Life, on the Line (19 page)

John Peters took a small step forward while the others glanced at the ground. “I can do it,” he said, his eyes making clear contact with mine.

John was my other linebacker, or perhaps more accurately, my lineman. He was a soft-spoken native Texan with a stature that rivaled Dave's. Speaking quietly but confidently, he told the group about his time working in steakhouses in Texas before moving on to culinary school at the CIA, and eventually landing in Chicago to work at Jean-Georges Vongerichten's Thai-influenced restaurant, Vong. Since I had nothing else to go on at this point, I thought to myself that putting a giant guy from Texas on meat made sense.

I placed the others in their respective stations based largely on the same process. It was more about their personalities than their cooking experience. With the help of a local culinary school extern named Jesse, Nathan would hold down the cold garde manger and Chris Sy would man hot garde manger.

 

I needed to articulate my goals to this small group of strangers. I wanted to turn a tiny restaurant on a sleepy street forty minutes outside of Chicago into a world-class establishment.

I needed them to start believing.

I tried the same method I used on myself to build up my confidence after I accepted the job at Trio. At the end of our first day of fourteen hours spent scrubbing and rearranging the kitchen, we retired to the dining room for a meeting. I grabbed an easel, a few Sharpies, and a giant pad of paper and had the group sit in a small circle. Then I started asking the same questions I had asked and answered in my own head a thousand times.

“What are the five best restaurant cities in America?”

The group shouted out the first two in unison, with Carrier's voice booming above the others. “New York. San Francisco.”

Then there was a pause.

“Come on, now. I need three more,” I pushed as I wrote headers with the city names side by side to create columns. I then wrote the numbers one through five below each city.

“Los Angeles . . . and maybe Boston,” Nathan said with an inflection that suggested uncertainty.

“Okay,” I said, “does everyone agree?” The group stared blankly at me, afraid to give the wrong answer on their first day.

John Peters spoke up, “Well, Chicago, right?”

I smiled a bit as I wrote down “Chicago” in the fifth spot and nodded my head. “Let's find out. Now I want you to list the very best restaurants in each of these cities. Let's start in New York since that will be the easiest.”

The cooks started naming restaurants, and whenever I heard one that was generally agreed upon I wrote it down. The list looked like this:

It didn't take long for me to realize that this exercise was going to do much more than I anticipated. My original hope was that by the end of the discussion I would be able to inspire the team and help them believe we could accomplish great things on par with these great restaurants. But the discussion also allowed me to understand the personalities and overall gastronomic knowledge of each cook. This was a young group overall, and with the exception of Chris Sy, who clearly spent much of his free time reading cookbooks and scanning food posts on the Internet, none of them had heard of many of these restaurants on the list. If they did know them by name, they had certainly never eaten at them.

We struggled to fill five slots in each city with what the group felt confident were “great” restaurants. Occasionally arguments would break out about what made a restaurant truly “great” or “world class.” Of course, there were many restaurants in each city that were serving delicious food, but I made it clear that I wanted to list only the ones at the very highest level. My exact phrase was “fine dining, truly four stars”—exactly what we aspired to be.

After agreeing to leave a few cities with blank spots we came to Chicago. I shot Dave a glance and he smirked at me because he knew me well enough to know where I was heading.

“I am going to name some restaurants and let you guys vote them on or off the list. Certainly Trotter's is number one, right?” Everyone nodded their heads in agreement. “Tru? Arun's? What about Topolobampo and Blackbird?” We whittled a list of eight down to the four that everyone could agree upon. I left the fifth slot open on purpose, put down my Sharpie, and walked away from the board. I sat down in the circle with them.

“Take a look, guys. I think Chicago stacks up pretty well. David, why don't you take the board now.”

Carrier unfolded himself out of the chair and stood up, “Yes, Chef.”

“Okay, here's what we have to do now. Simply cross off the best restaurant in each city.” Without waiting for input David slashed the Sharpie through The French Laundry immediately. “Wait, why did you start there, David?”

“It's the best on the board, Chef. The big dog!” Everyone started chuckling.

“Yes, it is,” I replied, “but who's next best?” The room fell quiet and everyone looked at me. We crossed off Trotter and Lespinesse next. I prompted the group again, second best on the board? JG or Daniel? And so it went—we canceled out restaurants that were equivalents in each city until we had some cities with none left. New York was the clear winner with the most restaurants remaining, but we all knew that before we started. What the group was genuinely surprised by was where Chicago stood—a solid second.

I stood up and relieved David of his duties. “See guys, Chicago is a great restaurant city. New York is tough to beat, but we can take everyone else.”

 

These chefs knew very little about me except that I was the sous chef to Thomas Keller and worked at The French Laundry for four years, despite looking like I was an eighteen-year-old dwarf standing between Carrier and Peters. They had never seen me cook, although a few of them had read a mention of me in Michael Ruhlman's book
The Soul of a Chef
. Their assumption was that I wanted to create food that was derivative of Thomas Keller's, even though I'd told them during the hiring process that Trio would be very different. But I didn't have notebooks filled with new techniques or recipes, nor did I have complete menus ready to implement. I had a vague notion that I wanted to explore new areas, and I had a very clear idea of how I wanted a meal to feel to the diner. That was the driving force, and everything else simply had to support that.

I was very much of the belief that if I built it, they would come. I watched firsthand as The French Laundry exploded from a little-known restaurant tucked away in the sleepy town of Yountville to a globally known temple of gastronomy. I was optimistic that we could accomplish the same thing. I was very aware of all the things that we didn't have at Trio, but I was naive enough to tell myself that it didn't matter. The fact that Trio had been considered one of the best restaurants in the Chicago area for the previous seven years yet still struggled to draw people from the city simply wouldn't apply to us. The glassware, china, and silverware were dated, mismatched, and lacking in numbers. The best cooks would not want to work all the way out in Evanston. We had no budget. Servers would want to work where they could make more money on more covers.

I wanted to change all of that.

Three days after arriving in Evanston, two of which were spent cleaning, the team touched food for the first time. I had stayed up until 4:00 A.M. finalizing the opening menu and made packets for each cook containing recipes and
mise en place
lists. I ordered everything the previous night. For the first time in years I was nervous in a kitchen. I realized that I had to demonstrate every procedure to every cook except David. It wasn't just how to make a foie gras torchon, or how we were going to make avocado soup, it was every minor detail: how to check in the produce order, how we label every container, where to store all of the ingredients, how often to vacuum the floor, which equipment is hand-washed, and how we coil the cord around the blenders after they're used. The list was endless. The first time we did anything, even the most menial task, was critically important to setting a standard, and the bar had to be set high. “The only way to do it is the right way” was taken directly from the Laundry kitchen, and we made it our credo on the very first day.

Henry and I planned to hold a series of front-of-house training sessions and tastings in the days leading up to the reopening. The cuisine was a major departure from what they had been serving, and we knew that in order to be successful the staff had to be able to present it with confidence.

The menu format was different. The à la carte menu was abandoned, and two tasting menus took its place. The first was a five- to six-course menu with four or five choices in each category, and the other was a nine-course degustation. All of this made the service team quite nervous. Henry had warned them as well that the food we intended to serve would be radically different in appearance and in flavor combinations. Their job would be complicated by the fact that some courses would require special instructions to the guests to get the full, intended effect.

Just after 2:00 P.M. on day three, after the kitchen team spent six hours preparing the
mise en place
for the dishes, the front-of-house team arrived for their first training session. I had not met any of them formally, and had only seen them when I ate dinner during my tryout. Henry and the office manager, Peter Shire, printed the opening menus and recipe packets for the staff in preparation for the meetings. Henry came into the kitchen to let me know that the team was fully assembled. I lifted my head up as I heard his voice, tied my blue apron snugly around my waist, and nodded to Dave. “I'll be back in a bit. Keep it tight.” I grabbed my clipboard and walked into the dining room.

It was a joy to listen to Henry speak. He had a thoughtful, poetic eloquence and a Zen-like demeanor that instantly put everyone at ease. As I walked into the room he turned his charm on full blast in an effort to “sell me” to the service team. After a gushing introduction, I thanked everyone for attending and began explaining what it was that we were about to embark upon.

The group I stood before was on average fifteen years older than me and had been in the restaurant business longer than it looked like I was alive. I tried to explain to them how and why we were going to create a dining experience that they had never seen before. The whole thing must have sounded absurd to them, coming as it did from a clean-cut guy who could be one of their kids. I spoke about my upbringing in the diner, culinary school, the brief stint at Trotter's, and my time with Thomas before I began to explain the philosophy behind the food.

“I want to create an experience that is based on emotions. I want people to be excited, happy, curious, surprised, intrigued, and even bewildered during the meal.” That was my litmus test to see who was in and who was just there for the paycheck. A couple of the staff stared at me intently, a few drifted off, and one guy slyly nudged his friend with his elbow and raised an eyebrow as if to say, “Who is this clown?”

Henry and I took turns explaining how the restaurant would have to evolve and what our collective vision and goals were for this incarnation of Trio. I headed back to the kitchen while Henry went through service-related protocols and got the staff ready for the tasting we had coming up later in the evening.

The plan for the remaining portion of the afternoon was to serve half of the courses on the menu one by one. I would explain the ingredients and concepts behind each dish, we would settle on a wine pairing, the appropriate silverware, and practice descriptions for each. In the kitchen I plated the dishes for the first time and explained the critical elements of the presentations to the chefs while answering any questions they might have about technique or components. The team would then assemble the remaining dishes under my supervision.

We wanted the tasting to follow the progression of the menu as closely as possible, so we started with a small series of one-bite courses slated to be the
amuse-bouche
for each menu. First up was a course modeled after the one that won me the job. Called “Cumin Candied Corn,” it was essentially a savory corn panna cotta wrapped in a cumin-flavored sugar film. The quarter-sized lozenge was salty and sweet, creamy and crunchy at the same time. David and I made ten of them and walked into the dining room. We didn't say much except to present it as we wished it to be presented to guests.

“Cumin Candied Corn. Please eat the lozenge in a single bite.”

Nobody moved. Nobody lifted their spoons. Everyone simply stared first at the lozenge, then looked up at me blankly. Finally, Henry blurted out, “Eat it, folks!”

It was a delicious bite—that much I knew—but I could tell that this ambiguous-looking morsel did nothing to alleviate the staff's concerns about me. The tasting went on: strawberries laced with wasabi, shot glasses filled with bright orange carrot juice floating atop translucent green celery-flavored liquid, crab with clear raviolis made from lemon tea, and tomato salad with olive oil ice cream. A few in the group began to drink the proverbial Kool-Aid, but the majority showed signs of nothing so much as fear. By the time I got to the last course of the tasting, Rib Eye of Beef with Prunes and Wild Mushroom Perfumed with Tobacco, someone finally had the guts to voice the group's thoughts.