I don’t envy the job of food writers. How do you describe the ephemeral pleasures of taste with words? Grant Achatz, the chef and owner of the avant-garde restaurant Alinea, includes pictures in his autobiography Life, On the Line, and while they help somewhat, it’s still hard to wrap one’s head around food that one will probably never taste. Achatz food is far beyond what most people eat, so it’s hard to even imagine what it might taste or smell like.
Achatz and his co-writer Kokonas (his partner at Alinea) begin with a leisurely introduction to Achatz’s early life. He comes from a restaurant-owning family, though the family owned diners rather than fine restaurants. He describes learning to cook at an early age. From the book, it would seem that he had no other ambitions but to own a great restaurant and be the best chef in the world. Everything Achatz does is toward that goal. In the early parts of the book, it’s easy to cheer Achatz on. But as his relationships deteriorate and as he leaps from high point to high point in his career, I found it harder to stay on his side. At times, I thought he sounded like a putz. This book is so different from the other food memoirs I’ve read, where cooks spend years toughing it out in grim, dirty, and dangerous kitchens or amateurs learning the hard way that cooking is not easy. It seems like everything in his professional life comes easily. And when things are not going well in his personal life, Achatz skims over the top of it in this book.
As the biography moves towards the present, the timeline speeds up. After generous chapters describing Achatz’s life at Thomas Keller’s The French Laundry, Achatz lands a job as the head chef at Trio and revives the restaurant. In a few short chapters, Trio is the best Chicago area fine restaurant. Three years and a chapter later, Achatz gets itchy feet and wants to open a restaurant where he can control the food, the look, and the experience. He finds a partner if one of his regular diners at Trio and in a year, Alinea opens. Within seven months, it’s named the best restaurant in America. This section of the book is almost blindingly fast. When Achatz learns he has squamous cell cancer of the tongue, it seems as though the ride of good luck is over.
The diagnosis seems impossible to beat. All of the treatment options are terribly grim and would mean the end of his career. Achatz and his business partner/friend Kokonas visit four doctors before they find one that has a different treatment that does involve disfiguring surgery. Then Achatz’s luck turns again. The alternative treatment works for him and he only temporarily loses his sense of taste. By the end of the book, Achatz and Kokonas are scouting locations for a new restaurant project.
Life, On the Line, is an interesting read, if only because it showed me a part of the food world that I had only briefly glimpsed through mentions in Ruth Reichl and Anthony Bourdain’s books. Achatz’s food struck me as being as much performance art as food. Achatz mines his memories and experiences and sense of humor to create elegant dishes that consistently defy expectations. He is now on my short list of people who should be given unlimited budgets and freedom just to see what they’ll come up with next*.
* Others on this list include Joss Whedon, Neko Case, China Miéville, and Banksy.