Best Food Writing 2013 (51 page)

The word “grace” rolled off his tongue, effortless and soft. He saw it defined in his cooking style—elegant, delicate, the rock ‘n' roll celebrity TV chef-antithesis. Curtis favored light over heavy in his food, seldom using butter or cream. At Avenues, half his menu was vegetarian.

“Grace” was also something he found working behind the hot stove. The significance didn't escape Curtis. The word resonated so much he named his younger daughter Eden Grace.

“If I ever owned a restaurant,” he told himself, “it will be called Grace.”

His wine director at Avenues, Michael Muser, was a man with the opposite personality: boisterous, ebullient, not above pulling practical jokes on strangers. But the two became fast friends over a shared love of motorcycles, cigars and fine wine, and they decided to become business partners.

The two found an Avenues regular—a real estate man named Mike Olszewski—who agreed to help bankroll their dream: to operate the best restaurant in the country, uttered in the same breath as heavyweights The French Laundry and Alinea. They began by leasing an old frame shop in the West Loop, near restaurant neighbors Girl & The Goat, Next and Blackbird.

When Curtis announced he was leaving Avenues in July 2011, he set a goal of opening by the following March. But building a restaurant proved different from composing a menu.

If he planned to charge $250 a person for dinner, then every detail had to be thought out. And every detail strained the budget. An Internet
router. Paper clips. Light fixtures in the bathroom. They thought about getting trays on the table that would accommodate a diner's cellphone.

If there were disagreements among the three partners, they typically fell along this line: “Do we buy the best version of what we need, or should we be cost efficient?” Muser, for instance, wanted horseshoe-shaped white leather chairs in the dining room that cost $2,300 each. Curtis told him he was crazy. Eventually they decided those chairs were the most comfortable, and they talked the dealer down to a discounted price of $1,000 each.

Curtis' cooking was the sort of intricately plated food to be consumed in six bites or fewer—just enough before the palate, mentally, becomes numb to the same flavor. “You want diners to say, ‘I wish I had one more piece of Wagyu beef, one more piece of salmon,” Curtis said. “You want them to not have
just enough
of a dish; you want them to crave for one more bite.”

So the plateware, Curtis decided, should act as more than serving vessels and actually enhance the taste of a dish, even if just in the mind. A chestnut puree's creamy texture might be accentuated, he reasoned, if it was served in a bowl with no edges. He ordered curved bowls from France that resembled overinflated inner tubes.

Another idea was serving a dish inside an edible tube made of flavored ice; the diner would crack the tube with the side of a spoon to reveal what was inside. Curtis visited the Chicago School of Mold Making in Oak Park to collaborate on a custom silicone canister that could freeze water into a tube in 45 minutes.

The plates alone cost more than $60,000. An all-granite-countertop kitchen equipped with the ovens and fridges needed would cost $500,000 more. In all, the partners said, to build Grace from an empty concrete shell cost $2.5 million.

As at Avenues, Curtis planned two menus of 10 courses each, one meat-based, the other mostly vegetarian. Labeling his cooking as a specific cuisine is futile—“progressive American,” if one prefers pithiness, though obscure ingredients such as
sudachi
(a green citrus fruit from Japan) or Queensland blue squash are centerpieces of dishes. When Curtis brainstorms dish concepts, it's a free-form exercise with pen and paper. After many years, he's developed a “mind's palate”—Curtis could name three disparate flavors and, in his head, know exactly how they'd taste together. In his sketch pad,
Curtis would jot down a main ingredient to anchor a dish. Then he'd scribble off supporting ingredients that might pair well, or, if it's the effect he's seeking, clash in a palatable manner. His notebook is like a casting director's clipboard: a long list of candidates, whittled down to achieve on-plate chemistry.

While Curtis and his culinary team focused on food, every passing day at the Randolph Street space brought a new set of problems. Sheets of glass arrived cracked. The kitchen ventilation hood came in the wrong size. Construction crews checked out by 3 p.m. most days. No surprise, Curtis and his partners blew past the proposed March opening date, and delays would push it back to April, then June, then August. September came, and the kitchen wasn't even installed.

Then October. And November.

Curtis' frustration was visible. He'd lifted weights at 4 a.m. every morning—now he didn't have time for it and began gaining weight. Hairs above his ears turned gray in greater numbers.

But slowly, surely, exasperatingly, the blond-wood millwork walls and frosted windows and glass pendant lamps were put up, 64 white leather chairs were placed in the dining room, and by December, Grace restaurant went from figment in Curtis' mind to reality.

Industry friends were invited in for a series of three practice dinners. Even these test runs required 14-hour workdays. By the end of practice night No. 3, the waitstaff walked with chin up and upright posture. They had passed all the written tests on ingredients, wine pairings and related allergies. Cooks, meanwhile, achieved their goal of five minutes between an empty plate taken away and arrival of the next course. Behind the glass-enclosed kitchen, dinner service was an exacting, choreographed dance invisible to customers.

On Dec. 11, Grace opened its door to the public at last. Curtis got his usual three hours of sleep. If he was excited, there was no outward sign of it—long ago he had learned to keep his head down and focus on the task.

He knew Kim and their daughters would not attend. They had prior commitments, he said. He wished it weren't so.

“I wanted them to walk through the door before anybody else.”

But there was one other person he wanted on hand for the first night of service.

A taxi pulled in front of 652 W. Randolph St., and Ruth Snider emerged in a red coat and shimmering black gown along with her daughter Lauren.

They had arrived for their 9:30 p.m. reservation.

It had been three years since Curtis and Snider had last seen each other, and when they met in the restaurant's front lobby,

They'd first met when Curtis was 12, when he and his older brother had beaten up neighborhood kids for fun. And she stayed with him through all that followed—his parents' deaths, his dash out to Colorado, the christening of his daughters, the pending divorce. Snider was there the moment Curtis fell in love with cooking, and now she was here on opening night.

Snider and her daughter sat at the table closest to the kitchen window and watched as Curtis plated each dish for them. He instructed his cooks that no one else would prepare Table 11's dinner.

Snider watched Curtis float through the kitchen—the same quiet sixth-grader who'd made Pillsbury biscuit pizzas in home economics class—now 37, bringing out an ice cylinder made from ginger water, with kampachi fish, golden trout roe, pomelo segments and Thai basil intricately embedded inside the frozen tube. She said afterward that it was the best meal of her life.

As the last dessert plate was cleared, Curtis sat at her table. He was no longer the reticent boy.

“You've given me something more than any amount of money can give . . . unconditional love and values of life,” he told her. “I could never repay you. But the ability to be able to give back to you what I do . . . cook for you . . . means more than anything.”

The roads were empty by the time Curtis drove back to his Lincoln Square apartment at the end of the night.

“It's been a good day,” he said.

The clock on his phone read 3 a.m.

Some things don't ever change. This was his life now, but the chef only knew one way. Tomorrow had already arrived.

By 7 a.m. Curtis Duffy was buttoning up his chef's jacket once more, back at his restaurant, back at Grace.

 

 

S
PIN THE
G
LOBE

By Francis Lam

From
AFAR

Like a master of all food media, Francis Lam has proven his culinary chops in print (
Gourmet, The New York Times
), digital media (Salon, Gilt Taste), TV (
Food(ography), Top Chef
), and now books (editor-at-large at Clarkson Potter). One thing he never forgets: Cooking stories are always stories about people.

W
hen I'm traveling, what matters—what really matters—isn't that the food be the fanciest or even the best, but that it tells you that you can be nowhere else but here. Those meals have their own deliciousness: Nothing locks in the memory of a place like a taste of something real, a taste that connects me to the person who made it.

That's the kind of eating I was hoping for when I emailed a Trinidadian for restaurant tips on nearby St. Vincent. Like every Trini I know, this friend is fireworks-proud of his people's food—its mix of indigenous, East Indian, African, European, and Chinese flavors. But it turned out that pride stretches only so far into the rest of the Caribbean.

“St. Vincent's just a big rock,” he scoffed, probably while munching on a life-changing curry-stuffed roti. But his wife, sweetly annoyed, told me to go prove him wrong. I was headed to the Caribbean on short notice, and so her command became my mission. It pursued me through my flight from New York, prodded me out of my hotel, into the streets of St. Vincent's tiny capital, Kingstown, and up to the national tourist services office.

There, I asked about local specialties, and a delightful young brochure-slinger named Whitney whipped out a notepad and started on a playlist of old-school Vincentian culinary hits: breadfruit with jackfish; dried blackfish; and salt fish with “bakes”—buns that are, charmingly, fried, not baked.

But then she said, “Well, honestly, I prefer KFC.” Tapping her pencil, she waited for a fourth iconic dish to occur to her before she basically gave up, adding “banana.” Which actually was a great tip.

Back outside, at a proudly arranged table of peanuts, rice, and fruit on the street, I bought tiny bananas that tasted—I swear—like cloves and cooked pineapple melted into cream.

I hit some lucky strikes my first couple days. At a restaurant on the way back from hiking the magnificent volcano La Soufrière, my guide steered me to camouflage-colored callaloo, an earthy stew of greens, goat, and smoky charred breadfruit (think plantain flavor in a potato's body). And back in Kingstown, out of the back of a car, I bought a great bake with salt fish.

As I ate it—first chewy and sweet, then chewy and salty—I watched the rolling parties that are, technically, mass transit on St. Vincent. Vans painted with names like SWAGGA, Street Styla, and the Hard Knock Champion Squad blazed past coconut carts and buildings painted Caribbean blues, pinks, oranges, and yellows. Dancehall blared from their windows, the music shredding the cheap speakers: banging, hard and furious. Fare collectors, more like hype men, whipped open their doors and called out, “Where you gon' to?” before getting back to the party inside.

On my third night, I happened upon a restaurant called Aggie's. It looked more like a house than a business, an impression supported by the fact that the two staff—the only people there—seemed unsure of what to do when I arrived. The man just disappeared inside. The woman said, “We have beef, pork, fish, and conch.”

I stared dumbly, until she elaborated on how she could cook them; I asked for the conch in souse, because I had no idea what souse was.

I sat on the porch to watch the daylight sink into the hills. In the kitchen, I could see the woman cutting vegetables in her hand, like home cooks do. When she came out, she brought a bowl of broth with the sea taste of conch, brightened with cucumbers doused in
lime and candy-sweet onions. It was the cleanest, most refreshing soup; it tasted the way you want life to be on a sunny island.

Afterward, we talked at length about conch, unconstrained by other customers. The woman said this was Miss Aggie's place, but that she, Eloise, was the second cook and supervised the younger ladies during the day. Eloise is tall and round, with a kind face and rough hands. I liked her instantly. We shook hands as I said goodbye, and she held onto mine for a moment longer than I expected as she told me her brother and I shared the same name.