Life on the Line Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  PREFACE

  PART 1 - STANDING ON THE MILK CRATE

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  PART 2 - A NEW TRAIN OF THOUGHT

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  PART 3 - LIFE, ON THE LINE

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  EPILOGUE

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  First printing, March 2011

  Copyright © 2011 by Achatz, LLC

  All rights reserved

  Chicago Tribune article on pages 376-378 reprinted with special permission of the Chicago Tribune; copyright

  Chicago Tribune; all rights reserved

  The images on pages 234, 235, 237, and 238 are courtesy of Grant Kessler. All other images within the text are courtesy of the author.

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  PREFACE

  On June 8, 2008, I flew to New York to attend the James Beard Foundation Awards. I was nominated for the Outstanding Chef Award. It is the ultimate recognition a chef can get at the Beard Foundation, and arguably the ultimate recognition for an American chef, period. I wanted to win.

  I just didn’t want to be there when I won.

  Five months earlier I had finished a brutal course of chemotherapy and radiation treatment for stage IVb squamous cell carcinoma. There is no stage V or even a IVc. The cancer was located primarily in my tongue and was a tumor that took up more than 50 percent of the visible part. According to the scans, it had also metastasized to my lymph system, located primarily on the left side of my neck. Everyone certainly hoped it had not spread below my collarbones. If it had, well—time to “get your affairs in order.”

  The chemotherapy had left me bald, pimpled, scaled, and sore. The radiation had burned my tongue and face from the inside out. The lining of my esophagus would shed like a snakeskin and I was forced to peel it out of my throat while choking and vomiting. I started the treatment at 172 pounds. By the end I weighed 127.

  I couldn’t taste a thing. Nothing. Food was cardboard and salt was just sand in my mouth, dissolving oddly and slowly with no purpose. Eating was a horrific and painful ordeal to be tolerated three or four times a day. Cooking at Alinea became a gauntlet to run every night: wonderful smells that you can’t taste, food you used to love that you can’t eat.

  By the time the Beard Awards arrived, I had begun to recover from the treatment. I was in remission and apparently cancer-free. But the healing process would take time, and now I had to show up at Lincoln Center in New York, greet the other chefs, the restaurateurs, and the press.

  I wanted to run away. I looked terrible. I had a scraggly goatee because I was unable to shave without peeling away my skin. My hair had started to grow back, but the back of my head was still bald—I looked like a sixteenth-century monk. My legs were sticks and the skin over my rib cage was sunken in. The tuxedo draped over my shoulders like it would on a hanger.

  But what really concerned me was that I could barely talk. My tongue was half the size it used to be—it was nearly all tumors, and now those tumors had been vaporized by radiation. It was peeled, red, white, and sore, and the muscles that control it had been atrophied by the radiation. Part of my neck and most of my lymph nodes had been removed, leaving nerve damage under my chin. My lips didn’t always go where I intended them to, and my speech sounded slurred and distorted. Like eating, speaking was arduous.

  None of this was a good setup for a public appearance. And it got off to an awkward start. When I arrived at Lincoln Center, many of the country’s great chefs tried to avoid me. No one approached me to say hello. I walked through the crowd and felt like a leper. At that time it did not occur to me that they were trying to “act normal,” to not have to ask, “How are you doing?”

  The only good news at this point was that I was reasonably certain I would not win. Nick Kokonas, my business partner, put my chances as only a good friend could: “You have no chance of winning. Dan Barber is going to kick your scrawny ass. He is a great chef, he’s been at it longer, and he is from New York. That is a killer combo. And he cooks real food. You’re screwed.” We had a good laugh at that, but it was exactly what we both thought.

  I grabbed a glass of champagne as a prop and stood in a corner with my girlfriend, Heather. Although I considered leaving, she convinced me to go inside and sit down. I slumped down in my seat and the awards began. These ceremonies tend to drag on, and Outstanding Chef was the very last award to
be given.

  Finally, Kim Cattrall slinked onstage to announce the last award of the evening. I perked up momentarily, smiled when my name was read as a nominee, and settled back into my chair. Then the announcement: “The Outstanding Chef in America for 2008 is . . . Grant Achatz.” I was stunned. Suddenly I was onstage and the crowd stood, cheering. The words, unprepared, tumbled out of me:

  “Rather than thank specific people who obviously I need to, but in fact, probably know who they are, I want to tell a quick story instead, if I could. In 1996, I started at The French Laundry as a commis. I was twenty-two years old, and I was in awe. I walked into that restaurant, and I saw a gentleman that ultimately would become my mentor and, at this point, even though it feels a little awkward to say, a great friend. What struck me about the restaurant was ‘the push.’ I had never seen it before in my life. I had never experienced the discipline, the dedication, the intensity, the tenacity, and the drive that both the chef and all of the cooks possessed. I pulled that in, thinking it was going to make me a good cook and ultimately, a great chef. What I didn’t know was that it was actually going to save my life. That drive, that tenacity, that dedication that I took in at that restaurant . . . it became a part of who I am, ten years later, twelve years later. It helped me get through a pretty ridiculous battle.

  “I think that everybody in the room can be proud of that, because everybody can relate to how cooking, in one way or another, has not only influenced their professional career, but also their lives. Also, I need to thank everybody in this room for the tremendous amount of support that I received in this last year. I had e-mails, countless phone calls, letters, packages, offers from chefs that I consider mentors, friends, colleagues, and visionaries to help in any way that they possibly could at a time when I needed it. I didn’t let any of them come to the restaurant and cook like they suggested. I couldn’t do that to the [Alinea] cooks. But the support that I received was critical at a time when I needed it and again, I think we can all be very proud of that. I know that it really helped me push through. That’s really it. I’m kind of in awe. I think that it’s an amazing honor, and I really appreciate it, and I thank you all. Thank you.”

  The award is fantastic for any chef to win, but for me it was a new beginning.

  The news of my cancer was on the front page of the Chicago Tribune and covered prominently by the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, but the news of my recovery was less publicized. Business at Alinea, for the first time ever, began to wane—patrons thought I was still sick, or worse—dead—and I was worried that while I had beaten cancer, I had not won the fight for the restaurant I loved. But that award made all the difference. Customers came back. I saw things more clearly and became more focused.

  I returned to Alinea the next day, stepped into the kitchen, and worked with a vigor I had never felt before.

  PART 1

  STANDING ON THE MILK CRATE

  CHAPTER 1

  My mom pulled a dining room chair over to the stove and turned a milk crate upside down on the seat so I could stir the cherry Jell-O into the hot water. I watched as the powder dissolved like magic, knowing that when it cooled, it would turn into a strange, jiggly solid. At five years old, it was my introduction to cooking.

  My mom worked weekends for Grandma Achatz at her restaurant in the riverside town of Marine City, Michigan. A village of four thousand, Marine City sat just across the border from Ontario, Canada. Mom baked pies and cooked short-order breakfasts while I was given a few dishes to “wash.” The Achatz Café was tiny. The whole place was basically just eight bar stools and a kitchen, which wasn’t much aside from a tabletop griddle for the hash browns, bacon, and sausage links; a few small residential refrigerators; and a beat-up stove. The design was Americana, circa 1965.

  My dad’s sisters Liz and Patty cooked while Aunt Cathy waited tables. They would do their work while giving me small tasks to keep me occupied and out of the way.

  I never got a toy Easy-Bake oven or a play kitchen. I played every day at the Achatz Café surrounded by my family and a town full of people who knew my name.

  As I grew a bit older I graduated from pot washer to vegetable peeler and eventually to chief egg cracker. The egg station, two portable electric burners with not much more power than a coffee warmer, was situated at the front of the restaurant in front of a few large windows overlooking Main Street.

  There was a lot of foot traffic on Main during the warmer months, and people peeked in to see me sitting on the counter next to my grandmother, cracking eggs into the pans for her.

  “We got an ‘over hard,’ Grant, you’re up!” she would call out. I would then run over to crack a few eggs. With the over-hards it didn’t matter if the yolks broke. But through time I broke fewer and fewer, and one day my grandmother called me over and said, “This one’s over easy.” I cracked carefully, aware that the customers were watching. A bit of pride welled up in me. I was the little kid who could cook—I was at the top of the egg-station now, doing the over-easies.

  In February 1980, when I was seven, my parents borrowed $5,000 from my grandmother to open their own restaurant.

  Mickey’s Dutch Treat was an ice-cream parlor right next to the train tracks that divided the small community of Richmond, Michigan. My grandmother’s sister had heard that the owner wanted out and mentioned it suggestively to my father. Dad was hanging drywall at the time, but he had worked in restaurants off and on since he was sixteen. The dream of self-employment was something he always fostered, and cooking seemed as logical a choice as any other for a business.

  The new restaurant was given a quick once-over, and the Achatz Depot was born. It was open for breakfast, lunch, and dinner seven days a week—and my dad didn’t skip a day that first year.

  From the start the Depot was busy. The Achatz name was synonymous with food in the area. There was of course my grandmother’s place in Marine City, and ten miles to the east in Armanda, Dave Achatz—my dad’s first cousin—owned a very successful diner. Irene’s Catering, my great-uncle’s business, had been feeding people at weddings, graduations, and funerals for years. The Achatz family fed the community, cradle to grave.

  Achatz Depot grossed nearly $200,000 its first year, all the while paying the enormous rent of $300 per month. That is good money now, and in 1980 it was a huge success. Dad worked eighteen hours a day then, but he didn’t seem to mind it. Success has a way of making the work seem less like, well, work.

  Much like his mother’s place, the general hiring strategy was to find the closest family members and put them to work. My mom was there while I was at school. Two of my dad’s brothers, a couple of sisters, a cousin, and my mom’s brother also worked there. The Achatz Depot was more like the Achatz Family Reunion with a shifting cast of characters, depending on the day and time. And like before, I came in whenever I could during the week and all day on the weekends.

  It felt like home.

  “Just take the burger blanket, stick three or four fries in the middle, and wrap that sucker up like a taco and eat it.” Burger blankets were thin-cut, half-dollar-sized pickles that we put on nearly every sandwich.

  Uncle Norm demonstrated the process of eating his creation with exaggerated gusto. He tilted his head to the side and looked like Ozzy biting the head off a bat, complete with growling sound effects. These kinds of things can leave an impression on a young boy.

  Norm, my dad’s youngest brother, was baby-faced, but big. Tall, thick-boned, and bordering on rotund, he was the archetypal mean uncle. He was the relative who would wrestle a bit too hard and hit you on the shoulder when you weren’t looking, leaving a serious mark. A headlock followed by some SNL noogies were standard protocol every chance he got. “This will toughen you up, you spoiled brat.”

  Norm was my godfather. He was also a surrogate big brother, a sibling that I never had. I loved him a lot despite, or perhaps because of, the tough love. Like most of my extended family, Norm worked at the Depot as a line cook b
etween his own drywalling jobs. He was definitely rough around the edges—he had a raspy voice from years of drinking and cigarettes, callused hands from hanging drywall and cooking most of his life, and a fading, crappy tattoo on his forearm that read simply, NORM. Occasionally, when there were a few moments to spare and Norm and my dad shared a beer or two, they would spin tales of pool games and bar fights, and to my eight-year-old ears it seemed that Norm was indeed a good coach for learning to get tough. He lived alone and spent much of his free time hunting and fishing. Norm basically lived a Hank Williams Jr. song, and whenever possible, I tried to tag along.

  “Grant, you just try it. Trust me, it’s good,” he chuckled in the way that usually meant anything but “trust me.”

  I was pretty sure this was a mean prank to gross me out. I backed away slowly, out of arm’s length, and bought some time to see if he made himself another of these strange concoctions. He did, over and over. He genuinely seemed to be enjoying them. Eventually I got curious enough to try it.

  I took the first bite carefully and braced myself for a putrid taste. But somehow it was good. No, it was really, really delicious. I reached for another.

  “I told you. See, you should listen to your uncle Norm more often. I have a few things I can teach you.”

  “It’s so weird, though, right?”

  “Not really—you put ketchup on your fries, right?”