Life, on the Line by Grant Achatz (leveled readers .TXT) 📗

against our will. I was eating more, but couldn’t fathom making it through a tasting menu. We slid past Don Johnson at the bar and were given the best table in the house. I looked at Nick and said, “I hope you’re hungry, because anything with a sharp edge or a spice is going in your mouth.”

But suddenly I could taste. A few things hurt if I chewed in the wrong spot, but the flavors were amazing. I had been afraid to venture too far from safe foods, but now I could see that I had been too conservative. Nick started blind-tasting me to see if I could really taste—who else would do that?—and sure enough, I was batting a thousand. The TV show and the documentary never panned out, but the trip was worth it for that meal.

I was back.

It’s hard to take the long view when you have cancer. From the moment I understood the diagnosis until well after my treatment ended the concept of a “future” did not exist for me. Planning long term gave way to making sure I was enjoying myself more in the moment.

Time with Kaden and Keller became special. I never had a talk with them where I told them I thought I was going to die or that the odds were I wouldn’t make it to forty. I just spent my Mondays and Tuesdays with them doing the things that I valued with my dad when I was a kid. Those times felt better than before.

Work, however, felt different. If I wasn’t building toward a future, then pushing hard in the kitchen, creating new dishes and techniques, seemed less rewarding, pointless even. And building a new restaurant began to seem foolish.

Nick had always encouraged me to invest for the long term. I enjoyed spending money even when I didn’t have it, and I never focused on savings or planning. Nick always stressed ownership over our business and intellectual property, forgoing money up front on projects like the book in order to keep control and make more in the long run. While I always agreed with the logic of that strategy and appreciated his efforts, it seemed now that I had made the wrong bet.

And yet, I kept waking up. I kept making small, imperceptible gains. My weight slowly returned and along with it my strength and stamina. There were a few days when I felt normal—or what my doctors called my “new normal.” I wasn’t what I once was, but I also wasn’t thinking about my health during the day.

I was just living. And it felt great.

At some point I stopped worrying about what I was going to do next and started enjoying myself again. Heather moved from New York to Chicago and we began spending real time together. I planned more trips and accepted more speaking engagements and cooking demonstrations, not for the money but for the opportunity to see the world and be inspired again by new ideas, art, and food.

As I stopped worrying about the future, I actually began to believe that I might have one.

Another offer from Vegas came just after the economic meltdown. It seemed an odd time to be getting such an offer, but as real estate was being pulled from the developers to the banks, the banks were looking to finish the projects. Once again, we spent time putting a proposal together and looking at the deal. It would have been good money. But once again, it just didn’t feel right. We couldn’t answer the question, “Why should we build a restaurant in Vegas other than for the money?”

In May 2010 I traveled to London for the World’s 50 Best Restaurants awards. Alinea moved up to number seven in the world, but even more significantly was named the Best Restaurant in North America. When we received that ranking from Gourmet, it felt amazing to us, but ultimately did not impact our business as significantly as we had expected. It was not reported in other magazines and newspapers, and while we would cite it to the press as one of our biggest achievements, it would rarely get mentioned. Somehow, this was completely different. The day after the awards newspapers all over the United States hailed Alinea as the “Best Restaurant in America.” People began calling the restaurant telling us that our website was down. Nick texted me in London: “Servers crashed. Fifty thousand requests for our site in the last hour! Phones off the hook.”

When I returned to Chicago Nick and I sat down and had a long talk. Now he was itching to do something nearly as much as I was. Alinea was rolling like never before, the book was in its fourth printing, and my health was less of a concern. He mentioned the duck breast I cooked for him on the day I was diagnosed with cancer.

“Chef, I am telling you, people want to see you cook ‘normal’ food. It would be a great story as well to have you show your chops. No one except me ever gets to see that.”

I thought it sounded boring. “Okay. So after I cook a duck breast and a few steaks, then what? What drives the restaurant?” Alinea is about constant innovation, of searching for the new and the better and the interesting. I had come to realize that I enjoyed that search more than the execution of the restaurant itself.

“Well, after we do that, why not just do an Italian menu for a while?” he said without thinking. “Then, when you get tired of that, just do something totally off the wall—Vietnamese food.”

“Naw. That’s impossible. You can’t retool a restaurant and a kitchen like that all the time. As soon as you get rolling on a menu you stop it and start again? And who shows up not knowing what they’re going to get?”

“You do realize that you just described Alinea, right?” Nick said with a smile. “Impossible is a