Life, on the Line (22 page)

I was already deep into butchering a pile of Elysian Fields Farm lamb saddles when Curtis Duffy, the young, fit Tom Cruise-esque cook who we recently lured from Trotter's, walked in the back door of the kitchen holding a ziplock bag full of what looked like paper.

“I picked this up in Chinatown yesterday,” he said. “I thought it was pretty cool.”

Curtis ripped off a corner of the paper and popped it in his mouth. He motioned for me to do the same. I picked up what looked like paper and placed it gingerly on my tongue. Within a second it was gone, completely dissolved. I did it again.

We quickly started chatting about what to do with this potato-starch paper. The rest of the cooks stopped at my cutting board, and Curtis kept ripping off samples for them to try. We decided that whatever it was had to be small. Even though the paper dissolved efficiently it did leave an unpleasant starchy film if you took too big a piece.

I immediately told them that if we were going to serve a tiny bite, it had to have intense flavors. The paper would also dissolve in the presence of any moisture. So the ingredients had to be dry. What about with fat? Chef Carrier grabbed a bottle of olive oil and dripped a bit on the paper. It held together. After nothing happened we knew we had our culinary glue. We began rattling off foods that would be imbedded in everyone's memories and that had intense flavors. We quickly got to pizza.

Almost everyone has had pepperoni pizza and can remember exactly what it tastes like. While there may be variables that come with pizza's numerous toppings, the core flavors of tomato, cheese, and garlic are nearly universal. The pepperoni merely adds a paprika and fennel seed element to the mix. We all became very excited by the prospect of turning this edible paper into a culinary joke, and Carrier sent one of the externs to the grocery store to buy some mozzarella. I began mixing powders of garlic, tomato, smoked paprika, and fennel pollen together in a ratio that tasted about right. When the extern came with the cheese I grated it into a large sauté pan and fired it in a hot oven. I wanted the cheese to caramelize the way it does on the edges of the crust of a pizza that has been overladen with cheese. Once it was browned we hung the pan and collected the rendered cheese fat in a small cup. The fat was then placed in the fridge, where it set up into a butterlike consistency.

We cut the potato-starch paper into half-inch squares, spread the congealed cheese fat on it, and sprinkled the powder mixture over the whole thing. It tasted exactly like the essence of pizza.

The experience of eating this pizza-flavored stamp was of course nothing like eating a slice of molten-hot pizza right out of the oven. But that was exactly the point. While it would remind the diner exactly of its namesake, it would not make you feel in the least bit full the way a slice of rich pizza does. And the visual pun of a tiny, tiny stamp of food packed with so much flavor was a great riff on the bad rap that haute cuisine has among some people: tiny portions. All of these aspects made people think about the mini-pizza they were putting in their mouths, and it made everyone laugh.

 

In March 2003 the James Beard Foundation released the final nominees for the restaurant and chef awards to be held in New York in May. The previous year I had been nominated for the Rising Star Chef Award, only to be beaten by Jean François Bruel, the talented protégé of Daniel Boulud. I didn't expect to win that time, but Bruel was a product of the entrenched and powerful New York empire of Boulud. I would be lying if I wasn't disappointed, but I felt I would have my shot.

Still, it rankled me more than a little, not that I lost, but that I lost to a chef who was in my mind merely implementing the cuisine of his mentor at db Bistro Moderne. Here we were at Trio breaking our backs to try to do something completely new and original. The criteria for the award were: “A chef age thirty or younger who displays an impressive talent and who is likely to have a significant impact on the industry in years to come.”

I did my best to set my ego and jealousy aside and focus my ambition squarely on creating new dishes. We were in the middle of filming a TV show for the Food Network called
Into the Fire.
They had a crew of guys filming at Trio trying to dig into our creative process. It made me aware after seeing the clips just how hard the whole team was pushing, how many ideas were coming out of our kitchen.

Going into the awards this time around I felt like we were in a better position to win. By “we” I do mean me, but recognition of this type was really for our whole kitchen and for Henry. The
Food & Wine
award raised our recognition nationally, and I felt we had a shot. Plus, most important, there were no New Yorkers on the list.

Despite my pride in our work, I was uncomfortable in the atmosphere of a big event. I wore a cheap rented tux and walked around holding a glass of champagne while deflecting any questions about Trio's food from the press or my peers. I was terrible at schmoozing and just wanted to head back to Evanston as quickly as possible. So I just smiled and tried to enjoy myself without looking nervous.

Finally it came to our category. The nominees were read, and before I realized what was happening, I was onstage with Henry slapping my back and Jean François draping the medal around my neck. I walked up to the podium, thanked Henry, the kitchen, and the front-of-house teams, and turned to walk off the stage when I spotted a tall, lanky man standing just out of sight of the crowd. He was jumping up and down like a schoolboy. As I drew closer I realized it was Thomas. He grabbed me by my shoulders, patted me on the back, and said over and over in my ear, “Congratulations. You did it.” I am pretty sure he was more excited for me than I was.

He also had a better idea than I did of what such recognition could do for a chef 's career.

 

Shortly after returning home from the Beard Awards, Angela told me she thought she might be pregnant again. I never thought I would have a family. After watching the turbulence of my parents' relationship and feeling the effects firsthand of a difficult marriage, I never wanted to assume that risk. My father had lectured me about how hard his career choice was on home life and how it forced difficult decisions and sacrifices.

I had begun to compartmentalize my life. Everything in my career was locking into place just as I had hoped, and I made it my mission to see that that didn't waver. My dedication to cooking was growing daily. And while I didn't anticipate being a father of two, I promised myself I would do my best at being a father. I kept telling myself I could do both, even though I knew the demanding circumstances surrounding the goals I had for my career would make it much more difficult.

My relationship with Angela continued to strain with the knowledge that we were having another child. Finances started becoming more of a concern, and she urged me to look for a job that would pay more money while requiring fewer hours. I immediately dismissed the notion knowing that the momentum I had now was rare.

Days would go by and we would barely speak. I would tend to my responsibilities as a father, showing Kaden how to cut the grass and shovel the sidewalk, making taking out the garbage a morning adventure, building a gauntlet of Matchbox car racecourses, and going three rounds of wrestling before my escape to work by 10:00 A.M. every day. As time went on, I stayed at Trio later and later after service, sometimes not getting home until 2:30 A.M. I was at home six hours a day and slept through most of them. Angela and I basically became roommates once again.

That compartment in my life was basically empty.

The food, however, was evolving at a rapid pace after the Beard Award. What started as a desire to break away from the model that was instilled in me at The French Laundry became an unquenchable desire to create entirely new experiences and tastes for diners. We had more ideas than we could develop, more creative urges than we could satisfy. This was a good problem to have. Our kitchen team was locked in and feeding off of each other.

As we pushed the food in new directions we began to realize that the plates, bowls, and silverware that had been used to consume food for hundreds or thousands of years did not work optimally for the food we were now creating. The “pizza” was a great conundrum. How does one serve it? You can't simply put it on a plate, and even if you did it would look absurd. And you couldn't exactly use a fork. It needed to be elevated so the guests could easily get their fingers under it. At the time, we were presenting the guests with homemade bubble gums of unusual flavors. This was brought to the guest inside a balloon that they had to pop in order to get the gum. Their experience would then be extended, casually, on the car ride home. As I looked around the kitchen to find something to serve the pizza on, I saw the pins. We decided to put the pizza on the head of a straight pin, and to put the pin in paraffin wax at the bottom of a large bowl, thus emphasizing just how small it was.

These were novel solutions that did make good use of minimal resources, but we didn't create anything truly new. They were fun, but they weren't innovative.

I turned to the Internet and started searching everything I could find on service pieces, plateware designers, silverware manufacturers, and even jewelry designers. In the span of a few hours after service I e-mailed forty-three designers and companies explaining who I was and what we were trying to accomplish at Trio.

A few days later I received my only response from a designer named Martin Kastner. He explained that he had grown up in the Czech Republic, where every eighteen-year-old male had to do a mandatory two years of military service. After completing his secondary-school studies in blacksmithing and locksmithing, Martin first trained as a paramedic, but after nine months switched to restoring the Horsovsky Tyn Castle, a Czech cultural monument. It was an opportunity for them to get a qualified person at almost no cost. Martin spent time restoring sixteenth-century armaments in a castle out in the country. For good measure, they also gave him a bunch of old padlocks—centuries old—to reverse engineer. There were no keys and he wasn't allowed to crack them open. He had to learn to think like a lock maker from the sixteenth century, hand forge a test key, and try again. He cracked most of them. In between restoring metalworks, cracking locks, and fixing old gates, he fed the bears that lived in the moat. The local circus had run out of money, and that seemed like a safe place to keep them.

When his service ended he enrolled at the Fine Arts Institute at Usti nad Labem, then went on to the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague, where he graduated with an MFA in metal sculpture. He married an American, Lara, who was living in Prague, and returned with her to the United States, founding Crucial Detail design studio in San Diego in 1998.

Martin's response was cautious, deliberate, and inquisitive, completely in line with what I was to learn was his analytical personality. He was very interested in identifying the problems we faced in the current service lineup available to chefs, and to determine whether there were ways to find better solutions.

We started an e-mail exchange to get to know each other better, and it became apparent that we had similar goals in two entirely different disciplines. We quickly became comfortable with the process and settled on our first project, a holder for a lavender-flavored Popsicle.

Martin got to work, and a few days later sent me some sketches outlining his initial ideas. Even though Martin and I had never met in person, I could tell from these early designs that this was the start of something very exciting. The thought of having original service pieces to complement the food made me downright giddy.

His initial set of ideas was fairly mainstream and pretty much what my first idea would have been. A concept he called the “Folded Sheet” was simply a piece of stainless steel with holes bent at a strong angle, each of which would hold the handle of the Popsicle, which now looked more like a lollipop. The next, “The Caterpillar,” was something akin to a bottom-weighted heat lamp, with the heavy base positioning the Popsicle vertically to prevent it from falling over. “The Shadow” was a more conceptual version of the folded sheet that used the silhouette of the Popsicle itself to create the final form. As the designs came in I could see the direction he was going. Each one was a bit more abstract, yet still cohesive. They started to meld aesthetic concerns with functionality in a way that made it hard to determine which was the priority. After every e-mail I would tell him that I loved the idea and that he should start making the piece as soon as possible, and each time he would encourage me to be patient, explaining that he had a few more ideas to flesh out. I was eager to get moving in order to have it completed for Trio's tenth anniversary celebration event we had planned in three weeks. The restaurant was hosting a giant open house that included a large tented area in the adjacent yard, and many local chefs were coming up to cook a course in honor of Henry and the restaurant's birthday. We would have a captive audience, and it would be a perfect opportunity to show the local industry where we were headed.