Life, on the Line (55 page)

We were being trailed that day by the writer D.T. Max, who was working on a profile for the
New Yorker
. It was hard not to be enthused. I talked to him about my goals, about how my taste was slowly coming back. Nick had reiterated to me over and over again that there were two magazines in the world that had truly great writing, and the
New Yorker
was, in his opinion, one of them. While it may not have had the biggest circulation, it did, perhaps, have the most influential.

My ambitions were returning.

Nick was unusually quiet. Really quiet. And when we got back to the hotel he looked at me and said, “Why the hell do you want to build a restaurant in New York when you can barely function and still can't taste?” He had been the one pushing, and now he was disengaging again. It seemed that his earlier enthusiasm had been fake—something to keep me motivated—but now that it was a distinct possibility, his real thoughts became evident. And that just ticked me off.

I told him that my taste was coming back, slowly for sure, but definitely. And of course every chef would want to own a restaurant in New York. New York and Paris are the dining capitals of the world. People go out to eat in New York at 11:00 P.M. We would kill it there.

“It's about your ego, then,” he said. “It doesn't get us anything. And with all due respect, who's going to put up the money at this point? Everyone is enthusiastic now, but will they write a check for a guy who just survived stage IVb cancer and can't get an insurance policy? Do you think the landlords will give us an out-clause on that?”

“So we never build another restaurant?” I said rhetorically, getting angry.

“We might. But only after you're healed. You need to take care of yourself. You can fake it with others, but I see the case of lidocaine you packed. I know what you can taste, and I know why you want to do this. But it's a loser, even if you assume we do it right. And right now, we can't do it right.”

“So you don't want to do it?”

“It isn't about ‘want.' I get the desire. I came to this city as a trader when we were riding high and it was a blast. My ego was every bit of yours. But no matter what we do here, we lose. If the restaurant here is better than Alinea, then our flagship suffers. If the New York place is worse than Alinea, then obviously that's a failure. If we do the same thing, well, that's a loser, too. Those are the three possibilities, and I know you don't want to come here to build a three-star concept. So it's a lose-lose-lose, existentially, as those are the only possibilities—same, better, or worse.”

He was making sense and pissing me off at the same time.

We got back to Chicago and Nick made virtually no effort to move things along. I realized quickly that he had no intention of putting together a New York restaurant. Every time I brought it up he turned the focus to the book. “Let's just get the book out, Grant. Better opportunities will come along.”

Nick talked to Keith, who was disappointed. He expressed surprise that the investors seemed willing to invest, that the Vegas developers kept calling too. Maybe he knew too much, or maybe he had just lost faith a bit.

Either way, I began to feel that he was in my way.

 

The New York and Vegas deals fell to the side. We explored them, and each time we came to the conclusion that they weren't right. I wanted to push, to move on, but on some level I agreed. We should be getting something more, something better. But nothing came along that we were genuinely excited by. Odd TV shows based on
American Idol
but with cooking, restaurants in Dubai, and endorsement deals for pans were all shot down.

I arrived at the University of Chicago at the one-year mark of my remission and got the full body scan and physical exam. I still weighed less than 145 pounds, but the scans were clean. And six months later, at eighteen months, they were clean too.

The Alinea book came out and we did events in New York and Chicago. Nick also called Thomas and asked him if he would do a series of dinners with me. One at Per Se, then at Alinea, and then finishing at The French Laundry. The planning and dynamics of the dinners were difficult, the costs astronomical, and the press was not terribly kind given the economy and the $1,500 per ticket price—on which we barely broke even. But Nick's heart was in the right place. He simply wanted to force me and Thomas to cook together again after I nearly died, to get a moment to reflect on our relationship as mentor and apprentice. The dinners went off well. We had pizza in the Alinea kitchen after service, Nick and Thomas shared a bottle of cheap pinot, and at TFL the whole staff got In-N-Out burgers. It all felt like family.

The book sold very well and introduced our cuisine to thousands of people who would otherwise have missed it. Martin was recognized with a Communications Arts award for the design, a huge honor—especially considering it was his first book—and
Alinea
won a James Beard Award, beating out the likes of
Under Pressure
by Thomas, who was gracious to invite us to what would have been his victory dinner at Per Se with the entire team that made his book. As always, he was as excited for me as he would have been for himself.

My taste buds came back in waves. First I could suddenly taste sweet. Then it would retreat and salty would come back. Then I would get a wave of savory, meaty taste that would be fleeting but real. I would rush into the kitchen, grab a tasting spoon, and go down the line to see what worked and what didn't. It was an amazing education to get these building blocks one at a time. Finally, on a trip to L.A. to meet with some TV producers for a documentary, Nick and I ate at Spago after literally bumping into Sherry Yard, the longtime Spago pastry chef, on the street. She dragged us in against our will. I was eating more, but couldn't fathom making it through a tasting menu. We slid past Don Johnson at the bar and were given the best table in the house. I looked at Nick and said, “I hope you're hungry, because anything with a sharp edge or a spice is going in your mouth.”

But suddenly I could taste. A few things hurt if I chewed in the wrong spot, but the flavors were amazing. I had been afraid to venture too far from safe foods, but now I could see that I had been too conservative. Nick started blind-tasting me to see if I could really taste—who else would do that?—and sure enough, I was batting a thousand. The TV show and the documentary never panned out, but the trip was worth it for that meal.

I was back.

It's hard to take the long view when you have cancer. From the moment I understood the diagnosis until well after my treatment ended the concept of a “future” did not exist for me. Planning long term gave way to making sure I was enjoying myself more in the moment.

Time with Kaden and Keller became special. I never had a talk with them where I told them I thought I was going to die or that the odds were I wouldn't make it to forty. I just spent my Mondays and Tuesdays with them doing the things that I valued with my dad when I was a kid. Those times felt better than before.

Work, however, felt different. If I wasn't building toward a future, then pushing hard in the kitchen, creating new dishes and techniques, seemed less rewarding, pointless even. And building a new restaurant began to seem foolish.

Nick had always encouraged me to invest for the long term. I enjoyed spending money even when I didn't have it, and I never focused on savings or planning. Nick always stressed ownership over our business and intellectual property, forgoing money up front on projects like the book in order to keep control and make more in the long run. While I always agreed with the logic of that strategy and appreciated his efforts, it seemed now that I had made the wrong bet.

And yet, I kept waking up. I kept making small, imperceptible gains. My weight slowly returned and along with it my strength and stamina. There were a few days when I felt normal—or what my doctors called my “new normal.” I wasn't what I once was, but I also wasn't thinking about my health during the day.

I was just living. And it felt great.

 

At some point I stopped worrying about what I was going to do next and started enjoying myself again. Heather moved from New York to Chicago and we began spending real time together. I planned more trips and accepted more speaking engagements and cooking demonstrations, not for the money but for the opportunity to see the world and be inspired again by new ideas, art, and food.

As I stopped worrying about the future, I actually began to believe that I might have one.

Another offer from Vegas came just after the economic meltdown. It seemed an odd time to be getting such an offer, but as real estate was being pulled from the developers to the banks, the banks were looking to finish the projects. Once again, we spent time putting a proposal together and looking at the deal. It would have been good money. But once again, it just didn't feel right. We couldn't answer the question, “Why should we build a restaurant in Vegas other than for the money?”

In May 2010 I traveled to London for the World's 50 Best Restaurants awards. Alinea moved up to number seven in the world, but even more significantly was named the Best Restaurant in North America. When we received that ranking from
Gourmet,
it felt amazing to us, but ultimately did not impact our business as significantly as we had expected. It was not reported in other magazines and newspapers, and while we would cite it to the press as one of our biggest achievements, it would rarely get mentioned. Somehow, this was completely different. The day after the awards newspapers all over the United States hailed Alinea as the “Best Restaurant in America.” People began calling the restaurant telling us that our website was down. Nick texted me in London: “Servers crashed. Fifty thousand requests for our site in the last hour! Phones off the hook.”

When I returned to Chicago Nick and I sat down and had a long talk. Now he was itching to do something nearly as much as I was. Alinea was rolling like never before, the book was in its fourth printing, and my health was less of a concern. He mentioned the duck breast I cooked for him on the day I was diagnosed with cancer.

“Chef, I am telling you, people want to see you cook ‘normal' food. It would be a great story as well to have you show your chops. No one except me ever gets to see that.”

I thought it sounded boring. “Okay. So after I cook a duck breast and a few steaks, then what? What drives the restaurant?” Alinea is about constant innovation, of searching for the new and the better and the interesting. I had come to realize that I enjoyed that search more than the execution of the restaurant itself.

“Well, after we do that, why not just do an Italian menu for a while?” he said without thinking. “Then, when you get tired of that, just do something totally off the wall—Vietnamese food.”

“Naw. That's impossible. You can't retool a restaurant and a kitchen like that all the time. As soon as you get rolling on a menu you stop it and start again? And who shows up not knowing what they're going to get?”

“You do realize that you just described Alinea, right?” Nick said with a smile. “Impossible is a good thing. That means that no one else has probably done this. I'm telling you it would be fantastic to get you and the crew doing a French menu one season and a Thai menu the next. People would show up for that. The goal would be, let's be the best Italian restaurant in Chicago for three months, then the best Chinese restaurant. It would be audacious, difficult, and fun as hell. Plus we'd get to do research trips!”

Quietly, we started searching for real estate and going back through the plans that we had created as proposals for other developments. Among them was a plan for a lounge for the Trump building in Chicago. As we found real estate that didn't fit a restaurant, I started pushing for the lounge. Cocktail development is an area that I hadn't explored much but where I could see the possibility for innovation on par with what we had done at Alinea. Plus, the food concepts wouldn't fight with Alinea—the two wouldn't be compared.

One deal was almost signed for the lounge and details began leaking out in the press—apparently, the building owner wanted to drum up business for his other empty spots next door. But just as I was digging into how to arrange a drink-kitchen there, Nick called me. “I found a better spot just down the street. And guess what? It's actually two spots. We can do both.”

“Both? As in, the restaurant and the lounge?”

“Yeah,” he said. “I think it works even better.” He explained the lease structure and the space. I drove over and was surprised by how well it could work physically.

“You ready?” I asked.

“Yeah. I think we both are.”

The next day Nick sent me an overview of the project, which was just like the one we had sent to investors in Alinea. He likes to say that every great restaurant has a great story behind it, and it's important to articulate that story. It began: