Grant Achatz faces ‘Life, on the Line’

Former French Laundry chef Grant Achatz was at the peak of his impossibly young and impossibly glorious career — a James Beard award-winning chef and owner of the nation’s top restaurant, Chicago’s Alinea — when the then 33-year-old was diagnosed with a deadly oral cancer that devastated his taste buds and seemed poised to take his life, too.

But “impossible” is just a word, especially to Nick Kokonas, Achatz’s best friend and business partner in Alinea, a restaurant whose name means “a new train of thought.” Alinea was built on the idea of breaking barriers, deconstructing dishes and reassembling them into intriguing new experiences — shattered foie gras with flowers, braised artichokes with liquid truffle. Gourmet magazine anointed the restaurant the best in America in 2006.

Achatz’s cancer diagnosis came less than a year later. The prognosis was grim and the treatment options horrifying. Beethoven and other tales of deaf composers and blind artists aside, what kind of chef contemplates the removal of his tongue with anything approaching calm? Achatz had all but given up when Kokonas dragged him to the University of Chicago, where doctors, he said, had had a new train of thought. It was a trip that saved Achatz’s life.

Today, Alinea is thriving. Achatz and Kokonas are opening a new restaurant and cocktail lounge in Chicago later this spring, and they’re heading back to San Francisco next week, halfway through a book tour for their memoir, “Life, on the Line.”

It’s not just the story of a cutting-edge restaurant, peppered with appearances by everyone from The French Laundry’s Thomas Keller to mercurial Chicago chef Charlie Trotter and Spain’s Ferran Adria of El Bulli fame. And it’s not just a tale of friendship and family, although readers will love discovering whose name Achatz’s younger son bears. It’s a riveting page-turner and the passages that describe Achatz’s recovery and return to the line that leaves readers hungry to hear what happened after the book ended.

So when Achatz called to chat, we had plenty of questions — about the book, the chefs and personalities, and what happens next.

Q: Charlie Trotter sure doesn’t come across as warm and fuzzy. Do you ever talk with him?

A: Occasionally I’ll see him, jogging or walking his dog, on my way to work. I don’t think people realize that elements of his personality and character ultimately became mine.

Q: Such as “…?

A: That constant pursuit of perfection, the highly competitive spirit, that all-or-nothing approach to making an ultimate restaurant. I have all the respect in the world for Charlie.

Q: And Thomas Keller?

A: It’s almost impossible to quantify that. The thing with The French Laundry is, I was there for so long and at such a critical, highly malleable stage in my youth and my life, as a person and as a cook. The short answer, honestly, is everything — everything from how to cook to how to live your life, I absorbed from him. When you’re there for so long and you drink the Kool-Aid the way that I did, it’s so entwined in you it becomes you.

Q: During your devastating illness, you completely lost your sense of taste. Let’s talk about that.

A: For a long, long time — literally 11 months to a year — I could put anything in my mouth and it wouldn’t taste like anything. It was the most bizarre thing, especially for someone who devotes their entire life to tasting and cooking. That was a big part of why I lost so much weight. There was no compelling reason to even eat. No enjoyment. It really plays with your head.

Q: What was it like as that sensation came back?

A: It came back in stages — sweet was first, then salty, bitter, acid. I think it made me a better chef, because as an adult, I’ve experienced the evolution of that sense in the way that a newborn would progress. When you’re first born, you can only taste sweet. When you’re 3 months old, you don’t know what’s going on. As a 33-year-old adult you can wrap your head around the function of taste and flavor. When all you can taste is sweet and nothing else, you can bite a raw artichoke, a quadruple espresso and it does not taste bitter. The moment you can taste bitter, you understand the relationship of sweet and bitter, how they synergize and what it means to flavor. Then the salt comes in and you compare those components. It was something.

Q: Grappling with reawakening flavor, recovering from chemo — how did that affect what was happening in your kitchen?

A: I worked all the way through — missed a little bit at the end, because I was just a mess. There were adjustments. For one, you can’t taste, and now you come in to work? There’s a giant role reversal. I would be making a sauce and I would have to give it to one of the cooks to evaluate and they would tell me what it needed. Guests, they would come in and not be really sure how to act around me. But the work is the work. You don’t really have a choice. The 60-some people who were working for me expected me to jump right back in the pool.

Q: Now you’ve got the book tour and not one, but two new places opening?

A: Aviary is going to be the Alinea of the cocktail world, kind of ripping apart what a cocktail bar is, manipulating it and then putting it all back together in a way that is compelling and meaningful. The food will all be progressive finger food. Nothing on a plate or bowl and nothing that has to be consumed with flatware. Like nigiri or tapas — that style — but progressive and utilizing the techniques at Alinea.

Q: And Next, your new restaurant?

A: The whole philosophy is, it’s a new restaurant every quarter — based on a geographic location and a time. So, Paris in 1906, Sicily in 1946.

Q: We hear the pricing is somewhat unorthodox too. Prepaid dinners?

A: You’ll go on our site, just like you were buying a ticket to a Broadway show. And the prepay component is variable, so basically, we have a system that allows us to price — I don’t want to say the less desirable, but everybody likes to eat Saturday night at 7, so say it’s $85. You can have the same exact menu, same exact experience for $65 Wednesday at 9:15, because it’s a less popular slot.

Q: Ah. Like airplane tickets. Only without the lost luggage?

A: (Laughs) That’s right.

Q: So, why 1906 Paris?

A: Escoffier. It’s 1906, based on his cookbooks and writing and recipes — verbatim. Originally, we were going to do a Paris bistro, but it was a little bit too rustic for me. I wanted to do kind of an homage to what I feel virtually every chef builds on as the foundation: Escoffier, classic French refined cooking from the early 1900s. He’s the big daddy of them all.

Q: Decadent, huh?

A: The food is so rich and so unbelievable. We did a practice last night at Alinea. How did people eat this every night back then? They must have been dropping like flies from heart attacks.