Grant had arranged for a room at a good rate for me at the Homestead, the hotel that houses Trio, located on a leafy street in Evanston, a few blocks south of Northwestern University. He suggested that I have dinner at Trio before I spent substantial time in the kitchen so that I’d come to the table with as few expectations as possible, and so I did.
I arrived in the subdued dining room, where about twenty-five people were seated. The room, lit by overhead dome lighting, was handsome, decorated in earthy browns and funky modernist art on the walls. Trio’s four-course tasting was priced at $85; the eight-course chef’s tasting menu, which included lobster, lamb, and beef dishes, at $120. Service was gracious and, knowing who I was and that I intended to spend the week in the kitchen, assumed correctly that I’d want the Tour de Force menu, the largest of the three tasting menus, twenty-eight courses ($175) that described the complete range of the Trio kitchen, a genuine culinary adventure.
Twenty-eight courses does not mean twenty-eight large plates of food, of course, or even small plates of food. One “dish” was simply a frozen circle of verjuice the size of a Communion wafer, a refreshing intermezzo toward the end of the meal. Some “dishes” came with no dishes at all, or even silverware. The first course was a small slice of Sri Lankan eggplant that had been poached in a spicy liquid and had a crisp sugar top, as if it had been brûléed, served on a fork—one bite, good flavors sweet and spicy with a nice crunch to go with the soft eggplant.
The next course: wild steelhead roe, tealike tosaka seaweed, and tiny cucumber balls, wrapped in a package of something reminiscent of rice paper—what was it? Tasty, mild, not weird. Interesting.
It was, rather, the third course that signaled I was not in a conventional fine-dining restaurant: salmon with pineapple and soy sauce—another one-biter. The whole deal was presented on what the staff called an “antenna,” a skinny rod about fourteen inches long rising at an angle through a heavy circular base. Not only was there no plate, all silverware had been removed from my table. The cubes of salmon and pineapple had been skewered on this antenna, and a soy sauce foam, stiff as shaving cream, had been dabbed on the pineapple. The creation bobbed gently before me, beckoning, like a little pet or something. I’d seen this thing arrive at other tables, and it was invariably fun to watch people’s reactions to it and what they did and how many angles they looked at it from—as if it were modern sculpture in a museum, but not something you put in your mouth—and to note how long it took them to go down on their food. Now it was time for others to watch me. And so I did—I went down on this thing. It tasted really good—salty, sweet, savory. But facing the bobbing little number, staring it down, and then actually getting it into your mouth—you didn’t need silverware, you didn’t even need arms—was odd and vaguely unsettling. I like using my hands, I decided.
And the meal caromed off from there, cruising, banking, breaking, one missed shot, and more than a few gorgeous swishes. The fourth course was among the latter. “Chilled English Peas ramps, eucalyptus, yogurt, ham,” the menu read. In my notes I called it pea soup. (I take notes throughout a meal like this, which is especially pleasurable to experience alone—the only way, as far as I’m concerned—I’d have been frustrated if anything beyond the food demanded my attention.) It was a chilled pea soup, dotted with fresh green peas, in a bowl with a wide, flat base—delicious in itself, kind of a no-brainer if you’ve got great peas. In the center of this was a disk of something white and creamy, on top of which was something icy and opaque, and on top of this ice—a granité, it looked like—were transparent pink balls, like pale salmon roe. The soup was also garnished with four shavings of Smithfield ham and small bright green leaves.
A very pretty and elegant-looking dish, conventional apparently—soup with garnish. And delicious. The peas and pea puree were a delight, something minty in there too, but not mint, hard to place, and the peas went perfectly with the ham (why not—as appropriate as a ham bone in split pea soup). The creamy center was a tart yogurt. The granité on top—hmm. Ham. Ham granité? OK. And the roe on top? That minty, unplaceable flavor—what was it? On the menu it said “eucalyptus.” Of course. Eucalyptus leaves—and eucalyptus…roe?
Who cares, this is a delicious dish, I thought.
The next dish had become something of a signature for Grant, the Black Truffle Explosion: It’s simply a ravioli filled with truffle juice with a slice of black truffle on top, a single bite that explodes in your mouth, exactly what it says on the menu. Delight.
The meal went on, but all the elements of the mind behind it were already in evidence: the unusual serving devices (Look, Ma, no hands!); conventional flavors in unconventional forms (ham granité, soy foam, and that rice paper wrapping the salmon roe and cucumber balls would turn out to be sake, gelled with agar); unconventional flavors in unconventional forms (eucalyptus roe); and perfect cooking technique (the peas).
But—very little cooking technique at all this early in the meal. That would come later, as dishes heavier on protein arrived—the beef and the duck and the lamb—much of it cooked sous-vide. (The Cryovac machine, which vacuum seals food in plastic, was evidently in more frequent use than the sauté pan.)
The lamb dish, for instance: Strips of lamb loin were cryovacked, then dropped in hot water until they were perfectly medium rare. They were then served with sunchoke puree, lamb sauce, ajwon (the seed of an oregano-like herb indigenous to the Middle East), and a little packet of stuff in a small rectangular cellophane pouch that the server called “bag of texture.” The lamb was perfectly cooked and had extraordinary flavor; it was grown by Keith Martin, in Pennsylvania, a guy I’d met while working on The French Laundry Cookbook, who fed his flock nothing but the finest grasses and alfalfa, which he grew himself. Indeed, because there were no flavors of searing, the lamb sensations were so vivid I actually saw in my mind’s eye Keith’s alfalfa fields—the flavor was so amazingly grassy and floral.
But because it wasn’t seared or grilled, but rather gently warmed, it would lack the complexity of flavor and texture that a good sear gives to red meats. Thus, the “bag of texture,” five items—capers, garlic chips, oregano leaves, sunflower seeds, and lamb that had been cooked to melting tenderness sous-vide, then pulled apart—deep-fried. Savory, crisp, crunchy, nutty—all of it delicious.
Desserts, likewise, ran the gamut, from interesting and solid—a great chocolate plate, including a very-high-fat bittersweet chocolate, on a flaxseed-and-pistachio cookie (flaxseed?!), a yeast sorbet (?!), and pistachio sauce—to somewhere beyond interesting (homemade bubble gum concluded the meal).
And then there was the out-there food—that “pizza” I’d heard about. A half-inch square of white paper, lightly dusted with tomato powder, fennel pollen, garlic that had been dehydrated and pulverized, and salt, affixed to the paper by a brushing of the fat rendered out of baked mozzarella. It tasted very much like pepperoni pizza; it lacked, of course, the heat and aroma, the chewy cheesiness, the fat, the protein, and the starch (though the paper was rice-based). Before Grant was born, I enjoyed having Space Food Sticks, a product that played off the popularity of the space program in the late 1960s, but Grant’s dishes were straight out of the Jetsons. The food wasn’t unpleasant by any means, but was this eating? Not always. The kitchen would sometimes chuckle when a table new to the restaurant would order the pizza as an appetizer while they looked over the menu.
Then there was the “shrimp cocktail”—which needed even bigger quote marks than the pizza. Trio’s shrimp cocktail came in a mouth spritzer set in crushed ice. That was it. Spritz, spritz—tastes just like shrimp cocktail!
The chips and dip (“Chicharrones con Salsa”) were fun—braised pigskin, cleaned up and fried puffy, and served with avocado that had been cured with salt and other seasonings, then pushed through a drum sieve into skinny “worms,” as well as the gelatinous seed-goop from ripe tomatoes, seasoned with garlic, chiles, cumin, and coriander. The dish composed mainly of seeds—kiwi, plantain, a
nd passion fruit—along with curls from the meat of young coconut, all dressed with lime vinaigrette, was a little nonsensical (there’s a reason we don’t eat fruit seeds), but it made me think about seeds. A fine-dining restaurant such as this usually serves a foie gras course. On the Trio menu it read “Moulard Duck Foie Gras blueberries, cinnamon, tapioca, sorrel.” The ingredients alone were enough to nudge this dish into the “odd” column, but more so: They arrived at the table in a glass tube, about an inch in diameter and about seven inches long, and made a strata of color along its length. Only a little instruction was required (“Cream end in your mouth first,” the server directed), and schluppft!—into the mouth. Like something you’d be doing to get drunk faster at a frat party. But it was tasty. The flavors (blueberry and sorrel?), amazingly, worked. The foie did not have a strong flavor, but instead gave the whole deal a very rich, luxurious feel. Grant had certainly figured out a surefire way to encourage the diner to eat multiple, separate ingredients in a set order—foie, blueberry puree, cinnamon tapioca, then again, foie, blueberry, tapioca, then conclude with sorrel puree and cinnamon jelly, a plug of it—to make this parfait really pop into your mouth.
The dinner lasted about four hours. Never once did I feel antsy. It was a delight all the way through, truly dining as entertainment in a way I’d never experienced before. And I was full, but not bloated. I’d enjoyed plenty of wine throughout the meal, but I didn’t feel drunk. This kind of thing is difficult for a chef to pull off. At a French Laundry over-the-top meal, after the second dessert course I’m praying the server will arrive with the mignardises tray and not another set of silverware; when the server does comes back with yet more silverware, I want to hoist up a white flag. This meal at Trio had been extraordinary. You wouldn’t want to eat this way every day. The Los Angeles Times article recounted a woman who got up and left after the third course, grumbling that she just wanted a steak. But the ingredients, methods, flavors, textures—all of it came together to create a new kind of dining experience. At least for me.
What was going on back there in the kitchen?
Trio’s kitchen is as traditional as the food is non. Entering the large rectangular space from the dining room, the hot line—the kitchen’s about forty feet long—and a bank of service counter is to the left, leaving a wide open path for the expediter (Grant) and numerous servers to come and go down the center of the kitchen. To the right is a coffee and beverage station followed by a raised built-in booth that serves as the chef’s table, where a table of four can eat and watch service at the same time (“Kind of a pain,” says Grant, “but people love it”). Desserts are finished and plated at the far end of the kitchen.
The Trio kitchen is celebrating its tenth anniversary—her opening chefs were Rick Tramanto and Gale Gand, who have gone on to considerable acclaim at their Chicago restaurant, Tru. Shawn McClain, who took over the kitchen when Rick and Gale left, now runs the Chicago restaurants Green Zebra and Spring, and was nominated in 2005 for a Best Chef Midwest award from the James Beard Foundation. Grant’s following McClain makes this string of chefs an unusually successful one for a restaurant, owned by Henry Adaniya, who’s proving to be something of an impresario for choosing stars in the making; the formal name of his restaurant is, appropriately, Trio Atelier, atelier being French for “studio” or “workshop.” (His choice to replace Grant would be Dale Levitski, a veteran of Blackbird in Chicago, one of the city’s best restaurants, but the change wouldn’t last. Adaniya would close it in February 2006.)
The place looks conventional in action, as morning routine gets under way, a dozen or so cooks at their stations banging out their mise en place—pasta dough being mixed, melons reduced to perfect parisienne balls, enormous cèpes being peeled (I’d been served the mushroom dish and eating an entire fat cèpe was as satisfying as eating a steak), butchering and portioning meat, picking and washing lettuces, and in a back room, the pastry room, gum being made, sorbet bases being mixed.
David Carrier, age twenty-eight, a sous-chef and a former commis at the French Laundry, moved through a box of asparagus. “This is what happens when you can’t get good asparagus,” he laments. Many of the asparagus came in kind of ratty on top, and so he was picking each ittybitty bud off the tip of those that were any good, part of a course featuring white and green asparagus with a chamomile vinaigrette (as well as littleneck and geoduck clams; a wine sorbet made from the wine they served with this dish, Argiolas Vermentino, from Sardinia; a poached quail egg and what looked like a raw hen’s yolk but was in fact an apricot puree, its exterior gelled with sodium alginate and calcium chloride so that it sat like a yolk waiting to break; and what the server had called “a fines herbes sponge,” about which, more later).
They do their lobster the way the French Laundry and Per Se do it now, by sous-vide. They include whole butter in the plastic pouch and drop it into 130-degree water.
John Peters, age twenty-nine, also a sous-chef and a veteran of Vong, Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s Chicago outpost, was the butcher and currently cut Keith’s lamb loins into strips (they called them “snakes”) to be bagged and cryovacked for service.
Nathan Klingbail, age twenty-four, had heard about Grant’s taking over Trio from his former boss, the chef at the Amway Grand, in Grand Rapids, Michigan, a kitchen where Grant had once worked. “It’s been three years and I ain’t bored yet,” he said as he worked through his prep list. “My parents didn’t understand why I would work these hours”—twelve-to sixteen-hour days for subsistence pay—“but after my dad saw Into the Fire,” a special series that profiled various kitchens and aired on the Food Network, “he said, ‘I understand.’” In the world of professional cooking, which in the vast majority of kitchens is dominated by the crushing monotony of daily prep, this was an exciting kitchen to be a part of.
The bizarre language of his list attested to this:
T1 snakes/chokes x2/sprouts/choke sauce/seed sauce/Aj sauce
Bag: g-chips & oregano & capers & lamb & seed
T2: shroomz/tongue/romaine/cress/arugula/puree/sauce/smoke
Roughly translated, his morning’s work focused on the “Elysian Fields Farm Lamb sunflower plant, bag of crispy texture” and the “Ribeye of Prime Beef spring lettuces, morel mushrooms, smoked tongue.”
Brett Jeffry was twenty-three-year-old “unpaid slave labor,” in his words, and he was delighted to be so. Brett was midway through his externship from the CIA, not long out of Turgeon’s class, in fact (“He’s the only guy who really talked about how busy it is, the importance of speed,” he said of his favorite chef-instructor there). Brett was so organized and focused he applied to extern at Trio as soon as he arrived at the CIA, months before he even set foot in a CIA kitchen.
Another extern had been nicknamed “Milk Crate” after he was caught sitting on one (you don’t sit, ever, when you’re in the kitchen, you just don’t). Milk Crate broke from his prep at 12:20 to vacuum the carpeted mats along the line.
Carpet along the hot line…hmm, haven’t seen that since the French Laundry and Per Se. And the blue aprons that everyone wore, the pervasiveness of the pint-size deli cups to hold sauces and mise en place—the feel of the French Laundry was palpable and visible. The water for blanching green vegetables was salty as the Atlantic. The veal stock looked and smelled exactly as it did at the French Laundry, pale brown and heavy with the sweet smell of tomato.
“Straight out of the book,” Brett said. He shook his head incredulously. “You taste it—oh, man.”
Mary Radigan, who’d remained friends with Chef Pardus after graduating from the CIA a year and a half earlier, was working pastry in back (though she made it clear to me she was a cook, not a pastry chef). “It’s a different learning experience here,” she said, recalling hours spent picking the individual cells of a grapefruit apart for a textural garnish for lobster—the popping in the mouth, the sweet-sour flavor a perfect seasoning for the shellfish. “A different way of looking at food.” She planned to leave
Trio to stage (or trail) at Blumenthal’s Fat Duck and travel in Europe and, she hoped, return to Chicago when Grant opened his new restaurant.
Her boss in pastry here was Curtis Duffy, age twenty-nine. Curtis had that vivid appearance of precision, ease of movement, and confidence reminiscent of the French Laundry cooks. He was from Columbus, Ohio, and went to culinary school at Ohio State University. He’d spent his formative culinary years, two and a half of them, at Charlie Trotter’s. He, John Peters, and David Carrier were the core of the Trio kitchen staff.
Trio’s is a roomy kitchen, the atmosphere is relaxed without being lax, and the cooks seem to form a cohesive and friendly group. Had I not already eaten the food, I’d have said this was same-old, same-old. But it’s not, which becomes clear only at service, after everyone’s station has been wiped down and pressed white cloth has been taped down at the pass (with painter’s tape, as at the French Laundry), in the center of the line, after Grant has set his station: serving spoons; a hotel pan with several rolled damp white towels with red pinstripes, to be used for wiping plates; ten “antennas,” the sculptures built for the salmon-and-pineapple dish, and twenty “squids,” silver prongs rising out of a small circular base used to hold one of Grant’s best dishes, a tempura of shrimp, Meyer lemon confit, and gelled cranberry, all held together on a vanilla bean skewer; a Diet Coke; a mug filled with a variety of markers; the long strip of metal that holds the tickets. Below were glasses to hold the smoke for the smoked tongue and other dish-specific vessels. The crew at the back of the kitchen, under Curtis’s direction, plates early courses (such as the pea soup) as well as desserts, and this station likewise is dressed in a starched white tablecloth fastened down with painter’s tape.
The Reach of a Chef Page 12
