Life, on the Line (5 page)

She brought me some supplies, and I wrapped my wound as best I could. I glanced at Mr. Morgan as I walked back toward the kitchen. He peered over the newspaper at me. When our eyes met he darted back behind the paper, but I could still see the top of his head—shaking back and forth.

 

“I'm thinking about going to culinary school. What do you guys think?”

I had officially decided to make good on my dream to go to the Culinary Institute of America and now needed to see how my parents would feel about it. My mom and dad looked at each other, unsettled, before my dad spoke. “Well, I don't know. Are you sure you don't want to study drafting or architecture? You enjoy that and you do it very well.”

My mom interjected, “We will support you in whatever you decide. We've set aside some money for school, so you don't have to worry about that.”

“But you see how hard your mom and I work,” my dad countered. “It's not easy and you don't make a ton of money for the amount of time you spend on it. And it's hard to have a good family life, too.” Clearly my dad was pushing for me to do something else.

“That's okay,” I blurted out, “I don't want a family.”

My mom, taken aback, reminded me that I was her only hope for grandchildren. My father laughed quietly, as if he knew something I didn't. Ultimately we decided that I should at least do some research about the school before committing to anything. But I had already made up my mind.

T
he fall after graduation most of my friends went away to college. Cindy left for Michigan State to study pre-law; my longtime friend Jim Stier joined the Air Force after all. I didn't go anywhere. I was still working at my parents' restaurant, growing more restless each day while awaiting acceptance to the Culinary Institute of America.

The letter finally came, and in February 1993, I packed my things and moved to Hyde Park, New York, with my friend Don Golder. Don was four years older than me and had been cooking for a long time. When Don got wind that I was applying to the CIA we decided to try for the same entry date so we could move out there together.

I expected the CIA to feel like the other colleges I had visited. But it was very different. The entire student body was older than me. Many were in their late twenties and were career-changers, or people who had started at a traditional university before deciding to pursue a culinary education.

Even more surprising was that the general attitude of the students was poor. I went in there to do one thing and one thing only: cook. I wanted to soak up all of the knowledge I could in the shortest amount of time possible. I had been a cook for years already, but this was my ticket to becoming a chef. Most of the students looked at the classes as an inconvenient interruption of their leisure activities. While they were going out to bars and partying, I hit the gym every day and then spent each night reading cookbooks.

I started buying culinary magazines like
Food & Wine
and
Gourmet
while standing in the grocery store checkout line. They didn't carry those titles in St. Clair, and I had never been exposed to fine dining. Suddenly, these cookbooks and magazines vastly expanded my awareness of the scope of the gastronomic world. There was this huge world that I wanted to explore, but I was incredibly naive. I had no understanding of the difference between haute cuisine and the classical education that I was exposed to every day. I joined the ice-carving club thinking it was going to be an important skill for me as a chef. I had no idea what a Michelin star was.

I breezed through the first several classes without any problem—they were incredibly basic. We began by learning how to hold and sharpen a knife, and then over the course of a week or two we progressed to actually learning how to cut something properly. Don and I would roll our eyes at these tasks—the knife already felt like a natural extension of our hands at this point—but to most of the class this was new information.

“This is stupid and a complete waste of time and money,” Don would say after we came home from class and settled into the tiny dorm room we shared. And really, I didn't disagree.

We already had basic knife skills, knew basic kitchen etiquette, and most important, understood how a commercial kitchen operated. We were quick to task and had a strong sense of urgency. And we knew how to season food.

But slowly I changed my opinion, and I began to understand why the CIA curriculum started every student at point zero regardless of his background. Just because I worked in a diner since I was five didn't mean that I knew the right way to do things. Sure, I could get by, but what they were teaching us was based on years and years of refinement, so much so that they were culinary traditions. I was willing to rethink the basics because it became clear that I had a lot to learn. And one of those things was simply patience.

Before I left home, my dad bet me that I couldn't stay on the dean's list the entire time I was there. I had nothing but my pride to wager, but my dad offered up his 1985 Corvette, along with a personal restoration and paint job—any color I wanted.

During my entire enrollment at the CIA I received only one mark below 85. Most of my scores were in the nineties, and I was confident I would finish my first six-month semester still above water on the car wager. The only class remaining before we went on our six-month externship was AM Pantry.

AM Pantry was basically cooking breakfast. It was going to be a lay-up. If there was one thing in the kitchen that I felt comfortable with, it was eggs and frying pans.

We had to wake at 4:20 every morning and make our way into a cafeteria-style kitchen, where we were lectured on the proper way to cook hash browns and flip eggs. I got a better course on that when I was seven years old. The instructor tried to humiliate the students one by one, and when she was done we would cook breakfast for the rest of the student body, manning the cafeteria line shoulder-to-shoulder to scoop the food out institution-style.

“Why don't you show the group how well you can do this,” she snarled in my direction.

“Okay. How many orders do you want?” I asked as I reached across the stove for more pans and turned the gas on to fire up a few more burners. I really didn't like this instructor and had decided to show her how to cook eggs. “You want humiliation?” I thought to myself. “Game on.”

I dipped the ladle into the clarified butter and splashed it into two pans. As I started for the third she physically stopped me and said, “Why don't you start with just one?”

I ignored her, grabbed two eggs in each hand and with a swift, smooth motion cracked them simultaneously on the edges of the pans. My fingers hinged the shells open one egg at a time, while keeping the other eggs at the ready. Five seconds later the eggs were in their respective pans—boom, boom, boom, boom. I dropped the emptied shells in the garbage and repeated. The eggs bubbled in the butter. She was pissed.

She leaned in close to the pans to find eggshells that had fallen in.

Nothing.

I flipped both sets over, waited forty-five seconds, and flipped them back. Then I turned them onto the awaiting plates. They were absolutely perfect, the best I could do. I quietly stepped back to the group and Don gave me a big smirk.

I got a C minus in AM Pantry. But it was worth it.

 

The CIA required all students to leave the school and gain practical experience at an accredited food-service establishment for the six months directly in the middle of the eighteen-month associate-degree program. Even though I wasn't entirely convinced that I needed or wanted any more practical experience, I started doing research on my externship early. Don kept trying to convince me that this was an opportunity to head to a warm-weather climate for a season, so I applied to a series of large hotels and golf clubs around Florida: the Fontaine-bleau, The Breakers, and the Sawgrass Country Club, amongst a host of lesser names. None of them bothered to respond to my inquiries.

I sent fifteen letters out. I got exactly one response: the Amway Grand Plaza Hotel in Grand Rapids, Michigan. I wasn't thrilled. Grand Rapids is definitely not Florida, and certainly not warm. I had never heard of the Amway or heard any talk about its culinary reputation. But it was close to home, it was close to Cindy at Michigan State, and it was my only option.

I picked up the phone and called the executive chef of the hotel, Steve Stallard, to confirm the details of my externship. He seemed cold, distracted, and wholly uninterested when I reached him. “Another inexperienced CIA extern that we'll throw in the banquet kitchen,” is all he could be thinking. Midway through the call he suggested I speak with the current CIA extern at Amway, Ray Cuzmak, who was halfway into his six months. Chef Stallard put me on hold to transfer the call.

“Hello, this is Ray.”

“Hi, Ray, my name is Grant Achatz and I will be starting as an extern there in a few weeks. Chef Stallard suggested we chat for a minute so you could give me an idea of what to expect.”

“Yeah, okay. Well, what do you know about this place?”

“Not much. I noticed there are two fine-dining restaurants there. That's why I applied.”

Ray chuckled. “Well, Grant, you'll never see those. They'll shove you in banquets or down in veg prep. I spend most mornings peeling potatoes and carrots. Tomorrow there is a banquet for nine hundred that I'll work. I don't know, man, this place is not what I expected.”

I hung up the phone deflated. I went to the CIA to become a chef, not peel spuds. This was going to suck.

 

In August 1993, my dad helped me move into a small one-bedroom apartment in Comstock Park, about a fifteen-minute drive north of Grand Rapids. I entered the massive hotel the next day and headed to the human resources department. They shuffled me over to an all-morning orientation program that was incredibly dull. It all seemed so foreign and corporate.

After they dismissed the batch of new employees I made my way to the main kitchen so I could find chef Stallard. It was like a maze. I wound my way through the labyrinth of hallways and finally found the giant set of super-wide double doors and entered the football field-sized kitchen. Cooks were everywhere. There were guys using what looked like shovels stirring food in giant tilt skillets. A conveyor belt ran down the back of the space, and ten chefs stood on each side of it adding one component of the plated dishes as they slowly crept by. Mountains of dirty pots and pans were stacked up next to enormous pot sinks.

I had definitely never seen anything like this before. As I was soaking it all in, I nearly bumped into a cook pushing a hot box through the kitchen, swerving like a drunk driver.

“Hi. Sorry. Where is the chef's office, please?”

“Over there, kid,” he said pointing.

I approached the door, took a deep breath, and knocked.

Chef Stallard lifted his head and slowly stood up out of his chair. He reached to shake my hand and welcomed me to the Amway.

He was quiet and deliberate as he spoke, pausing slightly as if to take a breath before he started each sentence. He was intimidating, a giant version of Charlie Sheen with no smile. And he exuded professionalism—his chef coat was flawlessly white and pressed, his jet-black hair was combed back, and his face was perfectly smooth.

“I am afraid there has been a change of plans, Grant. Originally we were going to put you in banquets, but a cook in Cygnus quit yesterday and they need a hand. So we are going to send you up there instead.”

“Yes, Chef.”

Chef Stallard gave me directions to the tower elevator, told me to ask for Jeff when I arrived, and sent me on my way.

I caught a lucky break.

 

If it were up to chef Jeff Kerr he would have continued to follow the Grateful Dead from city to city, partying with the Deadheads and trading bootleg cassettes along the way. Instead he ended up as the chef de cuisine at Cygnus.

Cygnus was one of the two fine-dining restaurants in the hotel and was located on the twenty-seventh floor of an all-glass tower. It was definitely the best restaurant in Grand Rapids and was considered among the best in northern Michigan. But it is fair to say that there was not a whole lot of competition for that title.

The restaurant was aiming to be more modern than its counterpart in the hotel, The 1913 Room, which was heavily rooted in classic French fare.

When I entered the kitchen I immediately looked for the telltale sign of the chef in charge: the colored stripes on the collar of the chef coat. I spotted a small man moving quickly around the kitchen giving instructions to a handful of cooks. He had red and blue stripes on his collar, but with the odd addition of a tie-dyed T-shirt poking up from under his neckline. He turned, spotted me, and came directly over.

“Hey, man, I'm Jeff. You Grant?” It seemed like he was panting the words out. He didn't make much eye contact. He was distracted.

“I am. I just started my extern today from the CIA. Chef Stallard sent me up here.”

“Wow, man. That sure was nice of him,” he said sarcastically. “We had a guy walk out of here yesterday. We're totally in the shits, man. I'm going to have you work in the back doing some prep for us. Cool?”

“Yes, Chef.”

“Whoa. Hold up there a second, Grant,” Jeff said, rolling his eyes. “I know they play that ‘call me chef ' game at school and downstairs, but up here we call people by their names. I'm Jeff.” Despite his lingo he spoke quickly and his eyes darted around the room. He was fidgety and it was common for him to stop a thought midsentence and just walk away. Then he would pop back five minutes later and say, “Okay, what was I saying?”