Grant Achatz: The Remarkable Rise of America’s Most Celebrated Young

146 Pages·2012·3.38 MB·English

by  Chicago Tribune

TABLE OF CONTENTS
ABOUT THIS BOOK
INTRODUCTION
PART I Coming to Chicago, Taking Over Trio
PART II Alinea: A New Train of Thought
PART III Against the Odds: Battling Cancer and Alinea’s Rise
PART IV New Directions: Next and Aviary
TRIBUNE SOURCES
PHOTO CREDITS
ABOUT THIS BOOK
This book was created using articles published in the Chicago Tribune. The
material has been carefully selected from the Tribune’s archives on Achatz and
edited to present the story of the chef and his accomplishments in book format.
Throughout the book, regular text denotes original material taken from the
Tribune’s archives. Italic text denotes material created to connect the various
source information into a coherent whole.
INTRODUCTION
Since his arrival in Chicago in 2001, Grant Achatz has become an international
leader in progressive cuisine. In his quest for perfection, Achatz has altered the
way we eat and experience food, gaining a reputation for playing with diners’
senses, emotions, and memories. Achatz has earned numerous James Beard
awards including “Rising Star Chef of the Year” in 2003 and “Best Chef: Great
Lakes” in 2008, as well as two James Beard awards in 2007. In 2006, Gourmet
magazine’s Ruth Reichl declared Alinea the best restaurant in America. Achatz
was included in Time magazine’s “100 most influential people” of 2011. Alinea
is one of the most sought after restaurants in the world, ranking at sixth place on
the highly prestigious S. Pellegrino “World’s 50 Best Restaurants” in 2011.
Alinea earned three Michelin stars in 2011 and 2012, and the chef has yet to
turn 40.
PART I
COMING TO CHICAGO, TAKING OVER TRIO
“If a dish does not taste good, it does not go into the
dining room.”
William Rice wrote the following profile of the young Grant Achatz, in January
2002, shortly after the virtually unknown chef had taken over at Evanston’s Trio
Restaurant.
The as-yet-unmade film “Achatz the Chef” begins in Richmond, Mich., 15
years ago.
Twelve-year-old Grant Achatz, a small, wiry German-American kid with a
ton of energy, has been hanging around the kitchen of his father’s restaurant long
enough, the elder Achatz decides. He sets a milk crate in front of the pot sink,
encourages his son to step onto it and, voila!, young Grant is able to reach the
bottom of the sink. Soon he is cleaning every kitchen implement he can lift.
Over the years, recalls Grant, Chicago’s newest four-star chef, a half-dozen
family members were involved in operating several restaurants founded by his
grandmother. “It was humble food,” the chef says, “burgers and family fare. But
I was at home in the kitchen environment.”
After high school, the boy opted to train to become a chef at the high-
powered Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, N.Y., despite some
discouraging words from his father. (“He told me the nature of the business is
not conducive to normal family or social life.”) Nonetheless, the young
Midwesterner took the school seriously and performed well.
“I developed a new attitude. What I was learning went way beyond burgers,”
he says. “I realized there was no ceiling on what I could do, that I had to work
within perimeters and learn a lot of details, but in time I could tailor them to
myself and my personal vision.”
In the best show business tradition, lights went on and doors of opportunity
opened for him. He was able to work briefly in some of the leading kitchens in
this country and Europe. But he made his big break through persistence.
In “The Soul of a Chef,” a 2000 book on contemporary American chefs,
author Michael Ruhlman reports that Achatz won admission in 1996 into the
kitchen of the French Laundry, the landmark Napa Valley restaurant, only after
writing a letter of application to all-star chef/owner Thomas Keller every day for
several weeks.
“It was kind of weird,” Achatz (pronounced AK-etz) told the author. But it
worked.
Over the past decade, the French Laundry — along with Charlie Trotter’s
and a handful of others — has been rated among the nation’s top restaurants and
Achatz played a meaningful role in the kitchen’s triumphs.
Described, accurately, by Ruhlman as “hopelessly wholesome and earnest,”
Achatz chased perfection with the zeal of a knight of King Arthur’s Round
Table.
“I was in awe of Thomas,” he remembers. “I wanted to be a sponge and just
soak it all up.”
Gradually, he began to look beyond the kitchen’s French orientation and
firmly set techniques. He also took a year off to work in a Napa winery, La Jota.
The vacancy at Trio
Early last year he found an announcement of the upcoming Trio vacancy on
the Internet. This time a single missive was enough to set the ball rolling, but it
took four months before he was hired. (“I did a big search,” says Trio owner
Henry Adaniya. “I wanted something unique, but also I wanted someone I could
relate to.”)
“One of the reasons I came here was Henry’s willingness to let me set my
style and use influences from around the world,” Achatz says.
There is no denying his distinctive mind set. This is a chef who, when asked
to list ingredients essential to his cooking, begins with gelatin, sugar and veal
stock.
“Awesome,” says veteran chef John Coletta of Caliterra, recalling a recent
meal at Evanston’s Trio restaurant. “He takes the usual, ingredients we all know,
and prepares them in an unusual manner that is extremely refined. His food is
intricate, precise and flavorful and it’s his. He’s not doing copycat cooking.”
Michael Taus, chef/owner of Zealous, a highly innovative chef who says he
has intentionally “tamed myself down,” was “very impressed” with his meal at
Trio, but found “a couple of things way out.”
He feels Thomas Keller’s influence is pervasive, Coletta does not.
Global tastes
Achatz has been under wraps for the past six months, since he started at Trio,
taking care of business so to speak. And with reason.
Adaniya realized he was taking a risk when he brought the young chef from
the French Laundry. Popular chef Shawn McClain, who was leaving to open his
own restaurant, had garnered four stars. Chefs Rick Tramonto and Gale Gand
had done the same after they and Adaniya opened Trio eight years ago.
Achatz’s concept was to create global — not regional — tastes and textures
and present his food on prix-fixe menus of four or eight courses that change
daily. There would be no a la carte meals of salad, steak and a cup of coffee.
Wines should change as the courses change, he believed. This put considerable
pressure on the cooks, servers and the customers. In some cases new china and
tableware were needed.
The customers found themselves face to face with a shot glass containing
infused water, truffle oil and a topping of hazelnut foam; smoked sablefish with
kumquat marmalade, endive jam and chocolate syrup; a honey balsamic poached
peach with almond-peach genoise, champagne ice cream and nectarine ice.
Some rebelled, Adaniya acknowledges. Not only was the format dictatorial
(which many food lovers enjoy because it empowers the chef to provide
continuity and possibly create a seamless meal), dinner was more expensive.
Despite the dining malaise that followed 9/11, tabs went up more than 50
percent, especially when customers began to increase their wine purchases.
“I am happy to have Grant here,” Adaniya explains. “He has established a
rapport in the kitchen beyond anything I’ve ever seen. Our cooks are on a
mission and so is the rest of the staff. We all admire his character as well as his
talent.”
Part of a food ‘revolution’
In turn, the chef explains he chose Chicago to begin his career as a star
performer because “the level of restaurant cooking is very high, there are a good
many food-oriented consumers and very good product availability.” He and
Angela Snell, a former co-worker at the French Laundry, have settled in
Evanston with 3½ -month-old son Kaden.
He believes “there’s a food revolution under way around the world” and
wants to be part of it. Despite the absence of a flamboyant personality, he
dreams of “playing with the big boys,” being accepted as one of the nation’s top
creative chefs. At the same time, he worries about burnout because of the intense
pressure on young chefs in the public eye to perform as well as produce. He
realizes the repetitious nature of his work leads to perfect execution, but the
price may be boredom.
To fight monotony, he and his cooks have nightly postmortems where they
push themselves to identify weak links and find improvements in dishes on the
menu.
Whether the techniques used to produce it are new or old,” Achatz says,
“there’s one fundamental rule: If a dish does not taste good, it does not go into
the dining room.”
“Grant Achatz is the Elsewhere in the Tribune that day, Tribune
most dynamic, boundary- critic Phil Vettel awarded Achatz his first of
stretching chef to hit the many four-star reviews.
town in a long, long As I sat down at Trio one recent
time.” evening in Evanston, a waiter approached to
say “there’s an amuse heading your way
that the chef thinks would match perfectly to a glass of Amontillado. Would you
care for some?”
I make it a point never to second-guess the chef, and so, moments later, I was
sipping rare Spanish sherry while contemplating a miniature ice-cream sandwich
of parmesan-laced shortbread wafers around savory olive-oil ice cream. And the
Amontillado (for which I was charged a quite-reasonable $5) was indeed an
excellent accompaniment.
One does not ordinarily begin a meal with ice cream and sherry, but Trio, in
its eight-plus years of existence, has never been an ordinary restaurant. From its
high-profile beginnings under founding chefs Rick Tramonto and Gale Gand to
its more subtle, harmonious years with Shawn McClain at the helm, Trio has
been a restaurant that routinely delivered the unexpected, usually in a spectacular
manner.
With the installation of its third-ever chef, Trio has definitely re-embraced its
wild side. Grant Achatz is the most dynamic, boundary-stretching chef to hit
town in a long, long time.
If you’ve been putting off luxury-dining lately, let me suggest that now is the
time to jump back into the game.
Achatz is a master at deconstructing familiar dishes, breaking them down
into their basic components. Case in point: An amuse that essentially was a
smithereened Bloody Mary, consisting of a solitary, intense tomato confit
alongside celery granita, a dab of horseradish cream and tiny cubes of
Worcestershire gelee.
Other times, Achatz will re-create a dish, turning an established concept
neatly on its ear. A signature first-course, for example, is a savory interpretation
of Chinese bubble tea, a confection of sweet tea, cream and tapioca “bubbles”
that are drawn through a straw. Achatz’s version mixes the tea with cucumber
juice, substitutes a frothy crème fraiche for the sweet cream and employs salty
salmon roe in place of the tapioca globules. Thus he creates a dish that’s visually
and texturally faithful to the original while it delivers a completely different
flavor experience.
Other dishes include rouget “aux six gouts,” or “with six tastes,” the fillet of
red mullet surrounded by Mediterranean accents, among them sumac-flavored
breadcrumbs, chile-accented lemon supreme and diced eggplant with garlic
chips; the idea is to experience what each accompaniment brings to the fish. An
amuse of hot spiced water topped with hazelnut foam is meant to be a liquid
equivalent of candied nuts and to be taken in a single gulp; similarly, thyme-
seasoned lamb with summer squash and gnocchi is accompanied not by a rich
sauce or light jus but by a demitasse of hot lamb consommé that you sip with
each bite.
This is taking the dining experience into the realm of participatory theater, if
not performance art.
Indeed, Achatz’s some-assembly-required creations actually come with
instructions; waiters gently convey the chef’s suggestions for how certain dishes
should be consumed. This takes a certain amount of diplomacy; the sort of
customers who patronize Trio might take umbrage at being told how to eat. But
Trio’s silky-smooth servers are deft at conveying information without
condescension.
Diners choose between the four-course ($75) and eight-course ($100) menus.
Some of my most memorable dishes have come from the four-course option,
particularly the quintet of ravioli filled with liquid black-truffle essence that