The kitchen is especially busy in the beginning of the evening. About half of Trio’s customers this week (usually about 40 or so a night, small for this time of year) will order the Tour de Force, which means a long dinner, so most who eat here come earlier rather than later. At the restaurant where I once worked, four of us would handle 150 reservations. Grant used 12 people to cook for 40 reservations. True, the restaurant sat 65 and they’d done as many as 100 in a night—but, still, the high ratio of cooks to diners was more along the lines of a Michelin three-star kitchen rather than a restaurant in the American Midwest.
“Chef,” Elaina, the front-of-the-house expediter, a thin woman with short blondish hair, says to Grant, “the gentleman at table thirty-four said he hates eggplant, but he agreed to try it. He tried it and he said he hated it. Is there anything else we can send them?”
Grant nods and to the line says, “Fire two cheese and crackers.” Molten cheddar inside a crackery dough—kind of like a crispy ravioli.
All stations are quickly busy, but the service is thrown off early when Stephen Parkerson, a CIA extern, loses a shrimp—floured and battered and fried, it falls off the vanilla bean as he’s moving it to the little pronged sculpture, the squid, resulting in a rush to fire another. This throws him off, and when he’s off, Nathan beside him has to pick up a little slack, and it goes like dominoes down the line, just a bit, just enough to make this first hour a little bumpy; especially when one of the line cooks, Jeffrey Pikus, notices he’s low on bacon—very thin, flat, dehydrated strips served with the roasted cèpes—but doesn’t do anything about it, kind of hopes he gets lucky. The line is fluid, everyone helps each other—and deli cups filled with frozen sorbet fly through the air from pastry to the hot line and back—these cooks can float among one another’s stations, but this also allows for the domino effect when one person gets thrown off.
Elaina, carrying a plate, again approaches Grant, who’s studying the tickets, and says, “This lady on thirty does not like asparagus.” Grant shakes his head—You’d think they’d read the menu—and says, “Ask her if she’ll eat cauliflower.” A few moments later Elaina returns to say, “Chef, she will not eat cauliflower.”
“Go get a list of what she won’t eat,” Grant says.
Elaina is back in quickly to say, “Table forty-four is clear.”
“Two lamb,” Grant calls to the line. Then, “All right, thirty-three?”
Elaina says, “Chef, table thirty-three is clear.” “Two beef!”
“Two beef!” David Carrier calls back.
Elaina: “We’re up on table forty-five”—meaning someone has left the table; they won’t serve food until everyone is seated.
The four diners at the chef’s table are avidly watching service and nodding and pointing, evidently impressed and delighting in their front-row seats.
Elaina: “Chef, the vegetarian on table forty-one wants no meat, no fish, poultry, or mushrooms. That includes truffles.”
Grant reads the table’s ticket and calls, “Three shrimp and a fennel!” Then he writes on the ticket the necessary replacements for each of the vegetarian’s eight courses.
Two servers bump each other on the way out, knocking a strip of bacon off the mushroom and jolting other garnish. The server returns the plate to David on the line to salvage it, but he says, “It’s not going to happen” and sends the plate to the dishwasher after removing all salvageable items, importantly the bacon. With the lost ’shrooms here and four more Tours ordered, it’s clear Pikus doesn’t have enough bacon to make it through service. Another line cook breaks away to get some strips roasting between Silpats—but they won’t be dehydrated as Grant has intended for the dish. He’s pissed and says to Pikus, “It’s no use lying to yourself.” He says it quietly and matter-of-factly, but you can see Pikus is miserable and humiliated and pissed at himself, even as he never stops hustling through this service, his personal ass-kicking.
Elaina: “Chef, I haven’t seen that duck go up on thirty-three.”
Grant: “Don’t worry about it.”
He hands her two beefs. White rectangular plates with a medallion of beef cap—the unctuous cut of beef above the rib eye—a ball of sautéed spinach, sautéed morels, a circle of salt and pepper, and a medallion of beef tongue, on which David Carrier places a leaf of spring lettuce. Each is in a distinct area of the plate, spread out from the others. Grant puts down perhaps a half teaspoon of two main sauces, one a forest green watercress puree and one a meat stock based on the reduced poaching liquid for the tongue, and various garnish on each item. The last garnish to go down is smoke. Carrier holds a piece of applewood over a gas flame to light it, brings it to the plate, blows out the flame, and holds a glass over the smoke, then puts the smoke-filled glass over the tongue and lettuce. The smoke flavors the tongue but more important will fill the air at the table with the aroma of wood smoke when the diner lifts off the glass—something I found surprisingly effective when I’d had it. But these dishes are very elaborate, with as many as a dozen components, and take two or three people a minute or more to plate. Elaina takes the beef dishes and leaves for the dining room.
One server calls out to pastry, “I’ve got a no-berries on table thirteen please.”
Grant hands two duck plates to a male server who turns so quickly that the garnish of radish and hearts of palm falls. Slim “coins” of alternating radish and hearts of palm are precariously balanced on a plank of jelly made from Australian rain forest plums, but these do not hold together well. Grant takes the plate back and rights the garnish. He hands the plate back to the server who turns and it falls again, but the server keeps going toward the dining room. Grant has turned back to the line but realizes that he saw the garnish fall again. He turns, says loudly, “Hey!” and holds out his hands in disbelief, as if to say, Why do you make me work so hard—when you see something’s not right, don’t serve it, fix it. Caught, the server returns and the problem is repaired.
When the rush is finished and the line has a moment to wipe down their station, David says, “A little hairy there for a second.” Grant throughout was nothing but calm, even when he’d been frustrated. And the remainder of the evening goes smoothly.
Throughout the day, a stage named Luke, a tall blond L.A. cook, had patiently worked his way through about a hundred crates of asparagus but during service was free to observe, and Grant would eventually send him a few dishes to try.
I asked him why he was here. He said his girlfriend wanted to move back to Chicago, her home, so he’d be looking for work. “I’ve staged at Trotter, the French Laundry; I’ve eaten at Ducasse and a couple Michelin three-stars,” Luke said. “People are saying this is the best restaurant in the country, so…”
I asked him what he thought about what he was seeing. “I’ve never seen anything like it…. During the day it’s like a normal restaurant, but now this is different—I’ve never seen anything like it. This is crazy.” The smoke on the plate, the apricot liquid that looks like an egg yolk, the eucalyptus roe, the fines herbes sponge. I’d helped make the sponge today. Piles of fines herbes (a traditional four-herb combo of tarragon, chervil, parsley, and chives) are juiced. This liquid is then put in the bowl of a standing mixer and set in ice to keep it cold. A little of the juice is heated enough to melt a sheet of gelatin. This gelatin is then added to the mixing bowl, and it’s whipped till the liquid froths to triple its volume; the foam is then put in a hotel pan and chilled. The gelatin sets before the bubbles pop, and so after it’s completely chilled, you have what is like a foam pillow of fines herbes juice. At service a cone of it is carved out using a teaspoon and added to the asparagus plate as a garnish.
The soy sauce for the salmon-pineapple antenna is stabilized by gelatin in the same way, though this is kept at room temperature and so maintains a more shaving cream–like pliability. A mixing bowl filled with the stuff is part of Grant’s mise en place at the pass for “saucing” the antenna.
This is the out-there f
ood of his reputation: the smoke; the sponge; the no-hands; the carrot–mandarin–smoked paprika “leather” (kind of like a fruit roll-up for adults, something that’s likely appreciated by adults who have kids, as Grant does); the mozzarella blown into a bubble, injected with tomato water, and served on basil—a reinvented caprese salad; a pheasant dish served in a second dish filled with pumpkin seeds, apple, and hay, over which at presentation the server pours boiling water, so that while you eat the pheasant, your head is filled with smells of, as Grant described it, “a quintessential Midwestern fall.” The list goes on. Honestly, you’d never expect it from this earnest, freckle-faced kid from a little town in Michigan. During service, when people ask to come back to meet the chef—which Grant is honored by—some of the guests think the server is kidding. “He’s the chef? How old is he?” During the day, there he is, in his black pants, black clogs, and blue apron, patiently wrapping salmon roe, seaweed, and cucumber balls in sheets of gelled sake, the quietest person in the kitchen. Was he really “redefining fine dining” as some were claiming?
After the final desserts are sent out, all begin cleaning the kitchen. It will shine before the cooks gather for a meeting (a review of tomorrow’s reservations—do they have all the food they need?—and a reflection on the night behind them: “I feel like we underestimated tonight,” Grant says, “and we got burned. Does anyone else feel like that?”), and then leave, after midnight. They’ll be back again around ten A.M. tomorrow—short days given the relatively small number of covers.
Grant does not go home. Instead he heads to the office to sit in front of his computer for the next two hours. He’ll think, he’ll search the Internet. He’ll answer e-mails at considerable length and of uncommon eloquence—for a chef, at any rate. He’ll check out eGullet, one of the most popular and well-run sites for culinary discourse, to post comments or answer food questions under the member profile “chefg.” It was on the Internet that he found the base to make chewing gum, a source that would deliver Australian rain forest plums, and, after he read an article in The New York Times about Australian finger limes, those too (the Times article had noted that you wouldn’t find them anywhere in the United States; Grant took this as a challenge to serve them and headed to the Internet to get them—the shipping charge alone is $300). What artisan-craftsman could help him design and create unique, dish-specific sculptures to use in serving his unusual food—the antenna and the squid? He found and wrote to forty of them via the Internet.
“The Internet,” Grant says, “is the most underutilized chefs’ tool.”
On the wall behind his printer is a large dry-erase board, a two-column list that more than anything describes the culinary brainstorm perpetually swirling in Grant’s mind. Most of the items are still just ideas, but when an idea is realized and put on the menu, Grant likes to note the date by the idea.
How can we make “snow”?
How can we make bubbles that don’t pop?
Can we make a dome of bubbles that disappears when touched?
Bubble or taffy, caramel or gelatin?
Alginate explosion (9/25/03)
Sashimi on breadstick or tube of crispy seaweed with filling of? and powder
“Dry shot” in starch cornet into bag of textures (1/27/04)
Savory “roll up” carrot w/orange, ginger (1/23/04)
Savory pectin soy-sesame bars
Forced air—aquarium pump
Masamum curry chips/replace pizza?
Raisins on vine coated in??
Cereal?
Transglutimate!!
Caramel-coated vinegar bomb as P.C.
Saddle “byaldi”
Starch usage! invisible flavors (12/3/03)
Pectin skin
“Candy Kane” 3 flavors…n. olive/vanilla/cranberry? “Grinchesque”-like shape
Deconstruction of dish w/simple form w/different shapes. Give diner a flavor map to follow.
Malt 11/7/03
Oyster in sesame meringue (1/21/03)
Mist bottle application (virtual shrimp cocktail 1/23/04)
Chocolate soda (12/31)
Bubble gum (1/23/04)
Tempura shrimp with M. lemon, cranberry (on a vanilla bean) (10/18/03)
Salsify wrapped in??? w/clams, mussels, dill, oysters, sausage (12/5/03)
Crispy nest of w/asp
traditional flavors
unusual flavors
Menu in graph form
color tells sweet/savory
hue shows intensity
axis is neutral
Eating without hands! (2/13/04 “antenna”)
“A menu should read like sheet music,” he says, so that the diner could know at a glance the progression of a meal, see the intensities, the truffle explosion (a knockout single bite) versus the verjuice (a light, clean, small intermezzo) versus a big meat dish. Grant seems always to be on, his brain perpetually thinking of new ideas, new manipulations of food.
He’ll leave the restaurant office by two A.M., he hopes, and can be home by two-fifteen. His wife, Angela, whom he met at the French Laundry (she worked front of the house), has been trying to mandate a home time of no later than two, and she’s been only partly successful. Now with two children under three, he needs to be home for longer than eight hours, at least four of which are typically spent sleeping. He gets up when the kids get up—“because if I didn’t get up and start being with them, I’d feel guilt,” he says. Asked about this schedule, Grant smiles and says, “I love it.”
Running a restaurant of this caliber and with this emphasis on experimentation and innovation is hard work. But for the past half year he’s been trying to propel this four-star restaurant while also putting together and opening another one. This new work requires knowing not just how to work a hot line and run a food cost, but how to put together a P&L sheet, do cost projections and site searches. “It’s been hard,” he says.
Especially as this new restaurant has to be perfect—this is the one, this is it, this is where he stays. And so he wants the structure of the entryway and dining room to mirror the food experience; he wants people to be put a little off their guard by the design; he wants the kitchen to be the kind of place that evolves as his cooking evolves. “It won’t have a standard brigade setup,” he predicts, “and maybe it won’t have a line of ranges and a flattop. It will have a lot of portable induction burners, instead.” His eyes grow bright, and he smiles at the absurdity of a normal kitchen layout, such as Trio’s, accommodating his food during service. “Right now,” he says, “we have fish station calling to pastry station for a sorbet that’s going on a vegetable dish!”
He’s got the financial guy and partner, Nick Kokonas, who will lead the money-raising efforts and be a primary investor himself.
Kokonas, a thirty-eight-year-old Chicago native, is completely new to the restaurant business, a fact he sees not as a detriment but rather as one of many reasons this venture is exciting. “I build businesses,” he says. “They’re all the same as far as I’m concerned.”
Kokonas is a trim, dapper, handsome man with short dark hair and a Mediterranean complexion typical of his Greek roots. He attended Colgate, backed out of going to law school at the last minute because it didn’t feel right, and instead took a job as a trader on the Mercantile Exchange for five dollars an hour. (He notes that the high pressure and the need to make fast decisions in that job are not different from the requirements of a good line cook in a crunch.) Kokonas did well, advanced, and eventually started his own business trading derivatives. The business grew to ten employees and soon opened branches in New York and San Francisco.
He also invested in some dot-coms, one of which was sold to Pearson Publishing for a profit that, with his derivatives business and other investments, was more than enough money to retire on. The derivatives business had grown to seventy-five employees, many of whom he didn’t even know, and this was one reason the work no longer excited him—he liked the personal nature of work. He decided i
nstead he wanted to play a lot of golf and take his kids to school. A smart, energetic guy, though, and he kept his eye out for the Next Thing.
In the winter of 2004, a friend called him to say he had lunch reservations at Trio but something had come up—would Nick and his wife, Dagmara, like them? They thought Why not? and went, expecting a customary high-end meal. Kokonas can no longer recall what the first course was, but he remembers his emotional response to it: “This is different, something different is going on here.” He asked the server what was the deal, and the server replied, “We got this new kid from the French Laundry and he’s blowing our minds.”
Since retiring, Kokonas had begun to take an interest in wines, and from wines developed an interest in good restaurants. He and his wife had been unprepared for their lunch—didn’t know what to make of it or how to evaluate it—so they made a reservation for dinner. Again, they were, he said, “blown away.” He and Dagmara decided to reserve a table on the first Wednesday of every month. “I became convinced that Grant was doing some of the most interesting stuff in the world,” Kokonas says now. But, he added, he sensed a disconnect between the place and the food.
The Reach of a Chef Page 13