by Holly Hughes
Gradually, Curtis’ ties with his Johnstown past faded away. More time passed between phone calls to Trisha and his brother, Robert Jr., until they barely spoke at all. Curtis was making $80,000 a year at age 24 as chef de cuisine at Tartan Fields Golf Club in Dublin, Ohio. But he equated small-town life with small-town ambitions. The good pay meant nothing if the challenge wasn’t there.
“If my priorities stayed in that town, that’s where I would be. But I’ve always wanted something greater than that place.”
Remembering the burgundy cookbook at Muirfield Village, he drove to Charlie Trotter’s restaurant in Chicago to volunteer his services for a few weeks. He returned to Ohio humbled. Curtis thought the recipes described in the cookbook were conceptual dishes meant to inspire and provoke. Trotter was actually serving those dishes to guests nightly. He had to move to Chicago.
In January 2000, Curtis spent his “Goodbye, Columbus” dinner with—who else?—Ruth Snider. They dined on steaks and offered the obligatory farewell sentiments: Let’s keep in touch. . . . Call any time. . . . Don’t be a stranger. But at some point during the night, the words “I love you” tumbled out for the first time, him to her, her back in response, natural as an exhale, and it solidified what they knew to be true. Curtis was the son Ruth had never had, and Ruth the mother Curtis had now.
Ascent
Sure, workdays at Charlie Trotter’s lasted 14 hours, six days a week, the paycheck was a pittance, and he was fulfilling someone else’s grand culinary vision. But Curtis was surrounded by like-minded kitchen grunts, uncompromising in their collective desire to become the best. Not the best in Chicago, but the best, full stop. Entry-level cooks traded an $18,000-a-year salary for Trotter’s name on their resumes.
In 2003, Curtis went for a meal at the since-closed Evanston restaurant Trio, where a young chef named Grant Achatz—just 15 months Curtis’ senior—was making noise with his avant-garde interpretation of fine dining. Achatz remembered that night: This cook from Trotter’s kitchen was dining with him, and whenever someone from a competing restaurant visited, he made sure to serve a meal that said, in no uncertain terms: You’re not employed at the best restaurant in town.
After that dinner, Curtis was sold. On a day off from Trotter’s, he spent time in Trio’s kitchen as a tryout. After seeing Curtis in his kitchen, Achatz told him:
“You don’t need to work here. You should be doing your own thing.”
“But I want to work for you,” Curtis said.
“Well, I can only pay you $16,000 a year.”
“Fine.”
At Trio, Curtis ascended from the cold foods station to head pastry chef, becoming one of Achatz’s top deputies. The two spoke a common language without uttering a word. Both were quiet figures amid the noise of the kitchen, and when they did converse, it was about the new cuisine emerging from Spain, or the burgeoning usage of laboratory science as a cooking technique. It was a workplace where “No” was no match for “Sure, let’s try it.”
When Achatz left Trio to open Alinea in 2005—a restaurant that Gourmet magazine would soon deem the best in America—he tapped Curtis as chef de cuisine, his right-hand man.
Curtis’ career took on the momentum of a wheel rolling downhill. Faster. Better. More. To lead such an ambitious kitchen, 90-hour workweeks became the norm. Nights, holidays and weekends took Curtis away from home. He’d return from work to find his wife already asleep for hours. Many nights, fear kept him awake: fear of failure, fear of slowing his forward momentum, fear of being second-best.
Then, midflight in his meteoric rise: Kim was expecting their first child. He wished for a son to play baseball with and ride motorcycles together, as Curtis had with his father. But the Duffys were bestowed a daughter, Ava Leigh, and when she clutched her father’s pinky finger in the hospital room, Curtis’ eyes welled up. Everything would be for her. And when daughter Eden arrived three years after Ava, Curtis felt whole in a way he hadn’t since his Colorado childhood. His family was intact. He thought back to his Johnstown years: My daughters will not sleep on the floor of a closet.
Curtis left Alinea after three years to make a name for himself. His goal of becoming one of the best chefs in the country was, he said, as much about personal validation as providing his family financial security. Curtis took on the top position at Avenues, a restaurant in The Peninsula hotel on Michigan Avenue where dinner for two cost $700.
Finally, he could showcase his food, and his good name would rise and fall with the restaurant’s successes and failures. He assembled a team that had to jell quickly in the tight confines of Avenues’ kitchen, and members of the Avenues family spent more time together than with their actual families.
On the day the Chicago Michelin Guide was unveiled in 2010, the Avenues team gathered in a suite at The Peninsula. Curtis knew the restaurant was receiving prestigious stars in the international guidebook; the question was how many. The call came to Curtis’ cellphone, and a man speaking in a French accent congratulated Avenues on winning two Michelin stars. Only two other restaurants in the city received that honor—one of which was Charlie Trotter’s. Alinea and L20 received the highest rating that year, three stars. In the hotel suite, the Avenues staff burst into applause and champagne overflowed.
“I must forge ahead,” Curtis told himself. “I want that third Michelin star.”
He had always worked for someone else. He needed to become his own boss. This was the moment he’d worked for all his life: to become chef and owner of his own restaurant.
Work harder. Push further. Stay that extra hour.
“What about us?” he said his wife asked him. “Nothing’s ever good enough. It’s always more and more and more. A second restaurant. A cookbook. When will it be about our family? I can’t . . .”
Kim had moved to Chicago not knowing anyone who lived here, he said. She’d made that sacrifice for her husband’s career. At last, Curtis saw his selfishness.
“You try to look for that balance in your day-to-day life. (You say) ‘I hope and pray that when I get to that point, people will still want to be around me,’” Curtis said.
When he was a teenager, Curtis learned that the key to properly holding a knife was finding the point of balance. At that age, he didn’t realize it would become a metaphor.
The kitchen was a place to run away from the chaos of his original family, and it had driven him to pursue a goal. That pursuit ultimately cost him another family—and his 11-year marriage.
“Opening my own restaurant is supposed to be the greatest moment of my career,” Curtis said. “And it’s happening at the worst moment of my personal life.”
It took many years to arrive at a place of forgiveness, but Curtis has found that place with his father, insomuch as anyone could with someone who killed his mother. Still, moments of hatred toward his dad surfaced—Bear, for instance, got in his goodbyes without giving Jan the same opportunity. Curtis thought: What a selfish act. But the anger subsides, because love for his parents never goes away.
Once in a while, in his garden apartment a few blocks west of where Kim and their daughters live, Curtis revisits the blue spiral-bound notebook he found at his father’s house the morning after his parents died.
Bear addressed each page to a different member of his family. But there was nothing written on them, except for one. The only letter Bear wrote in the notebook was to Curtis.
3/1/1994
Curt,
This is dad. I’m telling you from my heart that you’re a very special young man and I wish I could tell you how proud of you I am . . . You’ll be a great chef, no doubt in my mind, you’ll be one of the best in the world some day . . .
Your life is just beginning. Try to do all the right things in it. Make sure if you ever get married and have children, that you show them and your wife all the love in the world. Always take time to be with them and show them love. Your wife should be shown the most love of all. Always take the time to talk to her and hear what she ha
s to say because she’ll be the most important person in your life . . .
I ask you, Curt, to look back and see how many wrong things you have seen me do, and please don’t walk in my footsteps because you’ll be in a world of pain, hate, and sure won’t be loved and won’t be able to show love. So please be a better person than I was. I know you can . . .
Remember I love you, son, and always will.
My love,
Your dad
Tomorrow
When Curtis was still at Avenues, he became a name in the city, and diners started asking for autographs. He pondered what to write. Eventually he signed all menus this way: “It’s all about grace.”
The word “grace” rolled off his tongue, effortless and soft. He saw it defined in his cooking style—elegant, delicate, the rock ‘n’ roll celebrity TV chef-antithesis. Curtis favored light over heavy in his food, seldom using butter or cream. At Avenues, half his menu was vegetarian.
“Grace” was also something he found working behind the hot stove. The significance didn’t escape Curtis. The word resonated so much he named his younger daughter Eden Grace.
“If I ever owned a restaurant,” he told himself, “it will be called Grace.”
His wine director at Avenues, Michael Muser, was a man with the opposite personality: boisterous, ebullient, not above pulling practical jokes on strangers. But the two became fast friends over a shared love of motorcycles, cigars and fine wine, and they decided to become business partners.
The two found an Avenues regular—a real estate man named Mike Olszewski—who agreed to help bankroll their dream: to operate the best restaurant in the country, uttered in the same breath as heavyweights The French Laundry and Alinea. They began by leasing an old frame shop in the West Loop, near restaurant neighbors Girl & The Goat, Next and Blackbird.
When Curtis announced he was leaving Avenues in July 2011, he set a goal of opening by the following March. But building a restaurant proved different from composing a menu.
If he planned to charge $250 a person for dinner, then every detail had to be thought out. And every detail strained the budget. An Internet router. Paper clips. Light fixtures in the bathroom. They thought about getting trays on the table that would accommodate a diner’s cellphone.
If there were disagreements among the three partners, they typically fell along this line: “Do we buy the best version of what we need, or should we be cost efficient?” Muser, for instance, wanted horseshoe-shaped white leather chairs in the dining room that cost $2,300 each. Curtis told him he was crazy. Eventually they decided those chairs were the most comfortable, and they talked the dealer down to a discounted price of $1,000 each.
Curtis’ cooking was the sort of intricately plated food to be consumed in six bites or fewer—just enough before the palate, mentally, becomes numb to the same flavor. “You want diners to say, ‘I wish I had one more piece of Wagyu beef, one more piece of salmon,” Curtis said. “You want them to not have just enough of a dish; you want them to crave for one more bite.”
So the plateware, Curtis decided, should act as more than serving vessels and actually enhance the taste of a dish, even if just in the mind. A chestnut puree’s creamy texture might be accentuated, he reasoned, if it was served in a bowl with no edges. He ordered curved bowls from France that resembled overinflated inner tubes.
Another idea was serving a dish inside an edible tube made of flavored ice; the diner would crack the tube with the side of a spoon to reveal what was inside. Curtis visited the Chicago School of Mold Making in Oak Park to collaborate on a custom silicone canister that could freeze water into a tube in 45 minutes.
The plates alone cost more than $60,000. An all-granite-countertop kitchen equipped with the ovens and fridges needed would cost $500,000 more. In all, the partners said, to build Grace from an empty concrete shell cost $2.5 million.
As at Avenues, Curtis planned two menus of 10 courses each, one meat-based, the other mostly vegetarian. Labeling his cooking as a specific cuisine is futile—“progressive American,” if one prefers pithiness, though obscure ingredients such as sudachi (a green citrus fruit from Japan) or Queensland blue squash are centerpieces of dishes. When Curtis brainstorms dish concepts, it’s a free-form exercise with pen and paper. After many years, he’s developed a “mind’s palate”—Curtis could name three disparate flavors and, in his head, know exactly how they’d taste together. In his sketch pad, Curtis would jot down a main ingredient to anchor a dish. Then he’d scribble off supporting ingredients that might pair well, or, if it’s the effect he’s seeking, clash in a palatable manner. His notebook is like a casting director’s clipboard: a long list of candidates, whittled down to achieve on-plate chemistry.
While Curtis and his culinary team focused on food, every passing day at the Randolph Street space brought a new set of problems. Sheets of glass arrived cracked. The kitchen ventilation hood came in the wrong size. Construction crews checked out by 3 p.m. most days. No surprise, Curtis and his partners blew past the proposed March opening date, and delays would push it back to April, then June, then August. September came, and the kitchen wasn’t even installed.
Then October. And November.
Curtis’ frustration was visible. He’d lifted weights at 4 a.m. every morning—now he didn’t have time for it and began gaining weight. Hairs above his ears turned gray in greater numbers.
But slowly, surely, exasperatingly, the blond-wood millwork walls and frosted windows and glass pendant lamps were put up, 64 white leather chairs were placed in the dining room, and by December, Grace restaurant went from figment in Curtis’ mind to reality.
Industry friends were invited in for a series of three practice dinners. Even these test runs required 14-hour workdays. By the end of practice night No. 3, the waitstaff walked with chin up and upright posture. They had passed all the written tests on ingredients, wine pairings and related allergies. Cooks, meanwhile, achieved their goal of five minutes between an empty plate taken away and arrival of the next course. Behind the glass-enclosed kitchen, dinner service was an exacting, choreographed dance invisible to customers.
On Dec. 11, Grace opened its door to the public at last. Curtis got his usual three hours of sleep. If he was excited, there was no outward sign of it—long ago he had learned to keep his head down and focus on the task.
He knew Kim and their daughters would not attend. They had prior commitments, he said. He wished it weren’t so.
“I wanted them to walk through the door before anybody else.”
But there was one other person he wanted on hand for the first night of service.
A taxi pulled in front of 652 W. Randolph St., and Ruth Snider emerged in a red coat and shimmering black gown along with her daughter Lauren.
They had arrived for their 9:30 p.m. reservation.
It had been three years since Curtis and Snider had last seen each other, and when they met in the restaurant’s front lobby,
They’d first met when Curtis was 12, when he and his older brother had beaten up neighborhood kids for fun. And she stayed with him through all that followed—his parents’ deaths, his dash out to Colorado, the christening of his daughters, the pending divorce. Snider was there the moment Curtis fell in love with cooking, and now she was here on opening night.
Snider and her daughter sat at the table closest to the kitchen window and watched as Curtis plated each dish for them. He instructed his cooks that no one else would prepare Table 11’s dinner.
Snider watched Curtis float through the kitchen—the same quiet sixth-grader who’d made Pillsbury biscuit pizzas in home economics class—now 37, bringing out an ice cylinder made from ginger water, with kampachi fish, golden trout roe, pomelo segments and Thai basil intricately embedded inside the frozen tube. She said afterward that it was the best meal of her life.
As the last dessert plate was cleared, Curtis sat at her table. He was no longer the reticent boy.
“You’ve given me something mor
e than any amount of money can give . . . unconditional love and values of life,” he told her. “I could never repay you. But the ability to be able to give back to you what I do . . . cook for you . . . means more than anything.”
The roads were empty by the time Curtis drove back to his Lincoln Square apartment at the end of the night.
“It’s been a good day,” he said.
The clock on his phone read 3 a.m.
Some things don’t ever change. This was his life now, but the chef only knew one way. Tomorrow had already arrived.
By 7 a.m. Curtis Duffy was buttoning up his chef’s jacket once more, back at his restaurant, back at Grace.
SPIN THE GLOBE
By Francis Lam
From AFAR
Like a master of all food media, Francis Lam has proven his culinary chops in print (Gourmet, The New York Times), digital media (Salon, Gilt Taste), TV (Food(ography), Top Chef), and now books (editor-at-large at Clarkson Potter). One thing he never forgets: Cooking stories are always stories about people.
When I’m traveling, what matters—what really matters—isn’t that the food be the fanciest or even the best, but that it tells you that you can be nowhere else but here. Those meals have their own deliciousness: Nothing locks in the memory of a place like a taste of something real, a taste that connects me to the person who made it.
That’s the kind of eating I was hoping for when I emailed a Trinidadian for restaurant tips on nearby St. Vincent. Like every Trini I know, this friend is fireworks-proud of his people’s food—its mix of indigenous, East Indian, African, European, and Chinese flavors. But it turned out that pride stretches only so far into the rest of the Caribbean.
“St. Vincent’s just a big rock,” he scoffed, probably while munching on a life-changing curry-stuffed roti. But his wife, sweetly annoyed, told me to go prove him wrong. I was headed to the Caribbean on short notice, and so her command became my mission. It pursued me through my flight from New York, prodded me out of my hotel, into the streets of St. Vincent’s tiny capital, Kingstown, and up to the national tourist services office.