The Prodigy's Cousin (7 page)

In 2008, Joanne began a tenure-track position at Ohio State's
Mansfield campus, where she finally got her hands on some research funding: she received a seed grant—more than $13,000—earmarked to help new faculty jump-start their research. With money in her pocket, she could finally travel to the prodigies and begin digging into their cognitive profiles. Once she did, the deeper connections between prodigy and autism quickly began to reveal themselves. The first of these was memory.

By the time Greg Grossman was a toddler, the skinny New Yorker with the fluffy dark hair already had a wide palate.
Fellow diners around Manhattan and East Hampton gaped, astonished, as the doe-eyed kid requested foie gras and other adult fare. “He'd order anything—anything different and weird,” his mother, Terre Grossman, recalled. While waiting for his food, he scavenged for ways to observe the back-of-the-house action. He climbed onto his chair for a better view of the pizza oven; he snuck into the kitchen to watch the chefs at work.

Greg soon began experimenting in his own kitchen. At age four, he presented special candlelight dinners to his parents—often little more than a stuffed baked potato. At six, he used canned tomatoes to whip up his own pasta sauce. His recipes grew ever more sophisticated as he began sautéing fresh basil to add to his sauce and switched from limp spaghetti to al dente pasta. He began directing his mother as to what produce was in season when they went to the supermarket. “I would be buying stuff, and he would actually be telling me not to buy certain things, you know, ‘This isn't ripe; it's not in season,'” Terre said.

Around the time Greg was nine, the complexity of his creations swelled. He began using a grill, an appliance he described in a school essay as an “infrared, propane masterpiece of stainless-steel.” His repertoire exploded. He went from riffing on classic pasta dishes to
pairing melon carpaccio with anchovies and wrapping sushi with foie gras.

That year, he prepared the meal that convinced him he wasn't just messing around in the kitchen. With his father out of town, Greg urged Terre to watch television while he cooked dinner for the two of them. Terre stuck her head into the kitchen occasionally to monitor her child's use of the stove and knives, but her worry was unfounded. Greg emerged from the kitchen unscathed, having crafted a meal that he would later declare his “first work of cooking art”: pan-seared scallops with a balsamic vinegar glaze and a wild mushroom medley. “It was so unbelievably good,” Terre said. “I totally freaked out.”

After that, food was everywhere. The family television pulsed with culinary programs as Greg discovered a stable of talented chefs he admired: Jacques Pépin and Rachael Ray for bringing cooking to a broad audience; Andrew Zimmern for his use of exotic ingredients (Greg declared he would eat many of the bugs Zimmern featured but not the beating snake heart). Greg monopolized the computer, researching chefs and cooking techniques. He satisfied middle school world civilization assignments with reports on ancient food cultivation and completed science projects by experimenting with Scoville heat units and inspecting bacteria growth in kitchens. He saved his money to buy specialty food products, requested only professional chef products as gifts, and dreamed of owning his own truffle.

Kitchen implements became contested territory in the Grossman household. For months, Greg hounded his parents for a new knife set. At first, the Grossmans refused. When Greg received the coveted knife set from a family friend, Terre nearly returned it. But after hours of watching Greg work with the knives, his parents finally relented: he was skilled and invariably careful. Their next battles were over fire (Greg insisted he needed it for crème brûlée) and liquid nitrogen (essential, Greg said, for ice cream and cotton candy). Greg won them both. “I was a little scared. What if I'm not home and he's playing with
some friends and something happens, the thing blows up or he burns somebody?” Terre recalled. “It was very, very difficult.”

Hands-on training proved hard to come by. Most cooking classes that would admit a young person were geared toward beginner fare like introductory cupcake making. Greg eventually enrolled in a course for teens. His skill at the stove drew the attention of the instructors, who asked him to work at an upcoming benefit with them. Greg found an adult class that sparked his interest, but he couldn't participate because wine was served during the course. He would have to find a different way to learn.

Around the time he was twelve, Greg got a job busing tables and washing dishes at an Italian restaurant in East Hampton. When one of the prep cooks bailed on his shift, Greg stepped in, cutting carrots and peeling potatoes. He proved adept at the work, and soon he was filling in on this shift every week, eventually working as a line cook. When he was called on to run the pizza station, he made, by his mother's count, forty-two pizzas in one night without burning a single one. Fearing he would be teased, he kept his job a secret from his friends.

But it was the cafeteria at Greg's East Hampton school that really jump-started his education.
The Ross School Café, an eatery committed to “regional, organic, seasonal, and sustainable purchasing and culinary practices,” wasn't a meat-loaf-and-mashed-potatoes kind of place. The chefs used vegetables culled from the school's garden to produce spinach and shiitake mushroom salads and poached asparagus with miso scallion vinaigrette. For Greg, it was a haven. He lit out for the café every chance he got.

When Greg was in fifth grade, one of the chefs at the café lent him a copy of a book by Ferran Adrià. For decades, Adrià had helmed elBulli, a restaurant in Spain frequently heralded as the best in the world until closing its doors in 2011. The book included stunning photographs of foods prepared and presented in fantastically unexpected ways. Greg was captivated by it. The ten-year-old carefully wrapped the book in paper to protect it and then devoured its
contents. He searched the Internet for an inexpensive copy so that he could have one of his own. “That's one of the things that really sparked my deep dive into cooking,” Greg recalled. “That set me off on this quest for creativity and technique and trying to figure out what the book was about.”

Greg began buying food equipment and chemicals and experimenting with cooking techniques unfamiliar to many professional chefs. He hunted down information related to the science of food preparation and dragged his mother to food trade shows in pursuit of liquid nitrogen. He acquired cooking implements his parents had never heard of.

The following summer, having just turned a whopping thirteen years old, Greg announced that he would no longer attend sleepaway camp in the Adirondacks. The camp lacked air-conditioning, there were bugs everywhere, and, most damningly, the food was terrible.
One day in June, Greg accompanied his mother on a trip to Vered Gallery, an upscale art gallery in East Hampton where she had a business meeting. Greg perked up at the mention of an upcoming event at the gallery, a silent art auction fund-raiser.

You're having an event? he asked. Who's catering? We just cut up cheese and do a few little things, the gallery owner told him. There is no caterer. Give me a credit card and a budget, Greg offered, and I'll get together a few servers and do four hors d'oeuvres. The co-owner gave Greg $100 to work with. Just keep it semi-kosher, she told him.

Greg hired two girls from school and told them to wear black dresses and black shoes. He hired a sous chef, a friend he was working with a lot at the Ross School Café.

On the night of the event, Greg told his classmates turned servers how to pronounce the hors d'oeuvres and explain the ingredients. Relying on a tidbit culled from the Food Network, Greg told them that they needed to know what they were serving to avoid any allergy mishaps.

For his first catering job, Greg served salmon gravlax with shiso
crème fraîche—a raw, cured salmon appetizer. Other offerings included Thai chicken satay with citrus turmeric tzatziki and Indian spiced hummus with black sesame and curried nacho chip. For dessert, he prepared fresh whipped cream with peach gelée and mixed berries in a phyllo cup and chocolate mousse with lychee foam in a phyllo cup.

After the event, the co-owner complimented Greg on his execution. The event was beautiful, she told him. Everything was wonderful. Her only complaint was that the citrus turmeric tzatziki sauce he served with the Thai chicken satay wasn't kosher—an infraction that became a running joke because Greg is Jewish.

For the rest of the summer, Greg hawked his services around the Hamptons, making pitches to prepare food for parties and openings. When someone expressed interest, Greg proposed recipes more or less on the fly. He cooked a fiftieth anniversary dinner for thirty people and handled the food preparation for a friend's grandmother's party. Vered Gallery hired him back for another exhibition in August, and Greg prepared truffles and fish soufflés. By the end of the summer, Greg estimated for the
New York Post
that he had prepared seventy-five pounds of scallops, thirty pounds of salmon, and two hundred micro-green salads.

Greg had an eye for the business side of things. He made his own contracts and insisted on photographer credits for pictures he provided. He found a nondisclosure agreement online, sent it to a friend's lawyer father for edits, and began using it before he would discuss industry-related ideas with potential partners. He did his own billing, created budgets, and sought out wholesale suppliers to help keep costs down.

He plunged into the circuit of food industry events.
At the James Beard Foundation's Chefs and Champagne event, a glitzy tasting party in the Hamptons, Greg hobnobbed with fellow chefs, dove into conversations about the nitty-gritty of ingredients and food prep, and gave a cooking demonstration and interview for a TV station covering the event. At the International Restaurant and Foodservice Show in Manhattan, he introduced himself to vendors and suppliers, listened to the
industry legend Danny Meyer speak, and demoed a Pacojet, a machine that micro-purees frozen foods. He buzzed his way through the James Beard Foundation Awards at Lincoln Center, attended the New York International Gift Fair, and participated in the StarChefs convention.

He made the biggest splash at the National Restaurant Association Show, a Chicago event that NBC declared the thirteen-year-old Greg's “
coming out party.”
Greg demonstrated how to whip up a smoked Maine lobster tail with orange/anise granita, carpaccio of melons, and whipped shiso oil. Taking a page from his favorite TV chefs, the eighth grader included instructions on simpler methods for preparing the same dish at home. His public relations team beamed from the sidelines. Rumblings of a possible TV deal filled the air.

Greg rode a media swell back to New York.
The newspapers ribbed him for being younger than a 1994 Bordeaux and dissected his past experience.
When TV came calling, Greg's teen idol looks didn't hurt. His hair—dark brown, thick, and wavy—garnered Justin Bieber comparisons. His eyelashes—long and dark—“would make a Jonas brother jealous.” Greg cooked on the
Today
show, appeared as a guest on Fox News Channel's
Your World with Neil Cavuto,
and chatted with Gayle King on Oprah Radio.

Just one summer after his Hamptons catering debut, the Greg Grossman cooking cyclone reached dizzying speeds. In June, Greg whipped up 450 desserts—an innovative take on strawberry shortcake—for a school benefit. In July, he stopped in at an event to celebrate Flatiron chefs in Madison Square Park. Days later, he zipped off to Ohio to help raise money for an event at Veggie U, an organization dedicated to teaching kids about healthy foods, where he and his team churned out 650 tastings in an hour. After hustling back to New York, Greg helped fete a new coffee product by using liquid nitrogen and spray-dried yogurt powder to craft a dessert that looked like a frozen cappuccino. Next it was off to the French Culinary Institute to watch another chef demo before ordering specialty food products from out of state. He flew to Los Angeles to help with
another food product promotion. After he returned to the East Coast, he ventured out to the Culinary Institute of America for an event with the Avant-Garde Cuisine Society in Hyde Park, New York, and then darted back to Manhattan for an industry gift show.

He was almost always in a white chef's coat emblazoned with the logo of the Culinaria Group—the organization he founded as a beachhead for his professional and charitable work. He still hadn't started high school.

By the summer of 2009, Greg Grossman was all over the newspapers, all over the Internet, all over television. It was only a matter of time before Joanne found him.

But was he a prodigy? He more or less met Feldman's standard: Greg performed at a professional level at a very young age. Joanne's slightly modified definition was satisfied, too; there was no denying Greg's accelerated development. The quality of his work and the depth of his knowledge were recognized by professional chefs at the top of the game.

But there was a question about his field of expertise: Can you be a
cooking
prodigy? Was cooking really as difficult to master as, say, theoretical physics or music composition?

Two words kept Joanne from forgetting the kid chef: “molecular gastronomy,” a term sometimes used to describe Greg's style of cooking. It was no accident that it sounded scientific. The phrase was coined in the early 1990s to jazz up a conference on food science in Sicily.
The conference's host wanted something that sounded weightier than “Science and Gastronomy,” so the “International Workshop on Molecular and Physical Gastronomy” was born.