Life, on the Line (15 page)

I began to prepare the dish as John Frasier, the canapé
chef de partie
, walked past. “Oh, God. Now what are you up to?”

“The new caviar course you're going to be picking up tomorrow. You might want to watch how I do this so you don't go down in a couple of days.” John and I ego-jabbed each other all the time.

“Is that melon? You're making a caviar dish with melon? Yeah. That ought to be good. Can't wait to hear what Chef has to say about this one.”

I finished plating the prototype, placed the dish on chef Keller's desk, and handed him a spoon.

“Cantaloupe Melon Bavarois with Champagne Gelée and Osetra Caviar.”

He looked down at the dish and slowly lifted his head up to meet my eye. With a raised eyebrow he smiled. “Uh, you put caviar on dessert?”

I laughed. “No, Chef. It's not desserty sweet. It's just as sweet as the melon is naturally, about twenty Brix. But it balances really well with the acid from the champagne and the salinity of the caviar. Try it.”

He skeptically dug his spoon in and took a bite.

“Wow. It's really good.
Really
good. I never would have thought . . . Is it producible?”

“Yes, Chef. I can train John in a day or so, no problem. Can we put it on tomorrow?”

“Yes.” He paused for a moment and continued, “But you know the minute we put this dish on the menu it's no longer a Grant Achatz dish. It will be a Thomas Keller dish. You won't be able to use this when you eventually become a chef. People will think you are stealing from me.”

I thought about it for a moment and decided to say what came to mind. “That's okay, Chef. Plenty more ideas where that came from.”

 

I arrived at The French Laundry early one night so I could get some prep done for a table of regulars—we called them VIPs—when I saw chef Keller gliding through the kitchen directly toward me. Every morning he would greet each cook with a handshake and usually, depending on the day, a smile. On that day, I noticed something in his hand. He placed the October 1999 issue of
Gourmet
magazine on the stainless pass and asked me to open to the page marked with a yellow sticky note.

I thumbed to the page, finding an unfamiliar, gruff-looking chef surrounded by floating oranges. “Who is this guy?” I wondered. “And why is he juggling citrus fruits?”

That guy was Ferran Adrià, the chef at a restaurant in Spain called elBulli. “Bulldog?” I thought. “A restaurant named Bulldog?”

Chef Keller looked down at the magazine and almost whispered at me, “Grant, read this tonight when you go home. His food sounds really interesting and right up your alley. I think you should go there and stage this summer. I'll arrange it for you.”

Seven months later I landed at the Barcelona airport. I hadn't planned very well and had neglected to make arrangements for traveling to elBulli, two hours north of Barcelona by car.

While walking through the airport I ran into a group of American chefs. Wylie Dufresne, Paul Kahan, Suzanne Goin, Michael Schlow, and a couple of journalists had been flown to Spain by the local tourism board to promote Spanish gastronomy. I recognized them and we chatted for a while before I asked where they were headed. “A restaurant called elBulli,” Wylie said. “Have you heard of it?”

I hitched a ride with them on their posh tour bus.

When I arrived at elBulli with the American chefs I felt like a leech. After all, I was an unknown, uninvited sous chef there to work, not to be wined and dined. None of them had ever heard of me. The elBulli co-owner and maître d'hôtel, Juli Soler, welcomed the group at the door, along with the Spanish government official who was leading the tour. I pulled him aside and explained my story. He told Juli who I was and walked off to the kitchen to tell chef Adrià that I had arrived with the group.

“Ferran wants you to eat with them,” he said. Well, now I really felt like a parasite, but thought to myself, “If you insist.”

I sheepishly joined the group for dinner. Despite being uncomfortable with the chefs, I wasn't going to pass up this opportunity. I would just lay low, stay quiet, and pay attention.

I had, at this point, been cooking for twenty of my twenty-five years. I had literally grown up in restaurants. I had graduated from a top cooking school and worked as a sous chef in one of the best restaurants in the world. I thought I knew food and cooking.

I had no idea what we were in for. None of us did.

The dishes started to come out, and I was disoriented, surprised, and amazed. Completely blown away.

Trout roe arrived, encased in a thin, perfect tempura batter. I shot Wylie a skeptical glance and he immediately returned it. You simply don't deep-fry roe. You can't. It isn't possible.

We popped the gumball-sized bite into our mouths. There was no obvious binder holding the eggs together, and they were still cold and uncooked! How did they hold the eggs together and then dip them into a batter without dispersing them into hundreds of pieces? And how are they uncooked? Whoa.

A small bowl arrived. “Ah, polenta with olive oil,” I thought. “This isn't so out there. This I can understand.” But as soon as the spoon entered my mouth an explosion of yellow corn flavor burst, and then all the texture associated with polenta vanished. I laid my spoon down and stared at it with mock calm. I was astonished.

What the hell was going on back there? This is the stuff of magic.

On it went. Pea soup changed temperature as I ate it. Ravioli made from cuttlefish instead of pasta burst with a liquid coconut filling as soon as I closed my mouth. Tea showed up looking like a mound of bubbles but immediately dissolved on my palate. Braised rabbit arrived with a
hot
apple gelatin. How is that possible? Gelatin can't be hot! That much I knew for sure. Hell, my mom taught me that.

The meal went on for forty courses—over five and a half hours. It was, quite simply, mind-altering.

Still, I walked into the elBulli kitchen the next day expecting some familiarity. A kitchen is a kitchen, right? Chefs were coming from all over the world to learn this new style of cooking, yet it didn't feel like cooking at all. “Concepts” better described the dishes. There were no flaming burners in this kitchen, no proteins sizzling in oil, no veal stock simmering on the flattop. This was like landing on Mars.

I saw cooks using tools as though they were jewelers. Chefs huddled over a project such as wrapping young pine nuts in thin sheets of sliced beet or using syringes to precisely fill miniature hollowed-out recesses in strawberries with Campari. Everything was new and strange to me: the way the team was organized, the techniques being used, the sights, even the smells. Here was a new cuisine where nothing was routine.

René Redzepi from Copenhagen, who spoke French and English, was given the task of being my ears and voice during the stay. I didn't speak any Spanish. So an elBulli chef de cuisine would speak in Spanish to an Italian chef, who would translate to a French guy who would pass on the instructions to René. René would then pass along what was left of the initial conversation to me in English.

I spent just three days in the kitchen of elBulli, but it sent me home reeling.

I knew that quickly that I still had much to learn.

 

I arrived back at The French Laundry to find myself working the canapé station, filling a spot vacated by a cook who was fired while I was gone.

I couldn't stop thinking about the elBulli trip. The idea of letting my imagination be the guiding source of inspiration had resonated with me for a long time, but now the urge to create outside of The French Laundry became irresistible.

A few days later, chef Hiro Sone from Terra restaurant in St. Helena was coming in to dine. We always tried to come up with a few twists for visiting chefs, especially ones we knew well and appreciated. I looked over at chef Keller and said, “How about a foamed lobster broth in between the canapé progression?”

Thomas looked at me oddly, as if he dreaded the day I would want to implement some of the techniques I saw at elBulli, but knew it was coming. Suggesting such a thing at The French Laundry bordered on heresy. It was not under the Laundry umbrella, and I certainly did not want to insult chef Keller or compromise his style. But I was so incredibly inspired and excited by what I saw at elBulli that I wanted the other chefs to learn about it and feel the same way.

Chef Keller heard me out. “The flavors will be classic French Laundry, Chef,” I said. “It will be delicious. We will simply take our exact lobster base, put it in an ISI canister, and aerate it over some classic garnishes in a glass. It should come out part soufflé, part soup, and part parfait. We will only be playing with the texture. The rest is TFL all the way.”

Chef Keller paused, then nodded his head and said simply, “Okay.”

That was the moment I knew I had to leave The French Laundry.

I was so excited to explore and push new boundaries with food that I was in danger of compromising the vision that chef Keller had crafted over many years in his kitchen. I wanted to experiment and take risks, and I would need to risk failure and imperfection to move forward. Chef Keller had taken those same risks over and over early in his career, but now he and The French Laundry were at a different stage of maturity. Every day in that kitchen was about striving for perfection through refining years of ideas that were known and comfortable. The team continued to finesse dishes and increase the level of sophistication, but it was done in a set style.

I mentioned all of this to chef Keller, and while he was too generous to say so, I knew he could feel the conflict as well. Maybe he recognized the new instability I was feeling, the renewed creative energy, and realized it was time for me to go. He probably saw that I was no longer a soldier fighting his fight.

Two months of uncertainty went by and I contained my urges to mess with his dishes. I spent my free time trying to figure out what to do. I wasn't the chef de cuisine, but I was certainly in a position of leadership, and I felt confident that if and when Eric left I would be the heir to that coveted throne, right under chef Keller. I loved everything about The French Laundry: the people, the place, the food, and the memories. I learned more there than I had ever hoped to in one restaurant or from one chef. But I had to forge ahead on my own. I had, after all, seen my mom and dad do the very same thing. They took that leap and it paid off.

Thomas, armed with an espresso in one hand, put his other on my shoulder as we walked into the dining room on a sunny October morning. We tucked into the downstairs alcove for some added privacy, and I began to talk right away so I didn't waste his valuable time.

“Chef. I have been thinking about leaving, about trying to find my own kitchen to run. I wanted to hear your thoughts about that.”

Thomas smiled at me and nodded his head. This was not a surprise. “If you think you're really ready, I mean really ready, then you should go. But you need to understand that it is going to be incredibly difficult.

“What we have here is an amazing restaurant, built over many years. The infrastructure is in place and we are fortunate to have everything we need. If we need a Pacojet, we buy it. If we want new china, we buy it. And the staff, the staff is amazing both in the front of the house and the back. All of the things you take for granted here, well, they don't exist in many other places. Those are the things that allow The French Laundry to be among the best in the world.

“I know how frustrated you get when things are less than perfect, and I am telling you that it happens here far less frequently than almost anywhere else. You have to ask yourself if you really want to leave all of that behind so soon.”

He paused for a moment, but I didn't say anything, so he continued. “I assume you're talking about being a chef de cuisine, right? I mean, you are not opening your own place. So you are going to have to find an owner who is willing to let you have carte blanche. And knowing what I think you want to do . . . well, it will be extremely difficult to find that person. Especially for a chef who has no experience and no reputation.”

“I know, Chef, thank you,” I replied. “I want you to know that I really appreciate that you understand all of this. The Laundry means a tremendous amount to me. I just think it's time for me to try my own thing.”

He encouraged me to keep him in the loop on any developments as they happened and asked me to give him ample notice if I did find anything solid. I could tell that he figured this could take a while.

Indeed, I had no idea where to even start looking. Where do you find a fully operational restaurant that has all of the materials necessary to run at a four-star level, minus a chef? Most of the genuinely great restaurants in the United States were chef owned. While there might be an outside chance that one of them would consider hiring a chef de cuisine from the outside, that person would still have to cook in the style of the chef owner. I knew that a situation like that wouldn't work for me.

I was using the best restaurant in the country as a model for my ambitions. I knew exactly what I desired in terms of standards of operation, protocols, purveyors, and even cooks. What I lacked was a building suited for a great restaurant and an owner willing to let me complete my vision. And as Thomas said, who the hell would bet all of that on an unknown young chef with no reputation who never really ran a kitchen on his own?

For a couple of months I scanned the Internet, visiting hospitality headhunter and job-posting sites. I sent out a few e-mails and put out a few feelers to people I knew in the industry. Nothing.

The typical postings were for executive chef jobs in hotels and resorts located in far-flung places like the Caribbean, Mexico, or, if you were lucky, Florida. There were a few private chef positions. Not a single posting was remotely close to what I was looking for. I plugged along at the Laundry thinking I would have to change my expectations and my path. But I kept looking, almost out of habit.