The Reach of a Chef (38 page)

“If you don’t have a good personality,” he continued, “you can’t make good food. If you are not a good person, forget it. You have to be honest…. More honest, more open, think more straight. Otherwise, you’ll never get it, what’s good food. We serve direct to customer. We don’t say any lie to the customer. Nothing hide, just straight. We don’t cook anything, mostly the raw fish. If the ingredients are not good, but still OK, people won’t notice? They serve it for the money, people get used to it? They lower quality. That’s the personality. The person has to be the right judge. This is no good, no good no, no good, don’t do that. I tell them, you have to be a nice person, otherwise you cannot make good food. You show the customer face, try to make more entertaining. This kind of personality from your inside, from here. I don’t care, it’s just for money, I don’t care the food, just serve? Those kind of chef cannot stand over here.” He points to his station. “They can see our face. Every single dish has to be perfect.

“This is me,” he concludes. “This is what I am.”

The enduring image I have from my short time in Masa’s kitchen was from watching a lunch service.

At this particular lunch service, there was a single customer, an older woman, seated centrally at the
hinoki
bar. Masa stood before her unsmiling but looking comfortable in his loose clothing, his round shaved head glowing in the carefully lighted space. He bowed in plying his trade, in cutting fish on his board with his gorgeous knife. He first served the series of nonsushi dishes, ginkgo nuts, the
uni
risotto for which he’s famous, the lobster-and-foie
shabu-shabu
for which he should be famous, the elaborate blowfish dish, before moving into the sushi performance that included a dozen different carefully prepared bites of
toro,
mackerel, grouper,
shima aji, tai, hirame, ken ika, tako, kanpachi, anago, ebi,
eel. He cuts each piece before the woman, forms a small ball of rice and seasons it with a bit of fresh wasabi or one of a few simple sauces, folds the fish over the pillow of rice, and sets it on a dark stone disk in front of her. The woman lifts it with her hand and, with a small dip of her head, like a bow, eats it in a bite.

The meal lasted more than two hours. Occasionally, Masa would take a break in the kitchen, talk on his cell phone, have some tea, who knows—maybe check in with his bookie or reserve a Sunday tee time, or just relax for a moment. But when his customer, the old woman, had been alone for the right amount of time, he would return and resume his work.

The entire restaurant was empty but for these two people, with fine spots lighting them both up vividly against the black walls of the restaurant, Masa slicing and serving exotic fish and the woman eating what he placed before her, all of it in perfect silence. I stood and stared trans-fixed from my hideout in the kitchen. They were beautiful to behold. A monk serving a monk.

It wasn’t until after I’d spoken with Keller in Per Se that I realized fully how unusual Masa Takayama was in this country. Keller was dressed for work in a dark jacket and white shirt open at the collar, and we talked about the changing role of the restaurant chef, the changing composition of the daily work, and the dramatic transformation of his own life in the wake of the international success of the French Laundry and his subsequent fame.

“What’s a chef?” he asked. “The brigade system has chef de cuisine, chef de partie, chef garde manger. Does the ‘chef’ now become ‘chef-restaurateur,’ head of the restaurant? I don’t know.

“The media are the ones who set the image for who we are. It’s hard for us to set that image ourselves. The image began, you know, that whole romantic process of the chef going to the market, buying the freshest produce and the freshest fish and coming back to the restaurant and processing it and serving it that night. That’s an image that was out there for such a long time—which is not true. Maybe Gilbert [Le Coze, original chef-owner of Le Bernardin] did go to the market in the beginning to learn about the fish and what was available in America, but after a while he wasn’t up at four o’clock in the morning going to the market and then working all day. That’s an impossible task for anybody.

“So what is the perception of what a chef does? That’s really interesting. Because we don’t cook everything. People say, ‘Well the food is better when you’re there, Thomas.’ In some cases, I’ve just arrived. I’m coming in the back door, I put my jacket on, I go out to say hello to a guest, and they say, ‘Oh my God, thank goodness you’re here, because the food is so much better when you’re here.’ It’s not, it’s the perception that it is, which is important. Don’t get me wrong. Perception is about everything. So if the guest
thinks
the food is better because I’m in the dining room or in the kitchen, then the food
is
better. And that’s an important thing to realize even though sometimes I believe it’s not legitimate. Sometimes I feel like a fraud.”

The chef had moved out of the kitchen permanently. Or could, if he or she wanted to, and ultimately would have to, even if he or she didn’t want to, simply from physical limitations in a physically grueling job. You couldn’t cook forever. If you wanted to continue to strive, it had to be outside the kitchen, it had to be in multiple businesses, it had to be in providing opportunities to a few devoted and talented staff. Thomas earned a management fee for his work at Bouchon Las Vegas, and he was also a 50 percent owner of it, but money was not the same concern it had been ten years earlier when his office staff had to use milk crates for chairs. He no longer agonized over making payroll. Now he could say with real pride, “Mark Hopper.” I’d met Mark, now chef de cuisine at Bouchon in Las Vegas, when he was on meat station at the French Laundry, across from Grant on fish, had been watching the night he’d let a string go out on a piece of meat, and, humiliatingly and maddeningly, got it tossed back to him when Keller, at the pass and inspecting returning plates on their way to be washed, spotted it. “Mark Hopper is the chef of a twelve-million-dollar restaurant,” Keller said with pride and gratification.

He looked back on his trajectory from when the French Laundry was young and not known, now no longer in chef’s whites but on a plush couch in a four-star restaurant overlooking Central Park. That first kitchen, in what is now the vestibule of the French Laundry, where they’d cooked with secondhand pots and the oven doors wouldn’t stay closed and they prepped each day to the sound track of
Reservoir Dogs,
hanging out after work and playing softball on days off. Those days were gone and could never return.

“I miss the people,” he said. “I’m sad. I miss being in the kitchen with them.” He smiled. “I want to go back to the sandbox to play but nobody’s there!”

Gregory Short is gone to San Francisco. Grant Achatz is in Chicago. Eric Ziebold is in D.C. None of them work for him anymore. Nor do Ron Siegel and Stephen Durfee, who were part of the opening French Laundry brigade. And those who do remain with the company—Jonathan Benno and Corey Lee and Mark Hopper and Jeffrey Cerciello and many others, front and back of the house—well, his dealings with them are now sporadic rather than routine.

“I’m not a chef anymore and it breaks my heart,” he said. But he knew this had been inevitable, and of course he felt incredibly lucky for the course of his career. Moreover, he knew that the best way to create a legacy was not to cook till he was in his sixties, like Soltner or Giradet, but rather to pass down his standards to others who
are
cooking now, his kids, who will create the next restaurants and books and train their own staffs, on and on.

“I’m in transition,” he said, at ease but busy, soon off to Vegas, then to Yountville. “I’m trying to establish a new role for myself.”

All of this put his four-star colleague across the marble mall floor, Masa, in sharp relief for me. Masa, I realized, was something unique in this age of the chef-CEO; he was unique perhaps to any age of the chef. He had created the most extraordinary restaurant experience in New York.
“Here is my money,”
he’d said, holding up his hands.
“Here is my money,”
he’d said, touching his chest. He’d realized this as a young man, and he would do something none of the greats had done, not Keller or Soltner or Ducasse—none of them. He’d created a single restaurant that was wholly dependent on his presence. A restaurant that without him couldn’t even open.
“When I catch cold, I close the restaurant.”
The goal of most chefs was to train their staffs so well that they, the chefs, didn’t have to be there—when the staff could replicate a chef’s goals without his being there, that was an extraordinary achievement. The chefs’ goal was to make themselves completely dispensable—they considered that their ultimate success.

Masa had done the opposite. In an age of the branded chef and TV chefs and Vegas outposts and Olive Gardens and P.F. Chang’s, Masa had created a restaurant so personal, so dependent on his skills and spirit and personality, that it had no meaning when he was not inside it. Masa was the artist.

I’d left Keller at Per Se that day and headed immediately to the airport for one last stop, a return to Chicago to see Grant Achatz. I had to know what he’d come to, where his choices had led—from dishwashing at the family restaurant, standing on a milk crate, to high school line cook, to the CIA, to chopping his own shallots at the French Laundry, to the agar and alginates and a relentless quest for innovation at Trio, to Grant now opening his own restaurant.

When I showed up the morning of May 4, 2005, opening day, Grant was positively cool; the biggest worries were an AWOL fish delivery and a broken paint gun on the patisserie station—in other words, this promised to be a smooth opening. The offices in the basement weren’t finished, the sommelier was still unboxing crates of wine in the cellar to inventory, guys with tool belts strode purposefully through the restaurant adjusting light fixtures and screwing tabletops onto bases, and the brigade de cuisine worked steadily through their mise en place, in their large, long, spanking new kitchen, game day at last.

“I’ve been gone from Trio for nine months,” Grant said. “Me and John and Curtis, we’ve been in the kitchen working on the menu but…I just want to turn an artichoke.”

And so he did. He had put an artichoke dish on the menu, listed by this description:
fonds d’artichauts Cussy #3970.
That was all. I had no idea what
Cussy
designated, but Grant wondered if I’d be able to figure out the significance of the number.

The whole menu was odd like this—you couldn’t possibly know what was coming based on the descriptions. Martin Kastner, the sculptor who had designed some of the funky serving pieces for Trio—“the antenna” for the bobbing salmon dish, “the squid” for the tempura shrimp—was now the full-time designer for the restaurant and had created a clean and simple menu design in which a drawing of bubbles, beneath the translucent menu page, wound up between the main ingredients column and the dish description, indicating by their diameter the intensity and size of any given dish. A tiny bubble meant the dish was a small one-biter, a large circle predicted, say, the bison dish. You could at a glance get a feel for the emotional trajectory of a meal here, like reading a musical score (as Grant had wanted long ago), a meal that consisted of anywhere between eight and twenty-eight courses.

The bison dish—five separate preparations of bison, a bite each—was described this way:
beets, blueberries, smoking cinnamon.
What to make of that? Dungeness crab was described as
raw parsnip, young coconut, cashews.

This was the new ultramodern edge cuisine in America—you couldn’t describe it adequately in words, and it didn’t have, at least by name, any reference point.
*

But Grant liked this style of menu and these oblique descriptions. “It’s exciting, that’s what I think,” he said, boning three dozen pair of frogs’ legs
(FROG LEGS [medium-large bubble]: spring lettuces, paprika, morels).
“It’s romantic, like a foreigner’s interaction with service, when you don’t understand everything on the menu. It adds a layer of good service and excitement.” Servers here have to explain a lot, he noted: “They have to coddle, there’s a lot of pressure on them.”

But what about the artichokes and the number? Something at the edge of my mind recognized it, I knew, but nothing came to me.

Grant said, “Escoffier.”

Damn. Of course.

In his book
Le Guide Culinaire,
published in 1907, Auguste Escoffier numbers every recipe, from 1 (
Estouffade,
or brown stock: equal parts beef and veal bones; a fresh ham knuckle and fresh pork rind, both blanched; carrots; celery; and bouquet garni) to number 5012 (
Vin à la française,
claret or Burgundy with sugar and lemon).

Grant had put Escoffier recipe number 3970 on his menu—artichokes Cussy. (Louis, Marquis de Cussy, was “one of the wittiest gas tronomes” of the early nineteenth century, a food writer, and prefect of the palace of Napoleon I, according to
Larousse Gastronomique.
The French were big on naming dishes after people—a shame we no longer do that.) This, too, was part of the new ultramodern cuisine, a dish straight out of Escoffier. Cooked baby artichoke hearts were stuffed with a foie gras–truffle farce, then coated in sauce Villeroi (number 160; this sauce is sauce allemande, or a velouté flavored by mushrooms, with the addition of ham and truffle essence—meant to be very thick to coat things). After it was dipped in the sauce, then placed on a rack in the freezer to set and become hard, it was breaded with panko and deep-fried for service.

Artichoke #3970 was served as a single bite on a spoon resting in a porcelain ring, a bottomless plate in effect, or “the anti-plate,” as Kastner called it, and garnished with a piece of fried parsley.

“Foie gras, truffles, and artichoke—it’s perfect for us,” Grant says. “It’s a reference point for diners, shows us how far, or not far, we’ve come—I don’t know. It’s more than a hundred years old and it’s new. And”—he grins—“it’s a personal F-U to all those people who say, ‘Ah those guys just work with foam over there.’ We know how to work with foie gras, we know how to turn a lot of baby artichokes.”

The sleek rectangular kitchen, with two islands running on each side of a wide central isle beneath sleek hanging light fixtures, bustled. All cooks had their own stations and, at their stations, lowboy coolers and refrigerated drawers. One of the smartest design decisions he realized they’d made, Grant says, was to eliminate from the design a walk-in cooler. There was one large reach-in cooler and freezer, but for the most part, everyone could store his own food at his station; this way you didn’t have everyone running back and forth to the walk-in—a great time-saver. Each person could more or less arrive at his station, get set up, and stay there all day.

Alex Stupak, the young pastry chef, was out back with a new paint gun from Home Depot. He’d filled it with very fatty chocolate. He’d set liquid chocolate that had been frozen and cut into rectangles on racks over sheet trays and was spraying them with chocolate that would become a shell for the chocolate that would melt within
(LIQUID CHOCOLATE [big bubble]: milk, black licorice, banana).

The errant fish delivery arrived, and Curtis was breaking down and portioning turbot. He, too, was very excited the restaurant was at last opening. The biggest surprise in building and opening a restaurant, he said, was, “All the trades that come through here don’t work at the same level of urgency as we do.”

For all the past talk of foams and encapsulated liquids, there was very little visual evidence of the out-there food Grant was known for. Cooks cutting vegetables, stirring sauces. Grant had gotten to work on a big container of fresh hearts of palms, slicing dozens for the tasting of stuffed hearts of palm. My friend Jeffrey Pikus, who’d run out of bacon months earlier, was on meat station, cooking beets sous-vide for the bison, cleaning morels for the frogs’ legs, rolling sheets of potato for the "beef with A-1 Sauce,” and cooking them in rendered beef fat. Mary Radigan was frying little pieces of dough that had to puff so that she could inject them with chocolate. John Peters cryovacked bison after he finished glazing the artichokes.

If you looked carefully, though, here and there you’d catch signs of the unconventional. One of the pastry cooks was using the sugar tuile technique to create ultra-delicate tubes that he was filling with nuts and puffed wild rice, bulgur, hazelnuts, oats, toasted with curry and honey, and freeze-dried apricots. The syringe at Mary Radigan’s station wasn’t an item you’d find on most cooks’ stations. One of the cooks lifted skin off heated soy milk, called
yuba
. This skin would become the wrapper for snapper. A white boxlike appliance being set out for service at the rear end of the pastry station island was something I’d never seen. Grant had this built for him by a man who designs cooling devices for hospitals. It’s kind of like a small reverse flattop. The steel surface doesn’t get hot, it gets cold,–47 degrees Fahrenheit. It will freeze a small spoonful of a sour cream mixture dropped onto its surface into a mini-blini shape. The chef in charge of this dish would hold a sorrel leaf in the mixture till it set up, then lift the sour cream off the surface by holding the leaf and rest it in a small circular holder, then shave frozen smoked salmon over it.

By 5:10 most people were wiping down their stations, but not all—a few were scrambling even though they’d spent eight hours prepping yesterday. A few minutes later Grant called out, “Fifteen minutes!” and all called it back to him. Vacuums began to hum over the carpeted mats. Others swept the floor. Grant had found a rag and a can of stainless steel cleaner and buffed every counter and steel surface in sight. Huge bouquets of purple and pink hyacinth had been laid out at the fish station, fragrance for the turbo dish.

Nick Kokonas was in and out of the kitchen, helping to oversee front of the house for his first restaurant opening: later he would eat with his wife and some friends. The first reservations, which they’d limited to forty in the sixty-five-seat restaurant, arrived promptly at 5:30, and the service began. A new restaurant had opened.

The night went smoothly, particularly given the complexity of the dishes and how long they take to pick up. This is a good thing because, unlike Per Se, which hosted a series of “friends and family” dinners, practice services to work out the kinks, Alinea opened cold. And already the pressure was on; in fact, it was shaking Grant’s hand.

Melissa Clark, a regular freelancer for the dining pages of
The New York Times,
arrived in the kitchen shortly after six to say hello to Grant. Evidently, the only way to get a reservation was to say who she was—not exactly an ideal situation for her but the only resort. She had told Grant that she happened to be in town visiting an old friend and was dying to check out the restaurant—could he squeeze her and her friend in? This story, however, had been thrown slightly into question when a photographer called requesting an elaborate photo shoot for
The New York Times
a couple of days earlier.

Grant didn’t know what to make of it. The
Times
doesn’t do official restaurant reviews of out-of-town places. If the paper were planning to critique it in any way, they’d certainly wait, for fairness’ sake, for the restaurant to establish itself and iron out any opening-day glitches, before judging it. If a profile were planned, surely Grant would have been told this and been interviewed. He hadn’t been yet, and the elaborate photography seemed to signal more than just a note about its opening. He wasn’t going to think about it—he’d do what needed to be done, which was to oversee and help expedite Alinea’s first night of service.

Melissa has straight reddish hair and big blue eyes, a thin frame, and an intense, highly caffeinated manner. She knows the flowers at the pass are hyacinth before you know it, and she knows the name of the flowering tree out the window which you’ve never heard of before. She talks fast and friendly. Immediately, almost embarrassed, it seems, she expressed her gratitude for the reservation.

“Thanks for finessing this,” she said to Grant.

“No problem,” Grant said, smiling, apparently at ease.

After exchanging a few more words, Grant stepped away to work on some outgoing dishes, and I whispered to Melissa, whom I’d met once before, “
What
are you doing here?”

Seeming not to move her lips but looking me in the eyes, she said, “Don’t ask, don’t ask, don’t ask.”

“It’s not a secret that photographers were already here.”

She rolled her eyes while shaking her head and said, “I
know.
”

About a half hour later Grant strolled through the rooms on both floors, descending the back stairs into the kitchen, shaking his head. He moved immediately to the pass, and I didn’t ask him why he was shaking his head.

When I’d had enough of standing around watching the food, I asked Grant if he thought they might be able to seat me. He said whenever I wanted. In the basement—even this space containing the wine cellar, the unfinished offices, some dry storage, and a washing machine and a laundry press so they could count on fresh linen (Grant was unhappy with linen service in Chicago, so decided to do his own) had fresh concrete and a new-wood smell to it—I changed my shirt and put on a jacket. I left through a rear door, walked around to the front of the building on what was a fine, warm spring evening, and entered Alinea. The entrance was tunneled, a visual illusion of shrinking space, making one’s first emotional response to the restaurant a down-the-rabbit-hole
whoa.
I was escorted up the central Escher-like staircase and seated one empty table away from Melissa and her “friend”—Frank Bruni. Bruni looked at me and gave me a long, slow speechless nod—clearly an instruction. I’m not sure what he expected I’d do or say.
“FRANK BRUNI! WHAT IN THE HAM SANDWICH IS THE MOST INFLUENTIAL RESTAURANT REVIEWER IN THE COUNTRY DOING IN CHICAGO!?”
He really does try to maintain as much anonymity as possible, so I kept my big mouth shut.

Grant already suspected it was Bruni, obviously. That’s what he’d been shaking his head about when he trotted down the back steps. But then, there wasn’t anything more he could do at this point. Just stay focused and keep the plates coming out as perfect as he and his brigade could make them.

The rooms are elegant, handsome, understated. There was nothing on the dark mahogany table except for a metal disk, gold and silver against the black wood beneath the folded napkin. A hand of ginger, sliced in half lengthwise to expose its yellow flesh, recomposed as a small sculpture with three long needles, was set down as a table ornament and would be used later in the meal. The floral decorations in the restaurant were all related to gastronomy in some way. Some very funky-looking broad-stalked plants on a central buffet, for instance, were fancy manipulations of a rhubarb plant. The room was quiet and the service was slightly awkward, in an opening-night way, but easy and friendly, not uptight.