by Holly Hughes
We said goodbye to the Rottkamps. Driving back to the club, I asked Alex how he came to his job there. It wasn’t exactly the question I was supposed to ask, I guess—the question anyone would want to ask of the guy who spent ten years building one of the best restaurants in New York, one of the best restaurants in the world: “Why did you leave the game?” I didn’t want to ask that question. I didn’t want to ask this man something that would sound like I was questioning his honor or his commitment. But that might have been the question he heard anyway.
We pulled into the parking lot. “I like growing, I guess,” he started. “Watching plants grow. Watching people grow. I love cooking, but the balance of my life wasn’t so good anymore.
“In the restaurant, you feel like it’s a fight when you walk in the door. You’re fighting the purveyors, you’re fighting during prep, you’re fighting to be perfect in an imperfect system. Then service is a battle. There’s a lot of yelling and screaming. Whether it was me or someone else, I always talked to people after to make it good. It takes so many people to put on that show, and everyone’s important: the dishwasher, the coffee guy, the bread guy. I tried to make myself available to them, but it just got too crazy, to be between my family, my staff, the menu, the ordering . . . In life, all these things are tradeoffs. I do miss sometimes the energy of the city. Cooking is performance, and I enjoy the aspect of creating for people, especially when other chefs, critics, real foodies are coming through. I love feeding people.”
He paused, and I couldn’t tell if he was looking for words or getting emotional.
“At a restaurant like Daniel, you work so hard. I would be there eighteen hours a day, especially in the beginning, standing there and scrubbing down steel with my cooks after service. Believe me, you’re punishing the cooks. I guess I eventually just felt like I couldn’t ask that of them anymore if I wasn’t always going to be there for them, too.”
We decided to call it a day. It was hot, and his dinner service was starting. Casual millionaires were taking their seats for the barbecue on the veranda. The sushi station was set, the carving station was going up. Alex asked if he could get me a bottle of water for the road.
I waited a few minutes for him to come back out with the water, and his words turned in my mind. Alex Lee left the city for himself, for his family, but, just as much, because he was committed to the notion that if he couldn’t sacrifice everything of himself for his cooks, he shouldn’t be there at all. Could it be that he really had so little ego? Could it be that, after ten years of his life, after all the stars in the dining room and all the stars in the reviews, he didn’t think he should be doing it with his own name on the door?
A few days later, he will tell me over the phone that, just a few months ago, Daniel texted him out of the blue to say that the happiest he’d ever been in the kitchen was when he was cooking with Alex. And before I can follow up with a question, Alex will quickly change the subject and I will let it be, because some people want to keep their pride for themselves.
When Alex didn’t appear in the parking lot, I assumed he got stuck in service. I found him inside, by the Chicken Man’s fried chicken. He was munching on a drumstick, putting a few pieces into a box for me. He wanted to make sure, before I went, that he could feed me one more time.
SAVORING THE NOW
By John Kessler
From the Atlanta Journal-Constitution
As dining critic of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution,* John Kessler usually has to judge a restaurant on the basis of its food. But he has also been a restaurant cook himself; he knows what it takes to get that food on the table. Who better to tell the story of a talented young chef with a dream, racing against time?
On a warm afternoon in late September, Ryan and Jen Hidinger show visitors around a red brick two-story building on Edgewood Avenue in Old Fourth Ward. This handsome structure dates to 1906, and it will be everything to them.
The Hidingers speak in the imaginary future-inflected present—a verb tense known only to people with fantastic architectural plans. “So these are steps,” Jen says, pointing to a perfectly flat expanse of floor. “After guests walk down, they meet the hostess,” she continues with hands outstretched, outlining a standing desk or perhaps a very short hostess.
Ryan takes over. “Here’s the kitchen pass,” he says of thin air, the spot where cooks give finished plates to hovering waiters. “Guests are sitting here,” where he runs his hands over the smooth surface of a phantom counter facing the kitchen.
Ryan and Jen, who’ve been married for nearly eight years, pass the conversation ball back and forth with ease; you barely see the handoff, hear the pause, as one takes a breath and the other continues the tour. They walk their visitors through the middle of an imagined dinner service at their busy not-yet restaurant called Staplehouse. In the back courtyard, invisible guests sip drinks under the shelter of a weeping white oak, its fall leaves rustling on brick pavers underfoot. Meats roast in the open fire pit along the back wall.
At the front of the building upstairs lies the nexus of the whole operation—an office for the Giving Kitchen, the nonprofit philanthropic foundation that helps restaurant workers who can’t afford medical treatment when faced with an illness or catastrophic accident. The Giving Kitchen is Ryan and Jen’s life’s work, their gift back, their payment forward. Private donations and money collected from fundraising events—not to mention every penny of Staplehouse’s profit—will flow into it. Because of what they’ve been through in the past nine months, the Hidingers find themselves able to dream up such an audacious enterprise and convince everyone it will work.
Had the Atlanta restaurant community not rallied to raise funds when Ryan got the worst possible news, they wouldn’t be here. Rather than merely accepting the support, they kept the discourse going. They thought bigger.
The Hidingers lead their visitors back to a patio, Ryan’s favorite spot, by the concrete wall spiderwebbed with a dark filigree stain left by the ghost of a creeping vine. A guest asks to take their picture. “Like this?” asks Jen, striking a Betty Boop pose, a k a the proto-twerk.
“How about full nudity?” Ryan asks, hand on the brim of his ball cap, ready to expose his chemo-whitened crown of hair.
You go right ahead,” she laughs. “I’m keeping my clothes on.”
Love and Food
Ryan Hidinger (pronounced “HIGH-dinger”) first noticed Jen Wells in the Indianapolis market where she was bagging groceries in 2000. She looked a bit like Penelope Cruz—huge brown eyes, high cheekbones and long chestnut hair so dark it verged on black. He bought a pack of gum in her checkout line and asked her out. She looked this tall, earnest, 22-year-old catering cook up and down and said no. The next week he tried again. She thought for a second, pressed the button on her cash register until it spat out a length of receipt paper and wrote her store beeper number down. “Call me here,” she said, thinking it seemed cool to have a beeper.
She didn’t reveal she was only 17 and a high school senior.
When Jen told her tradition-minded Spanish mother she had a “formal date” with a culinary college graduate, Mary Carmen Wells shrieked loudly and insisted that he come over so the family could meet him. “Ryan showed up that night, and we went to the family room and sat him on the couch and started questioning his intentions,” Wells said. “Ryan called it the Spanish Inquisition.”
He charmed the family that night and got the blessing to date Jen as long as he didn’t interfere with her college education. While she took classes at Indiana University 50 miles away in Bloomington, he traded out his catering gig for a job at a restaurant called H20 Sushi. Greg Hardesty, who supervised Ryan in the kitchen there, saw an instinctive quality in Hidinger that escapes so many young hotshot chefs. “He puts the dish ahead of himself. He’s not the star, it’s the food that’s the star, and his job is to coax it.”
Once Jen graduated, they got engaged and took off in his Volkswagen Golf for a whirlwind cross-country tr
ip. They drove west across the Rockies, down the coast, through the Southwest arriving at Ryan’s brother’s house in Atlanta with no money and an empty gas tank. Atlanta. It was as good a place as any to pitch a tent.
Ryan soon landed a job as a line cook at Bacchanalia, Atlanta’s top-rated restaurant. It wasn’t easy. Hierarchy, intense pressure: that’s the way high-level kitchens operate. When asked about the job, Hidinger says, “I wouldn’t trade that experience for anything in the world. It gave me everything I needed.”
Ryan persevered, got promoted and soon moved to a management position at sister restaurant Floataway Cafe. But he wanted that feeling of family back, and so he and Jen began talking about opening their own restaurant. Nothing fancy, just a sandwich shop. But a really good one, with quality ingredients. Ryan even had a name—Staplehouse, a portmanteau he made up and then turned over often in his mind to admire its facets of meaning.
Ryan looked around Atlanta for the best example of the concept he had in mind, which led him to Muss & Turner’s in Smyrna. The popular gourmet deli was starting to improve its wine and beer lists and morph into a dinner destination. It felt perfect—the place where Ryan might find his Atlanta family.
A Dream Takes Form
Ryan Turner remembers how unlike other chefs Ryan Hidinger seemed when he applied at Muss & Turner’s that day in 2006. “He was very humble, very quiet, just a Midwest good guy who played basketball and ate chicken wings,” recalls Turner. “He was not the punk rock kind of chef.” Ryan had neither tattoo nor piercing on his 6’4” frame, showed meticulous knife skills, paid attention to seasonal produce and could take or leave pork belly.
Turner hired him right away. The management-level position paid a typically low foodservice salary but would entitle Ryan to benefits on the restaurant’s group health plan.
Within six months, he was running the kitchen. He oversaw the menu’s shift to the new open-ended format that was changing American dining—more small plates and shareable appetizers, a peaceful coexistence of sandwiches and knife-and-fork entrees, a suggestion that cutting-edge cooking could happen in low-key, comfy places that encouraged guests to relax. In the kitchen he encouraged calm voices, teamwork and opposing opinions from his staff.
The experience made Ryan rethink Staplehouse; maybe it should be more than a sandwich shop. One day at work he pulled Turner aside to share his idea. “I want it to be a restaurant but not a big one. Fifty seats, that’s all—a neighborhood place,” he said. “Larger restaurants get so contrived. With a smaller place you can make more personal connections, attract the right kind of people.”
Turner wasn’t buying it. “You’re not going to make any money with a 50-seat restaurant,” he said flatly.
“If I wanted to make money,” Ryan sighed, “I wouldn’t be in the restaurant business.”
In 2009, Ryan and Jen started a supper club called Prelude to Staplehouse. “We knew we wouldn’t be able to open a restaurant that had legs without doing it,” said Jen, who sensed their brand must be built on a foundation, and their literal foundation was their Grant Park bungalow. “It was the only way to gain respect and value” for Ryan as a signature chef.
They figured they could fit 10 people max—four at the kitchen counter, six around the white Ikea dining room table. They offered tickets on a blog and sold four the first week. The diners filed in on Sunday, Ryan’s night off.
As word spread, they began selling out—often within minutes of putting the tickets online. Guests arrived slightly freaked by the transitional neighborhood a few blocks west of Zoo Atlanta. They walked into a tiny living room to the strains of the Pixies from an iPod speaker and a waiting glass of wine. Soon they were sitting down to five-course dinners with dishes such as homemade duck sausage with cornbread and local greens. By the time they left, the guests had moved from polite conversation to an exchange of bear hugs and phone numbers, their bellies full of the Hidinger brand of hospitality. Jen’s gregarious quick wit and eye for setting the stage proved as much of a draw as the food. Reporters and bloggers helped spread the news about not only the supper club, but also the would-be restaurant, Staplehouse.
Did they have a location yet? An opening date? Not yet, the Hidingers said, we’re still working at it.
While Ryan and Jen had no problem raising the capital of community goodwill, banks and investors refused to bite. The rejections came—ceaseless, almost comical, eventually depressing. All they wanted to do was open a little restaurant, and it was proving impossible.
Between the job and the supper club, Ryan worked without taking a break. Colleagues began to notice he seemed stressed out and sullen. Sometimes he went in the back office to sit at the desk with his head down on his arms.
Jen thought he needed a jolt, something that would bring the hopeful Ryan back. On their seventh wedding anniversary in December, she gave him a plane ticket to New York. She couldn’t afford a ticket for herself or the cost of a hotel room, but she could give her husband one whirlwind day in New York stuffing his face. He had never been. Ryan Smith, the chef at Empire State South who was dating Ryan’s sister, Kara Hidinger, decided to join him for some quality bro time.
The day was a gustatory orgy of Moroccan lamb sausages at one stop and spicy rice cakes at the next. They slurped dozens of oysters with absinthe cocktails, feasted on octopus slicked with pork fat, drank shots of Blue Bottle espresso and ordered more rounds of beer than they could count. They only felt queasy in the cabs that shuttled them from restaurant to restaurant, but otherwise they rode through the city on a cloud of limitless appetite.
A New Purpose
Ryan, who never got sick, stayed home from work the day after the trip. And the next day, too. It seemed like the flu. He went back to work but felt like hell. At night his stomach cramped. Sharp pains. He couldn’t sleep.
The following week he visited his doctor, who recommended an ultrasound. It showed “liver abnormalities.” The doctor scheduled an MRI, magnetic resonance imaging, for a more accurate picture. After the MRI, Hidinger headed back to work, feeling guilty for taking so much time off. But a member of the radiology team intercepted him by phone and asked him to return as soon as possible to a different address on the Emory campus to go over the scan.
Hidinger plugged the address into his iPhone and was stopped cold. The word that lit up on his phone stabbed him like a knife. He called Jen. He could barely talk. “The Winship Cancer Institute,” he cried. “That’s where they want us to go.”
The doctor was blunt, pointing to scattershot white spots and masses. He needed a biopsy to make the official call but felt 99 percent certain they were looking at images of late-stage gall bladder cancer. Metastasis to the liver. A spot on the lung. “This is a bad diagnosis,” the oncologist said. Ryan and Jen wept and held each other.
“Usually patients with this cancer have six, maybe up to 12 months,” the doctor said.
The news made Jen’s head spin and she grasped at thoughts, any thoughts, to anchor herself. A weird one came to her overactive mind: That day’s date was Dec. 21, 2012—Mayan End Days. She was 30, the good man next to her was 35, and it felt like their end days.
Gall bladder cancer is exceptionally rare, less than 1 percent of all cancers. It typically shows up in Asia, where parasites are believed to trigger it. Environmental issues might also play a role.
Ryan could count on his group health policy at work to pay for treatment, but the co-pays alone might cost more than he and Jen could manage.
That is when the extended Atlanta restaurant community, in breathtaking fashion, swept into play. The day after New Year’s, dozens of the biggest names in the Atlanta dining community showed up to plan Team Hidi, a fundraiser for the Hidingers. “It was an amazing collaboration,” says Turner. “All these so-called competitors came together to help one of their own.” Among them, chef Anne Quatrano led a small army from Bacchanalia and Floataway Cafe.
Three weeks later nearly 800 people filed into the King Plow
Arts Center to eat, drink and offer support. The event raised more than $275,000. The turnout overwhelmed Ryan. “It’s not like I save lives or anything,” he said. “All I do is cook.”
The Hidingers decided to seek treatment at Cancer Treatment Centers of America, a new facility in Newnan. According to CTCA oncologist Brion Randolph, the center focuses on “the genome or the genes of the cancer itself, and figure out what kinds of mutations this person’s tumor might have.”
Ryan slept a lot those first weeks and stayed home as the chemo stripped weight from his body and verve from his soul. More than anything he felt sad, just bone-weary with the ache of it.
He was lying in bed when the sun shone in one day, and with it came a prickly January breeze. Jen had left the back door open for their dogs, Vida and Camper. It was, he says, a “distinct moment.” The breeze touched his face, and the sadness was gone.
He knew then he needed a purpose.
The night after the Team Hidi event, Turner couldn’t sleep. He couldn’t sleep the next night, either. He got up at 5 a.m. and poured his heart into an email addressed to Ryan. “I can’t stand the thought of you sitting at home with chemo running through your veins,” he wrote.
He spelled out a plea: “‘All I do is cook’ is what you keep saying and you are right and you need to keep ‘cooking.’ Replace the word cooking, with ‘creating.’ That is what you do Ryan. You take ideas and inspiration and with food you create dishes that bring people joy and deep admiration. You don’t need food to create, BUT you need to keep creating and contributing. STAPLEHOUSE is your ultimate creation that embodies everything important to you and Jen. It is time to start ‘cooking again.’”
