That night, Achatz and his team wanted to figure out the balance of ingredients for the white-chocolate-and-violet outer layer of the new dessert. The filling was another puzzle: too much strawberry would overwhelm the salt in the olives; too much olive would mask the strawberry. The violet had to serve as a link between these two strong flavors—as a reverberation of spring.
After the white chocolate had been melted, Achatz stepped back and let his sous-chefs take over. One used a medicine dropper to add lavender into the beige liquid, while another stirred the drops in. Achatz was using lavender as a proxy that night, because the restaurant had not yet received its shipment of violet oil.
“How’s it taste?” Achatz asked the three chefs.
“Not there yet, Chef,” one said.
Achatz put his nose deep in the bowl. “More drops,” he said. He stood back again, his concentration intense.
One sous-chef added more lavender, while another took out a spoon and swiped a bit off the top of the mixture.
“Do you taste it yet?” Achatz asked him. He danced around his staff.
“Not really,” one answered.
More lavender. Achatz turned to another sous-chef and asked him to taste it. The sous-chef picked up the spoon put down by his colleague, flipped it, and loaded the handle end with a taste from the pot. “No,” he said.
Achatz put his nose into the bowl again. His staff kept adding drops and tasting. Finally, they said that the blend of white chocolate and violet had the right flavor.
“I can really smell it,” Achatz said.
The four men dipped chunks of strawberry coated in an olive mixture into a pan containing liquid nitrogen, flash-freezing them. Then they coated the balls in the flower-infused white chocolate, and put them in the freezer.
Afterward, Achatz and I sat down at one of the tables in his empty restaurant. He said that, if his ambitions were different, his condition might not matter so much—many successful chefs leave their menus mostly unchanged, season after season. But this is not a route that Achatz is willing to take. He noted that he had once worked for Thomas Keller, the celebrated chef of the French Laundry, in the Napa Valley. He said, “Thomas has his Oysters and Pearls”—a signature dish. “We just don’t do that. We develop dishes that we feel are great and then eventually replace them.”
“You have no new messages.”
Cartoon by Leo Cullum
Indeed, Achatz’s rising fame rests on his restaurant’s commitment to novelty. (“Alinea” is the word for the backward “P” symbol that proofreaders put at the beginning of a new paragraph.) So if Achatz can’t keep creating new dishes the restaurant will close, or, at the least, it will lose the central place it currently occupies among food enthusiasts. (Ruth Reichl, the editor of Gourmet: “Grant Achatz is redefining the American restaurant.”) And so Achatz is willing, while his body heals, to play an odd, new, dependent role in his kitchen. “For years and years and years, it was the opposite,” he told me. “My sous-chef was handing me food, and I was saying, ‘No, it needs more salt.’ ” He added, “Now I just have to trust them, to either confirm what I myself am perceiving or to tell me, ‘No, Chef, that’s not it.’ ”
Achatz comes from a family of restaurant owners. His relatives—some of them German, others French-Canadian—owned seven diners within a fifty-mile radius of St. Clair, Michigan, Achatz’s home town. When he was five, his parents made him a dishwasher at their establishment, Achatz’s Family Restaurant. He stood on a milk crate so that his hands could scrub the bottoms of the pots. By the age of twelve, he was a cook on the line. “I was on the schedule, like a normal employee,” he says. Achatz’s Family Restaurant served basic food—eggs, roast chicken and potatoes, beef stew. The restaurant, he recalls, was “a social gathering place in the community, a place where everyone went after church on Sunday. And it did the most fundamental thing that food does—that is, nourish people.”
Dining and Cooking