The Reach of a Chef (14 page)

David Carrier, age twenty-eight, a sous-chef and a former commis at the French Laundry, moved through a box of asparagus. “This is what happens when you can’t get good asparagus,” he laments. Many of the asparagus came in kind of ratty on top, and so he was picking each ittybitty bud off the tip of those that were any good, part of a course featuring white and green asparagus with a chamomile vinaigrette (as well as littleneck and geoduck clams; a wine sorbet made from the wine they served with this dish, Argiolas Vermentino, from Sardinia; a poached quail egg and what looked like a raw hen’s yolk but was in fact an apricot puree, its exterior gelled with sodium alginate and calcium chloride so that it sat like a yolk waiting to break; and what the server had called “a fines herbes sponge,” about which, more later).

They do their lobster the way the French Laundry and Per Se do it now, by sous-vide. They include whole butter in the plastic pouch and drop it into 130-degree water.

John Peters, age twenty-nine, also a sous-chef and a veteran of Vong, Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s Chicago outpost, was the butcher and currently cut Keith’s lamb loins into strips (they called them “snakes”) to be bagged and cryovacked for service.

Nathan Klingbail, age twenty-four, had heard about Grant’s taking over Trio from his former boss, the chef at the Amway Grand, in Grand Rapids, Michigan, a kitchen where Grant had once worked. “It’s been three years and I ain’t bored yet,” he said as he worked through his prep list. “My parents didn’t understand why I would work these hours”—twelve-to sixteen-hour days for subsistence pay—“but after my dad saw
Into the Fire,
” a special series that profiled various kitchens and aired on the Food Network, “he said, ‘I understand.’” In the world of professional cooking, which in the vast majority of kitchens is dominated by the crushing monotony of daily prep, this was an exciting kitchen to be a part of.

The bizarre language of his list attested to this:

• T1 snakes/chokes x2/sprouts/choke sauce/seed sauce/Aj sauce
  

• Bag: g-chips & oregano & capers & lamb & seed
  

• T2: shroomz/tongue/romaine/cress/arugula/puree/sauce/smoke
  

Roughly translated, his morning’s work focused on the “Elysian Fields Farm Lamb
sunflower plant, bag of crispy texture
” and the “Ribeye of Prime Beef
spring lettuces, morel mushrooms, smoked tongue.
”

Brett Jeffry was twenty-three-year-old “unpaid slave labor,” in his words, and he was delighted to be so. Brett was midway through his externship from the CIA, not long out of Turgeon’s class, in fact (“He’s the only guy who really talked about how busy it is, the importance of speed,” he said of his favorite chef-instructor there). Brett was so organized and focused he applied to extern at Trio as soon as he arrived at the CIA, months before he even set foot in a CIA kitchen.

Another extern had been nicknamed “Milk Crate” after he was caught sitting on one (you don’t sit, ever, when you’re in the kitchen, you just don’t). Milk Crate broke from his prep at 12:20 to vacuum the carpeted mats along the line.

Carpet along the hot line
…hmm, haven’t seen that since the French Laundry and Per Se. And the blue aprons that everyone wore, the pervasiveness of the pint-size deli cups to hold sauces and mise en place—the feel of the French Laundry was palpable and visible. The water for blanching green vegetables was salty as the Atlantic. The veal stock looked and smelled exactly as it did at the French Laundry, pale brown and heavy with the sweet smell of tomato.

“Straight out of the book,” Brett said. He shook his head incredulously. “You taste it—
oh, man.
”

Mary Radigan, who’d remained friends with Chef Pardus after graduating from the CIA a year and a half earlier, was working pastry in back (though she made it clear to me she was a cook, not a pastry chef). “It’s a different learning experience here,” she said, recalling hours spent picking the individual cells of a grapefruit apart for a textural garnish for lobster—the popping in the mouth, the sweet-sour flavor a perfect seasoning for the shellfish. “A different way of looking at food.” She planned to leave Trio to stage (or trail) at Blumenthal’s Fat Duck and travel in Europe and, she hoped, return to Chicago when Grant opened his new restaurant.

Her boss in pastry here was Curtis Duffy, age twenty-nine. Curtis had that vivid appearance of precision, ease of movement, and confidence reminiscent of the French Laundry cooks. He was from Columbus, Ohio, and went to culinary school at Ohio State University. He’d spent his formative culinary years, two and a half of them, at Charlie Trotter’s. He, John Peters, and David Carrier were the core of the Trio kitchen staff.

Trio’s is a roomy kitchen, the atmosphere is relaxed without being lax, and the cooks seem to form a cohesive and friendly group. Had I not already eaten the food, I’d have said this was same-old, same-old. But it’s not, which becomes clear only at service, after everyone’s station has been wiped down and pressed white cloth has been taped down at the pass (with painter’s tape, as at the French Laundry), in the center of the line, after Grant has set his station: serving spoons; a hotel pan with several rolled damp white towels with red pinstripes, to be used for wiping plates; ten “antennas,” the sculptures built for the salmon-and-pineapple dish, and twenty “squids,” silver prongs rising out of a small circular base used to hold one of Grant’s best dishes, a tempura of shrimp, Meyer lemon confit, and gelled cranberry, all held together on a vanilla bean skewer; a Diet Coke; a mug filled with a variety of markers; the long strip of metal that holds the tickets. Below were glasses to hold the smoke for the smoked tongue and other dish-specific vessels. The crew at the back of the kitchen, under Curtis’s direction, plates early courses (such as the pea soup) as well as desserts, and this station likewise is dressed in a starched white tablecloth fastened down with painter’s tape.

The kitchen is especially busy in the beginning of the evening. About half of Trio’s customers this week (usually about 40 or so a night, small for this time of year) will order the Tour de Force, which means a long dinner, so most who eat here come earlier rather than later. At the restaurant where I once worked, four of us would handle 150 reservations. Grant used 12 people to cook for 40 reservations. True, the restaurant sat 65 and they’d done as many as 100 in a night—but, still, the high ratio of cooks to diners was more along the lines of a Michelin three-star kitchen rather than a restaurant in the American Midwest.

“Chef,” Elaina, the front-of-the-house expediter, a thin woman with short blondish hair, says to Grant, “the gentleman at table thirty-four said he hates eggplant, but he agreed to try it. He tried it and he said he hated it. Is there anything else we can send them?”

Grant nods and to the line says, “Fire two cheese and crackers.” Molten cheddar inside a crackery dough—kind of like a crispy ravioli.

All stations are quickly busy, but the service is thrown off early when Stephen Parkerson, a CIA extern, loses a shrimp—floured and battered and fried, it falls off the vanilla bean as he’s moving it to the little pronged sculpture, the squid, resulting in a rush to fire another. This throws him off, and when he’s off, Nathan beside him has to pick up a little slack, and it goes like dominoes down the line, just a bit, just enough to make this first hour a little bumpy; especially when one of the line cooks, Jeffrey Pikus, notices he’s low on bacon—very thin, flat, dehydrated strips served with the roasted cèpes—but doesn’t do anything about it, kind of hopes he gets lucky. The line is fluid, everyone helps each other—and deli cups filled with frozen sorbet fly through the air from pastry to the hot line and back—these cooks can float among one another’s stations, but this also allows for the domino effect when one person gets thrown off.

Elaina, carrying a plate, again approaches Grant, who’s studying the tickets, and says, “This lady on thirty does not like asparagus.” Grant shakes his head—
You’d think they’d read the menu
—and says, “Ask her if she’ll eat cauliflower.” A few moments later Elaina returns to say, “Chef, she will not eat cauliflower.”

“Go get a list of what she won’t eat,” Grant says.

Elaina is back in quickly to say, “Table forty-four is clear.”

“Two lamb,” Grant calls to the line. Then, “All right, thirty-three?”

Elaina says, “Chef, table thirty-three is clear.” “Two beef!”

“Two beef!” David Carrier calls back.

Elaina: “We’re up on table forty-five”—meaning someone has left the table; they won’t serve food until everyone is seated.

The four diners at the chef’s table are avidly watching service and nodding and pointing, evidently impressed and delighting in their front-row seats.

Elaina: “Chef, the vegetarian on table forty-one wants no meat, no fish, poultry, or mushrooms. That includes truffles.”

Grant reads the table’s ticket and calls, “Three shrimp and a fennel!” Then he writes on the ticket the necessary replacements for each of the vegetarian’s eight courses.

Two servers bump each other on the way out, knocking a strip of bacon off the mushroom and jolting other garnish. The server returns the plate to David on the line to salvage it, but he says, “It’s not going to happen” and sends the plate to the dishwasher after removing all salvageable items, importantly the bacon. With the lost ’shrooms here and four more Tours ordered, it’s clear Pikus doesn’t have enough bacon to make it through service. Another line cook breaks away to get some strips roasting between Silpats—but they won’t be dehydrated as Grant has intended for the dish. He’s pissed and says to Pikus, “It’s no use lying to yourself.” He says it quietly and matter-of-factly, but you can see Pikus is miserable and humiliated and pissed at himself, even as he never stops hustling through this service, his personal ass-kicking.

Elaina: “Chef, I haven’t seen that duck go up on thirty-three.”

Grant: “Don’t worry about it.”

He hands her two beefs. White rectangular plates with a medallion of beef cap—the unctuous cut of beef above the rib eye—a ball of sautéed spinach, sautéed morels, a circle of salt and pepper, and a medallion of beef tongue, on which David Carrier places a leaf of spring lettuce. Each is in a distinct area of the plate, spread out from the others. Grant puts down perhaps a half teaspoon of two main sauces, one a forest green watercress puree and one a meat stock based on the reduced poaching liquid for the tongue, and various garnish on each item. The last garnish to go down is smoke. Carrier holds a piece of applewood over a gas flame to light it, brings it to the plate, blows out the flame, and holds a glass over the smoke, then puts the smoke-filled glass over the tongue and lettuce. The smoke flavors the tongue but more important will fill the air at the table with the aroma of wood smoke when the diner lifts off the glass—something I found surprisingly effective when I’d had it. But these dishes are very elaborate, with as many as a dozen components, and take two or three people a minute or more to plate. Elaina takes the beef dishes and leaves for the dining room.

One server calls out to pastry, “I’ve got a no-berries on table thirteen please.”

Grant hands two duck plates to a male server who turns so quickly that the garnish of radish and hearts of palm falls. Slim “coins” of alternating radish and hearts of palm are precariously balanced on a plank of jelly made from Australian rain forest plums, but these do not hold together well. Grant takes the plate back and rights the garnish. He hands the plate back to the server who turns and it falls again, but the server keeps going toward the dining room. Grant has turned back to the line but realizes that he saw the garnish fall again. He turns, says loudly,
“Hey!”
and holds out his hands in disbelief, as if to say,
Why do you make me work so hard
—
when you see something’s not right, don’t serve it, fix it.
Caught, the server returns and the problem is repaired.

When the rush is finished and the line has a moment to wipe down their station, David says, “A little hairy there for a second.” Grant throughout was nothing but calm, even when he’d been frustrated. And the remainder of the evening goes smoothly.

Throughout the day, a stage named Luke, a tall blond L.A. cook, had patiently worked his way through about a hundred crates of asparagus but during service was free to observe, and Grant would eventually send him a few dishes to try.

I asked him why he was here. He said his girlfriend wanted to move back to Chicago, her home, so he’d be looking for work. “I’ve staged at Trotter, the French Laundry; I’ve eaten at Ducasse and a couple Michelin three-stars,” Luke said. “People are saying this is the best restaurant in the country, so…”

I asked him what he thought about what he was seeing. “I’ve never seen anything like it…. During the day it’s like a normal restaurant, but now this is different—I’ve never seen anything like it. This is crazy.” The smoke on the plate, the apricot liquid that looks like an egg yolk, the eucalyptus roe, the fines herbes sponge. I’d helped make the sponge today. Piles of fines herbes (a traditional four-herb combo of tarragon, chervil, parsley, and chives) are juiced. This liquid is then put in the bowl of a standing mixer and set in ice to keep it cold. A little of the juice is heated enough to melt a sheet of gelatin. This gelatin is then added to the mixing bowl, and it’s whipped till the liquid froths to triple its volume; the foam is then put in a hotel pan and chilled. The gelatin sets before the bubbles pop, and so after it’s completely chilled, you have what is like a foam pillow of fines herbes juice. At service a cone of it is carved out using a teaspoon and added to the asparagus plate as a garnish.

The soy sauce for the salmon-pineapple antenna is stabilized by gelatin in the same way, though this is kept at room temperature and so maintains a more shaving cream–like pliability. A mixing bowl filled with the stuff is part of Grant’s mise en place at the pass for “saucing” the antenna.