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Few
chefs have impacted the modern American dining scene as much
as Charlie Trotter, and few are so identified with
the concept of excellence. His Charlie Trotter’s
restaurant in Chicago, known for a vegetable-centric style
of cooking and set-menu dining, has influenced top restaurants
throughout the country, and he will soon open two others.
This acclaimed chef has garnered nine James Beard Foundation
awards, including "Outstanding Restaurant" (2000)
and "Outstanding Chef" (1999). Wine Spectator
named his restaurant "The Best Restaurant in the World
for Wine & Food" (1998). In fact, there doesn’t
seem to be a major industry award that this remarkable
leader hasn’t won, and he’s a sought-after
motivational speaker for groups from universities to franchises
to international banks. The Main Course traveled to Chicago
this fall to interview him at his Chicago restaurant on
the eve of publication of his newest book (it’s the
tenth to his credit), Raw.
What are the logistical problems
and benefits in running a restaurant that serves only set
menus?
In the early days, we needed to convince people to trust
us with the degustation menu, and it’s a great accomplishment
that we’ve built up that trust factor with our guests.
Sixteen years into this, people who come to this restaurant
know what’s going on, and they literally let us do
what we want to do. The most trying thing is managing time.
To serve eight to twelve courses per individual means that
you’re probably going to take around three hours
of their evening. For some, three hours is too rushed,
and for others three hours is too long. So, in summation,
it’s managing that time. It’s determining that
the people over here at this table want the experience
in two hours and ten minutes, and those at another table
want the same experience in four hours. It’s a lot
to juggle.
A look at one of your recent “Kitchen Table” menus
listed an astonishing 16 courses. What do you keep in mind
when designing such an ambitious menu, and how do you avoid
giving your diners palate fatigue?
When putting together a tasting menu, or a degustation
menu or a kaiseki meal, you’re always reminding yourself
not to be redundant with texture, flavor or foodstuffs.
It’s the responsibility of the chef to compose a
mini-symphony, and there must be a relationship from beginning
to end with regards to each dish you serve. The hardest
thing we do is to conceive of 16 courses and not have,
in the end, a diner asking himself, “What did I have?” A
tasting menu is not the chef’s greatest hits. It’s
everything making sense; course number seven is there because
the diner has had the dishes leading up to it. There’s
a building, a crescendo, a tapering, an ending, and conclusion
to the meal. Again, it’s not unlike creating a musical
score or writing a novel.
You’re opening “C” this winter in Los
Cabos, Mexico. Is the concept similar to Charlie Trotter’s?
And what challenges will you face running a restaurant
across the border?
C Restaurant is in the Palmilla Resort,
which is currently undergoing a $90 million renovation.
We have a soft opening
right around Christmas and the grand opening weekend is
the first weekend of February. It won’t be Charlie
Trotter’s from the standpoint of the degustation
experience — for people at a resort that wouldn’t
be appropriate. It will have the same philosophy as Charlie
Trotter’s: everything will be made from scratch everyday,
it’s a pure and clean product, and we’ll be
working with local farmers and fishermen. It’s a
seafood-oriented restaurant, with Latino and Caribbean
overtones to the menu. My chef-de-cuisine there is Guillermo
Tellez. He’s from Michoacan, so it’s kind of
a coming home for him and he’s excited to take what
he’s learned here, our philosophies and presentations,
and go back to his native land and combine them with the
influences from his youth. I’ve also got five exceptional
staff members down there running it for me, and I’ll
be there each season to put a new menu in place. It’s
a way for us to express ourselves in a different venue,
to let our hair down a bit.
It’s been argued that
the leaps made in the American restaurant industry as far
as quality of food have not
been matched by a similar leap in quality of service. Would
you agree?
I don’t know if I would agree with that.
I hear the rap all the time that there are too many actor/actress/models
taking service jobs. But even those people can be smart
people, and they can be dedicated and interested in food.
And then you still see people that do this as a career.
I think we have some great service in this country. In
general, even in midlevel restaurants, I see good service
and people who care about wine and food. And it’s
without the arrogance of what we think of as the traditional,
formal waiter, the kind who would roll their eyes if you
didn’t know what escarole was, or act put-off by
the less-than-sophisticated diner. I think you’re
seeing a nicer, gentler sort of service-staff member.
How
does your own staff keep service up to the outstanding
level of your food?
We never refer to our team as waiters
or waitresses or buspeople. They are leaders of their stations,
they’re
navigators of an experience, and they try to understand
the needs and desires of a given table. The individual
who is taking care of a table is really playing a complicated
game of chess, thinking 5 moves, 8 moves in advance. Whoever
is running a specific table is empowered to do whatever
they need to do to blow the diners’ minds. It goes
beyond whether the staff knows the menu items. What’s
exceptional for the staff is that they have power: They
can open a $500 bottle of wine, they can give away a bag
of cookbooks and sauces, or take people on a kitchen tour.
They understand the expectation level of the diner and,
no matter how awesome it may be, they exceed that expectation
level.
You’re probably associated with vegetables more
than any other chef in the country. What’s special
about your approach?
Almost from the beginning we’ve
offered a vegetable tasting menu at this restaurant, and
even the non-vegetable
dishes are vegetable-driven. We don’t serve a big
piece of meat or fish and some small vegetables. Instead,
you’ll find a very small piece of meat or fish and
one or several vegetable components, whether as part of
a sauce, part of a grain, a puree, or whatever it may be.
Proteins can be somewhat uni-dimensional in texture, flavor
and appearance, whereas vegetables can do things that are
multi-layered. You don’t need 6 ounces or, God forbid,
12 ounces of meat — you’re eating the same thing
over and over. I’d rather have 2 or 3 ounces, but
have something like, oh, broccoli purée flavored
with curry on the plate, and some carrots that have been
braised with ginger juice strewn about, and a little emulsion
of chervil spooned on top…. Suddenly I’m eating
something that’s got complexity.
In the past you’ve
said that you were ambivalent about genetically modified
foods. Has your view changed?
I don’t know if ambivalent
is the right word. I’m
certainly not part of the politically correct group of
chefs that all have to jump on the bandwagon and shout “We
can’t do this!” I’m for progress at all
times, in every field: in literature, economics, technology,
and gastronomy. I think there is some validity to genetically
modified food, although I’m not saying that across
the board it should be produced. I’m not saying it
should be employed just to mass-produce things in a cheaper
way. But we might be able to feed people who are incapable
of feeding themselves now, and do it in ways that have
never been done before in the history of our planet. I
think we have to understand that, and not react with the
knee-jerk leftism that seems to be the prevailing mindset
among chefs.
Your newest book, Raw, published in this past
October, is a collaboration with chef Roxanne Klein on
raw foods.
What was the genesis of the project?
Well, Roxanne and
her husband Michael and I have been great friends for 14
years. They’ve come here many times,
first as vegetarians, then as vegans and, in the last four
years, as raw-food devotees. Prior to Roxanne opening her
restaurant in Larkspur, we got to talking about doing a
book together, and one thing led to another. (We have a
lot of experience writing books, as you probably know;
we’ve got about 10 books out at this point.) For
me, eating raw food is a very vital, extraordinary way
to approach food. Roxanne is a guru, it’s just amazing
what she does. What I try to do is mesh a certain kind
of approach to food with her understanding of raw food.
Putting the two together is a celebration of flavor that’s
beyond alternative or health food. There are no political
overtones or anything like that. It’s just about
food, and it just so happens that everything in the book
is raw.
Your PBS cooking show, “The Kitchen Sessions,” is
done without a script or advance planning. What’s
the premise of the series?
We’ve shot three seasons,
and we’ve just finished
another 26 episodes; they’ll begin airing in the
spring of 2004. The premise is to show some cooking technique
or preparation technique for a few minutes in the restaurant
kitchen during service. Then, the show segues into the
studio kitchen, which is housed right next to the restaurant
space, and we do a simplified, deconstructed version of
what you saw happening in that very intense restaurant
space. We show that you don’t have to make this crazy
complicated sauce; we could do a derivative of that, and
make it accessible. So the idea is to show what happens
in a very intense high-powered, four-star restaurant kitchen,
and then show how it can connect to a home kitchen.
A few
years back, you were once quoted as saying, "I
especially love New Yorkers. They're so full of themselves,
walking in and dropping the names of the places at which
they eat three times a week." How do you feel about
now opening a restaurant in the AOL Building in New York
next fall?
People sometimes come in with a little chip on
their shoulder, wanting us to prove something. And I think
that’s
great. We’re excited to open in New York, because
it’s the food capital of the world. And you have
this concentration of sophisticated people — and a lot
of them certainly let you know how sophisticated they are.
You also have international travelers, and you have a great
culinary community, and the great chefs of the country.
We’re not going to duplicate the Chicago Charlie
Trotter’s. The restaurant won’t be unlike what
we’re doing in Mexico; the menu will be seafood-oriented,
a la carte, and it will be a little more casual than this
place. We’re very excited to be a part of the restaurant
experience in New York City. We should be opening in autumn ’04.
So for all those at the Institute who are interested, they
should begin to send their resumes in February or March….
You’re known for outstanding contributions to the
community. What’s your philosophy about reaching
out beyond the restaurant world?
I think it’s the obligation of a business operator
to do those sorts of things. First and foremost, of course,
you have to be a profitable enterprise. And then you have
to take care of your team, and then you absolutey have
to take care of your clients. Once you’ve done that,
then you must share your largesse with your community.
You need to make a difference from an aesthetic standpoint,
a cultural standpoint, and from a social standpoint. And
I don’t say this coming from a liberal prespective;
I’m coming at this from an enlightened entrepreneurial
perspective — it makes a difference to your business when
you affect some good in your area.
You’ve been particularly
recognized for The Charlie Trotter Culinary Education Foundation.
What is the foundation?
It’s something we started
about 4 1/2 years ago, and it’s a two-pronged program.
The first part is our culinary education foundation, where
through a series
of special events we raised just over $400,000 to provide
scholarships and grants for young people who otherwise
wouldn’t have the means to go to culinary school.
But the more interesting part to me is our Excellence Program.
Three nights a week we have Chicago public high-school
students come here and have the Excellence Experience.
Twenty students and two or three teachers arrive at 5 o’clock
on a school bus. They’re given a tour of the dining
rooms, the wine cellars, the kitchen, then they sit at
one big table in our studio kitchen space. For the next
two hours, they have eight or ten courses, much like what
diners in the restaurant would have, and they are introduced
to about a dozen staff members: sommelier, sous-chef, pastry
chef, fish cook, dining-room manager. The staff members
talk about how they pursue excellence everyday and the
students ask questions of each of our people. It’s
not about recruiting people into the hospitality field — it
has nothing to do with that. The message is nothing more
than you get what you give, and if you want a lot from
life you have to give a lot. It’s a great sight,
when at 7 or 7:30 at night the students are done, and they’re
just giddy with excitement, and they’ve had sea urchin
and sweetbreads and lamb’s tongue, which they’ve
never had before. And the school bus pulls back up in front
of the restaurant, vying for space with stretch limousines
and luxury automobiles, the students come tumbling out
the door. It’s great fun for us.
You staged in kitchens
as part of your own culinary training. What experiences
from that stand out to you?
Well, for one thing I saw a
lot of what not to do. You see filthy kitchens, you see people
who put a lot of care
into a dish, but when they have to sweep and mop or wash
dishes or take trash out, they don’t put any care
in it. But to me all the tasks in a kitchen are identical.
You need to sweep a floor with the exact same concentration
and the same care as you would use to cut a piece of turbot.
Most people think one thing is hugely more important than
the other; they’re completely missing the point.
Any
words of wisdom for culinary students at the outset of
their careers?
Yes, stay away from titled positions, and don’t worry
about salaries. You need to look inward, you need to be
humble, you need to learn not just about technique and
the restaurant life, but also that both service and cuisine
are of identical importance. Beyond that, you need to read,
and read, and read. Literally everything, not just food
or cooking or food history. You need to read literature,
you need to challenge yourself and learn how to think critically,
and how to juggle opposing or disparate thoughts. You need
to be a leader, and you’ll never be a great leader
unless you can distill an idea and communicate it others.
Beyond that, where ever you are, whatever the expectation
of you, your own expectation of yourself has to exceed
that.
Charlie Trotter’s
816 West Armitage
Chicago, IL 60614
773/248-6228
www.charlietrotters.com
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