anyone have any questions?”

No one said a word. I piped up, “Grant, we're all here and everyone has heard the news. I'm sure that I'm speaking on behalf of the whole staff when I tell you that we intend to redouble our efforts to make sure that Alinea is better than ever. And of course you'll be back here in a few days.”

“Well that's all I've got. Again, thanks to Curtis for his years of dedicated service. I'll check in with the doctors here tomorrow—they're supposed to be the best in the world—and will be back in a few days.” With that, he hung up.

Ever yone's eyes turned to me. I didn't know what to say. “Obviously, the situation is not good. In fact, I'm not going to lie, it's really bad.”

“Could he die?” someone asked.

“It is in fact more likely than not. And so far the recommended treatment is gruesome. We are going to decide what to tell the press, but until we hear from Sloan we don't want to say anything. So I ask you for now to keep this as quiet as possible.” I waited a few moments, but nobody said anything. With that I left the room. I simply couldn't say anything else. I was watching the death not only of a man, but of his life's work.

I walked outside to get some air, only to find Nathan in the alley. He looked up at me with tears streaming down his face. “Nate,” was all I could muster. I walked over to him and he turned away. “You think I haven't cried over this, Nate?”

“I'm really sorry,” he said. “I'm not very good with this kind of thing.”

“Who is, Nate?” I gave him a hug. He wiped his eyes with his chef's towel, thanked me, and strode back into the Alinea kitchen to go back to work.

 

I arrived at Heather's apartment in New York early in the week and we spent the better part of it eating our way through New York. I was limited to soft and wet foods that were easy to chew and that slid down my throat with minimal effort. But we managed to have fun on our tour. I wasn't sure what the Sloan appointment would hold for me so I figured I should spend as much time as possible doing what I love before seeing the surgeon.

 

“What do you want to do for dinner tonight?” she asked one afternoon. “Do you want to cook for us?”

Most people would think that was a strange request, but she knew that I was staring down the Sloan appointment the following morning with a great deal of anxiety. “Yeah, I do. Perfect.” If there was one thing that could take my mind off of a 7:00 A.M. visit at a major cancer hospital it would be cooking a five-course meal for seven people. I had four hours to run to Whole Foods for groceries and to cook. It would be a unique challenge, because I could only eat soft foods.

Heather arrived home a few hours later to find me just starting the potato gnocchi dough for the fourth course. She gave me a big, long hug, turned off the heavy metal music I was playing through her stereo from my iPod, and rolled up her sleeves.

“The tomatoes looked nice, so I figured I would do some gnocchi and basil.”

“Awesome. I love gnocchi.”

“Yeah, plus it's soft and that's about all I can handle these days. Thomas showed me how to make these when I first got there. You have to work fast or else the dough begins to soften and becomes difficult to shape. When I first started making them they were this size,” I said, pointing to one I had just made as a demo that was the size of a typical gnocchi, “but then we had the idea to make them the size of arborio rice. So I would roll them tiny, like this.”

“No way.”

“Yep. It took forever to get the amount we needed. We used them for a truffled gnocchi risotto that garnished a salmon chop. It's pretty funny when I think about that now—chops made from fish, risotto made from gnocchi, ice-cream cones with salmon tartar inside, dishes called ‘Tongue and Cheek.' Makes sense that we play with food at Alinea.”

I continued to roll out dozens of the tiny gnocchi.

“I remember all of us sitting around at the end of service one day after Thomas, Stephan Durfee, Richard Blais, and I went to Hawaii for an event in 1998. Thomas was excited by some of the indigenous ingredients, like moi and fresh hearts of palm, so he sourced the products to use back at the Laundry. We were working on a dish for the vegetable menu and were focusing on the fresh palm. Mark Hopper mentioned that when you push out the center the remaining piece looks like marrowbone. Someone else thought out loud about filling the center of it, so that it looks like marrow. Mark got excited and said, “Yeah. We can make a filling out of marrow beans. Get it?”

A new dish was born, from a pun based on an inside joke. But it worked.

I finished up the gnocchi and started explaining to Heather the rest of the menu. I wanted to roast some baby beets and serve them with shaved fennel and orange segments. I had also bought some hazelnuts, avocado, and tarragon to incorporate and thought about doing a hazelnut oil and BLiS sherry vinegar dressing. Then I wanted to confit eggplant in a ton of garlic and olive oil, adding mint and pine nuts, too. “Uh, how many courses are you making, Grant?”

“Well, I want to stay busy. I made some Southeast Asian-inspired soup too—coconut milk, ginger, basil, lemongrass, fish sauce, that sort of thing. For dessert I was thinking of spice-roasted peaches with vanilla ice cream. Something simple like that. Oh. And I also made a cocktail base—Watermelon-Hendricks-Hibiscus. It's in the freezer.”

“Man, you
have
been busy.”

I was happy among her friends—cooking, sharing a meal, and getting to know them. It felt normal. But everyone knew why I was in town, and given the booze and wine someone had the courage to ask, “So, why spend the eve of what is surely one of the most important days of your life cooking for us?”

“You know, it's what I do. It just makes me really happy. That's all there is to it.”

 

Heather and I walked into the waiting room of Memorial Sloan-Kettering to find Keith Goggin already there, sitting on the edge of a couch staring at the floor. He stood up as we approached him, his face expressionless and with no evidence of the boyish grin that is normally present. Keith is one of the investors in Alinea and lives in Manhattan. He and Nick went to college together, then years later discovered that they were both working as traders. They began collaborating on some long-distance projects, and when one grew into quite a big deal, they merged their firms. Keith got us the hookup at Sloan on short notice, and Nick suggested it would be useful to have Keith along, since Nick was going to stay in Chicago to seek out the best treatment options there. “He's really, really smart, analytical, logical, and when he needs to be, dispassionate. It'll be good to get his opinion.” I couldn't argue with that.

I introduced Keith to Heather, and he perked up when he realized that I wasn't going to keel over. We walked down the hallway to the carbon-copy examination room, where Keith and Heather sat in the two metal folding chairs against the wall while I made my way to the patient chair. We didn't chat much as we waited for the doctor to come in, and the silence was as awkward as it was inevitable. Keith asked me if there was anything I wanted him to ask the doctors as he pulled out a typewritten piece of paper from his pocket. He had come prepared. “Not off the top of my head,” I told him. “Let's see what he has to say first.”

I had been through this once already when Nick and I visited Masonic. I knew what was coming, although I hoped somehow it would be different. But I was really more concerned this time about Heather. How would she react to what the doctor was about to say? I knew she would keep it together—that wasn't my fear—but the thought of her sitting there while the doctor told me that they wanted to split my jaw in half, take out my tongue, and then a few months later I might very well die was . . . unsettling. I felt bad for her.

The doctor finally walked in carrying some papers and a CD of my scan results from the previous day.

“Hello, my name is Bhuvanesh Singh. You must be Grant? How are you doing?”

“That's a pretty stupid question to ask,” I thought. I paused, cocked my head sideways a bit and deadpanned, “You tell me, Doctor.” We all chuckled uneasily.

For a moment, I let hope creep back in.

Then Dr. Singh started to speak.

“I have the results from your PET scan. The one piece of good news, if there is one, is that the cancer has not metastasized to your lungs or brain. However, it has found its way into both sides of your neck.” This was not a surprise, as the other doctors had predicted that it had invaded my lymph nodes. As he said this, he began to feel my neck, below my ears, and under my arms. Then he pulled out the latex gloves, put them on, and asked me to open my mouth.