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

man. He’s in his office. I’ll call over there and see if he’ll talk to you now.”

I got the nod from Bill while he was still on the phone. “Go over there, G, make sure you knock, and take off your shoes before you enter the office.”

I was incredibly nervous and confused as I rapped on chef Trotter’s office door. Part of me questioned what I was about to do. It was my goal to become a great chef and in order to do so I knew that I would have to work in some great restaurants. I knew I had to endure being the new guy, to eat a fair amount of shit in the process. I was fine with that. But this wasn’t working. Trotter was rarely in the kitchen during the day, and when he was, he was giving a tour or simply walking through to discuss some aspect of the business with Bill.

I never saw Trotter cook.

Perhaps my ideal of learning from the man that created this amazing restaurant—and that amazing book—was unrealistic. I wanted to watch him work, learn how he cooked, hear his creative thoughts and processes. I wanted it to be like working with Jeff and chef Stallard. I wanted one-on-one time and mentoring. But the personality of this kitchen was the antithesis of that. The behavior of Trotter made such mentorship of cooks impossible. I wanted to grow, but instead I got ass-kickings.

I sat down across from chef Trotter. “Chef, I’m sorry, but I need to leave.”

Instead of the response I expected—yelling—I received for the first time in my young tenure something amazing—encouragement. In a matter of minutes, chef Trotter convinced me to stay. It was some sort of Jedi mind trick that was almost magical—this is not what you want to do, Grant. You want to stay. Clearly he knew how bad I wanted to succeed, and he knew how intimidating he was to a twenty-one-year-old cook. He complimented me on my work in his kitchen. He reminded me how great this restaurant was and how it could help me become a leader. My experience at Charlie Trotter’s would open doors. I walked out of his office in a daze, confused by what had just happened. When I returned to the kitchen to finish up the cleaning Mike walked over and bumped into me on purpose, spilling the soapy water I was holding. As we bent down together to clean it up he whispered, “Did you do it?”

“Well, yes and no,” I said.

Mike popped up and began laughing loudly. He strode over to Bill with excitement and announced, “Charlie got another one, Bill. G caved!”

I left the kitchen at nearly 3:30 A.M., strapped on my Rollerblades in the back alley, and began skating to my minuscule apartment just north of the restaurant. The October air was crisp, and the smell of autumn in the Midwest made me intensely homesick. As I passed the late-night bars and blues clubs along Halsted, people were falling into the street after last call, and the encore music spilled out the door, mixing with the noise of the cabs and the wind.

I don’t belong here. This just doesn’t feel right, none of it.

I lasted a few more weeks at Trotter’s. I pushed hard and actually did some good work. But the feeling only grew more intense—I needed to leave.

The atmosphere was genuinely eerie as I walked out the back door of Trotter’s for the last time. The alley was dead quiet and an orange glow from the light affixed to a nearby telephone pole made chef Trotter’s skin the color of a carrot. He was sitting on the hood of his maroon Jaguar, one foot up on the front, one foot on the ground. I knew I had to present myself confidently. But as my foot touched down on the last brick of the alley I realized I was looking at it, head down sheepishly.

“What can I do for you?” Trotter asked.

“Chef, I am really very sorry, but I have to go. If I leave now my landlord is willing to change my lease to a three-month, but that means I can only give you two weeks notice so that I can be out in time.” This was not going as planned.

Trotter looked me in the eye. “Well, that is really quite unfortunate. Because if you do not stay at this restaurant for a full year, you will simply not exist to me. Period. That means don’t ever call me. Don’t ever use me as a reference. Don’t put Charlie Trotter’s on your résumé. As far as I am concerned, if you don’t work here for a year, you haven’t worked here for a day.”

It took everything I had to pick my head up and look the best chef in the country in the eye. I wasn’t afraid of Trotter, but I realized that I had failed.

“I understand, Chef,” I mustered.

There was an odd pause and we stared at each other for a moment. Then Trotter slid off the fender of the car, walked to the driver’s door, got in, and drove away.

CHAPTER 6

I returned to St. Clair and brooded.

When I got the job at Trotter’s, I thought for sure it was the break I needed. The restaurant was amazing, the food exciting, and Trotter was certainly on an all-or-nothing mission to be the best. He was succeeding, but I was getting exactly the opposite of what I needed. Instead, in a very short time, the Trotter experience managed to drain all of the confidence and drive that I had built up over years of cooking and thinking about food.

Maybe I wasn’t cut out for fine dining after all. Maybe I belonged in a diner.

My dad pulled me aside one afternoon. “You okay, kid?”

“That was my shot and I blew it. I have no idea what to do now.”

“Ahh. That place wasn’t right for you. Whenever you called home you didn’t