The Reach of a Chef

by Michael Ruhlman

  Trio also used various forms of foams. I find foams dubious, and they are especially tricky because they’ve become synonymous with the worst of the new innovations or edge cuisine done badly. At Trio, one foam, the fines herbes sponge, was served as a stand-alone garnish, the soy foam as a stiff sauce, and a hot brothy foam covered his lobster tail like a cloud of sea spume. (I didn’t care for that whole dish, “Maine Lobster flavors of Thai ice tea, aromatic bread,” the menu called it, though Luke, the L.A. cook, had eaten that dish and was gaga over it.)

  I remained skeptical of foam. I didn’t like the texture. There was something inherently phony about foam. It tried to be bigger than it actually was—a heaping spoonful of foam really amounted to a piddly few drops of actual stuff. It was mostly air. Also, I didn’t like the look of foam. Foam is what you skim off your stock and discard; foam is what you stay away from when you’re swimming in a lake. I don’t want to eat foam.

  Grant defended it. “Why is there so much veal stock?” he asked me.

  I’m a veal stock fanatic so I tried to keep myself neutral, rattling off the obvious benefits of an excellent veal stock—body, flavor, moisture, richness.

  “Exactly,” Grant said. “Foam does the same thing, adds and enhances flavor, body. It’s a sauce. But it also does the opposite of a sauce. It adds lightness.”

  I nodded but he saw I wasn’t convinced.

  It was early in service when we had this exchange. He was at the pass and he pointed to the pineapple-salmon combo bobbing on the antenna. “How else could I sauce that?”

  Here he had a point I couldn’t argue. You wanted a sauce on this thing. It wanted the moisture, flavor, and seasoning that a sauce delivered. But one of Grant’s goals here was to serve a dish that didn’t require using your hands, so the thing was bouncing around on the end of an antenna. A stiff foam was a good solution; the Thai ice tea spume hiding the lobster was another story, but this I completely bought.

  “People are scared of things that are different,” Grant went on. “They push food back. In the last five years we’ve created five new techniques”—and by “we” Grant meant the professional chef, the innovative restaurant kitchens working this edge cuisine—“and they’re being challenged on a moral level!…It’s like the devil!”

  So what are these new techniques? I count eight:

  1. Agar, the ability to serve gelled food hot, resulting in such dishes as “fettuccine” made from consommé.

  2. Alginate and calcium chloride, the ability to create different-shaped gels and to encapsulate liquid in itself, such as the self-enclosed ravioli or the eucalyptus roe.

  3. Pervasive use of sous-vide cooking, the ability to cook protein very gently and slowly.

  4. Various types of foams, from solid to liquid.

  5. The sugar tuile technique: Three different types of sugars—glucose and isomalt (a sugar replacement derived from beet sugar) and fondant—are melted and brought to the hard-crack stage, about 365 degrees Fahrenheit, poured out, cooled, and ground into a powder, sprinkled out on a special nonstick paper (called “Magic Paper”) in the desired shape, baked, and cooled. The result is a sugar tuile that will melt at a relatively low temperature and encase an object, such as a disk of foie gras, in a very fine, crisp layer.

  6. Aggressive use of aromas—serving shrimp on a hot vanilla bean, for instance, beef with applewood smoke, pheasant with the smell of hay and apples. 7. Unconventional serving devices, such as the “antenna” and the parfait tube.

  7. Unconventional temperatures—hot gelatin, for example, or frozen foie gras.

  There are other techniques as well that might be included but aren’t unconventional until applied to this kind of food—techniques of dehydration, for example (Grant dehydrates mushrooms, bacon, and other items). Also, edge cuisine might simply be defined by the extent to which food is manipulated—turning shrimp cocktail into a liquid or, in a dish Adrià made famous, grilled vegetables juiced, gelled, sliced, and served like Technicolor piano keys as “grilled vegetables.”

  “As a whole,” Grant says, “when you group all these things together, it begins to define the movement. These are going to be the indicators of said cuisine. I think it’s important to keep moving gastronomy forward at this level…. More than anything, they help us express the objective: innovation.

  “I don’t want to do what’s been done for a long time,” he goes on. “I want to create. To try to invent, whether it be a dish or a technique. That’s exciting to me. Rather than perfecting something that’s old, I’d rather perfect something that’s new.

  “Three years from now, we might not be doing anything with alginate, but the thought process that led us to that will still be intact. If it’s not alginate, it’ll be something else. The thought processes are what’s really important.”

  “What’s the downside to all this?” I ask.

  “It’s really hard,” Grant says.

  I drove out of Evanston soon after, excited for Grant, and with my mind a little more open to the ideas and techniques defining this edge cuisine. I was comforted by what one of Grant’s sous-chefs, David Carrier, had said: “No matter how avant-garde you are, culinarily speaking, you always wind up back in the basics.” Indeed, I’m sure that Grant succeeded at Trio because his basics were as close to perfect as basics can be. He could do whatever kind of food he wanted and would succeed because of this, from bistro to edge cuisine.

  Grant would close down at the end of July and enter a peculiar world of nine-to-five, with plenty of time to spend with the family. Strange for a lifelong line cook. He could get everything done that he needed to do each day and still have tons of time on his hands and get enough sleep. It gave him time to think.

  Eager to follow the progress of Alinea, I stayed in touch by e-mail. He wrote me in November 2004:

  I left Trio nearly three months ago. I have made my humble reputation on creativity. In my opinion Thomas made his on technique and dedication, and Charlie…“the pursuit of excellence.” Over the last three months I have contemplated my place in this discipline, where do I stand? Where is my future? I have come to the conclusion it is the creative process that separates me from many culinarians.

  That creative process has led me to the building of Alinea. Within that container I will craft an experience like no other. From the design to space to the cuisine, it will express my emotions. The true origin of uniqueness, the start of creativity…emotion.

  More than a month later, in the week between Christmas and New Year’s Day, he wrote a long e-mail detailing the restaurant’s progress, the design of the space, the kitchen, the serviceware, the wine list, the menu—it was all coming together in an exciting way. The demolition of the interior of the building—on North Halsted Street in Lincoln Park, across coincidentally from Steppenwolf, the famous experimental theater company—had been completed, and the basic concrete-and-steel foundation had been put in place, and chalk outlines of the kitchen had been drawn. It gave him the chills, sometimes. City permits were all granted. He’d hired his kitchen staff, six of whom were at Trio. His two sous, Curtis Duffy and John Peters; his business partner, Nick Kokonas; and a general manager were working full-time, with two days a week being devoted to food development. He was soon to meet a private wine collector, a friend of two investors, who would be making a portion of his collection available to the restaurant. This was extraordinary given that creating a wine list can be among the biggest costs in opening a restaurant, something that most new restaurants must do gradually. Here they were basically borrowing a wine cellar, allowing them to open with a wine list of more than six hundred wines, four times the size they’d budgeted for.

  Luck seemed to be waiting for Grant around every corner. “All of this stuff scares me a bit though,” he concluded.

  On one hand I feel I am doing the right thing by trying to open this thing at the highest level. I seem to have resources available to me that most don’t when they open their first place. I have hea
rd some grumbles in the industry that I am just a spoiled kid who has investors with deep pockets…some people talking shit I guess you would say…but that is not really the case. This restaurant will be nice…really nice actually, but it has been done creatively and responsibly all the way through…even the biz angle which is allowing it to achieve more than the raise should provide.

  On the other hand there is something magical about the flstory…cooking on a four-burner stove with shitty sauté pans…Angela tells stories about sitting on milk crates while taking resos in the early days…the whole time watching it grow into the dream….

  I am not starting with the end-all dream…but probably at a higher level than most 30-year-olds could. It almost seems like a natural progression for me though, and a natural pressure. The Keller protégé, first chef job he gets the Mobil 5th star, F&W top ten, 4 stars, and the JB award…the momentum pushes me in this direction…my cuisine demands it…if I opened a 250K bistro people would say what the Fu?? Somehow I feel people expect me to come out swinging hard. If I don’t, I fail. If I do, and fail…I fail…so I guess that only leaves one option.

  Best,

  Grant

  CHAPTER 2

  The Romantic Ideal: Melissa Kelly

  The sound of the kitchen’s screen door slamming shut says Home. The air is a balmy seventy degrees at seven A.M. in Rockland, Maine, the first week of August. You can see the big garden in full summer bounty from the windows here. Michael Florence mixes bread doughs at the back of the Primo kitchen, built into an old Victorian house on the craggy Maine coast. He works on a heavy wood bench with flour and water in this rustic kitchen with a massive central brick oven, still hot from last night’s service. Michael will mix the starter, natural yeast, with water and flour, a little commercial yeast, let it rest awhile, then finish mixing with a little more water, extra-virgin olive oil, and salt. He’ll pour it into a five-gallon plastic container to ferment, let the natural yeasts feed on the sugars and release their tangy lactic acid that gives sourdough its name. Because of the warm weather, which makes the bacteria a little more feisty than usual, the starter’s been too sharp, and this concerns him.

  “You don’t want an overpowering acidic taste,” he says, “just a depth of flavor.” Michael is a craftsman. Quiet, fair, medium height and build, a cap over his short, light brown hair, he studied classical piano at a conservatory in Wisconsin. He’d like to do a recital here in Maine, but it’s hard to find three hours a day for practice. Every day in the kitchen, though, he’ll make the country loaf, four big ones. He uses a levain (a different kind of starter) for the whole-wheat boule. They’ve got another dough for the baguette, and he’ll also make the pizza dough and feed the starter. Occasionally he’ll do a rye, maybe a rye with hard cider in the fall, but not often. “A lot of people enjoy bread, but not everybody can make it,” he says. Sometimes he’ll leave a loaf of bread warm out of the stone oven. He cringes when the cooks rip a piece off, tearing apart the crumb. Making bread is a craft; he wants people to appreciate it.

  He needs to get all his doughs mixed and fermented before Kristin Nicodemus arrives to begin pastry back here. Kristin, twenty-nine, has a degree in applied history and public policy from Carnegie-Mellon. She worked in education for a while but it wasn’t right. “My true passion was in restaurants,” she says. She met her fiancé, Aaron Leikman, thirty-three, in a Seattle restaurant. He’ll be in at about eleven, will be working the line tonight. Aaron has a degree in ecology and zoology from Oklahoma University, as well as an associate’s degree from the CIA. Joe Nastro—tall and thin with dark hair cut very short, who used to work with animals out West, has a B.S. in animal science from the University of Vermont, and may return to that one day—is on the wood oven tonight. The wood-burning oven, he says, “is like working with another human being. It’s temperamental. You never know what it’s gonna do next.” After the bread has baked, Joe will load the oven with wood and really crank it for service. A pizza will cook in sixty seconds in there. A roasted whole dorade, stuffed with lemon slices and fennel, takes about five minutes on a sizzle platter and comes out with the skin nicely charred.

  While this kitchen staff has more nonculinary degrees than most others I’ve met, there are some purely culinary folks, such as Lindsey Kutsai, twenty-three, who arrives in the morning to begin prepping her station, garde manger. A graduate of the Institute of Culinary Education, formerly Peter Kump’s in Manhattan, she’s been here a year, her first real cook’s job. Art Rogers will be the last one in, the other line cook tonight—from Rochester, New York, a graduate of a hotel and restaurant school in New Hampshire and an unflappable line cook. Right now he’s out on a breakwater casting into the Penobscot Bay, and he’ll land eight or ten small mackerel, which will be grilled and used on a salad tonight, or with cucumbers or purple Romano beans, depending on what’s plentiful in the garden. Rob, the sous-chef, is off tonight, and Alissa Alden, twenty-one, who began washing dishes here six years ago, finishes up pastry in the evening.

  This is Melissa’s staff, her kitchen. Melissa Kelly arrives at 9:00 A.M. in her white T-shirt and navy blue overalls with the white pinstripes—the commis pattern in French kitchens—rolled high above her clogs to reveal thin, saggy white socks. Melissa is five-foot-four, dark hair pulled tightly back in a ponytail, and if you walk into her kitchen at most times of the day before service, you’re likely to see her in this position: straight over a cutting board, neck cocked to hold a phone, talking to a purveyor, the press, family, or someone begging a reservation at the height of the season. Melissa is thirty-nine years old, was first in her class at the CIA in 1988, won the Best Chef Northeast award from the Beard Foundation in 1999, and became a media darling after she put the Old Chatham Sheepherding Company Inn, the Relais & Châteaux B&B and restaurant in upstate New York, on the map. She and Price Kushner—they’re married in all but the technical sense (never had the time or a strong inclination to make it legal)—have owned this restaurant in the Victorian house since 1999. And while Price is nominally the pastry chef—his culinary background is breads and pastry—and he does oversee and often cook that side of the menu, he spends the majority of his time running the nonkitchen parts of the business and in the evening leads the front of the house. Melissa is the force of the kitchen, 9:00 A.M. to 1:00 A.M., seven days a week in the summer. Most of the remaining hours of the day, she’s dead asleep amid piles of cookbooks and notepads, which cover the bed and surrounding floor in their home nearby.

  When I asked when her next day off would be, she said without thinking, “Labor Day.” Her last day off had been Independence Day and before that Memorial Day. “We close for all the barbecue holidays,” she says. Summers are busy in Maine. If you’re not busy here in the summer, you’ve got a problem. Capacity summers are the only way to get through winter.

  “You could shoot a gun down Main Street and you wouldn’t hit anyone for three towns,” says Price of the winter population.

  But even those months, January through March, Melissa likes to stay open five days a week, despite the fact that they consistently lose money—she does it to keep her staff employed. Otherwise, she’s afraid, they’d have no choice but to leave her. Also, I suspect, she’s happiest in a kitchen.

  “I’m not a groundbreaking chef,” Melissa says. “I like to cook…. I cook. That’s what I do. That’s what I’ve done my whole life. Food is it. I’m not a photographer, I’m not an artist, I’m not a boatbuilder, I’m not anything else. I’m a cook, that’s who I am.”

  And so she’s most likely to be in her kitchen just about any nonsleeping hour—not dressed for a photo shoot, in the office on the phone with her brand consultant, or scouting new restaurant locations—dicing the onion and peppers for the peperonata, a base for a grilled swordfish–mussels–saffron gnocchetti, or mixing yolks and flour in the KitchenAid for the hand-rolled spaghetti, served with Nicoise olives, capers, and ricotta salata, as well as eggplant, basil, and tomatoes from the garden out ba
ck.

  “I don’t know why I do it,” she says in her slightly nasal, slightly Long Island voice and without looking up from her board. “I enjoy it, I enjoy the routine, the sense of accomplishment. Even last night going through the cooler and getting everything organized makes me feel really good.

  “I love the circle,” she adds, “the cycle of cooking. It is a life cycle, it has its own life.” The finest moments of the day are when she’s got four or five pots and pans going, she’s stirring a risotto, butchering the lamb, dicing the onion for the sauce, throwing the onion ends into the stock, every act and every scrap propelling her and the food toward the finished dishes, moments when one movement works toward several different ends, and all those different ends fulfilling a singular goal. “I love when there’s that full circle, to me that’s the best feeling.”

  The food at Primo couldn’t be more unlike the food Grant pursues. Melissa’s is home-cooking food that emphasizes the best possible vegetables, meats, dairy, and fish, simply prepared. It’s served in a house on a hill. To enter it, guests walk across a front porch, through a foyer, and into a vestibule whose main feature is a staircase leading up. There are three small dining rooms on the ground floor. Upstairs is a small bar (your best chance to eat at Primo in the summer if you don’t have a reservation), a small dining room that has a more bistrolike feel to it, and an open room that serves as a private dining room for up to fourteen people. Servers descend via a back stairway that leads to the kitchen. The hallways and doorways, the molding, the tongue-and-groove floors, the staircases all kind of whisper Home. The servers and cooks, they all work in a house, not a building, and this has its own impact. Service is casual, and the relationship between the servers and the cooks is not just cordial, it’s family-like, as much as front and back of the house can be, anyway. (Front and back is always a difficult bond.)