For Achatz, it’s still ‘business as usual’: Alinea chef continues to cook despite chemo

By Janet Rausa Fuller
Chicago Sun-Times
September 12, 2007

Grant Achatz wants everyone to know he is not on his deathbed.

He says he is not withering away, a wisp of his former self. He is not nauseous nor does he feel he is in pain.

His hair started falling out two weeks ago, but to him and, especially, his two young sons, it is more amusing than disturbing.

“They think it’s pretty funny that they can grab Dad’s hair and pull a big chunk of it out,” Achatz says.

The 33-year-old chef is having his own fun with it. Before he shaves his head, “I’m going to get a mohawk for a day. I’m going to walk in here and they’re all going to freak out,” he says.

“Here” is the kitchen at Alinea, Achatz’ world-renowned restaurant on North Halsted, where on a recent afternoon the chef stood, head down and hands busy, placing pristine blackberries atop a layer of tobacco-flavored custard.

On July 23, Achatz stunned the food world with the announcement that he has Stage 4 tongue cancer. The next day, he began chemotherapy.

Eight weeks into chemo, Achatz has not missed a day of work, save for when he was in New York meeting with doctors in July and last weekend.

“I just decided it would be good for me mentally to take a couple of days, go to New York and just hang out,” he says.

He spent time with his girlfriend, who lives there. He ate at Jean Georges. The first course — toasted black bread with sea urchin, yuzu and jalapeno — blew him away.

“It was amazing, the flavor profile. The urchin, the spiciness of jalapeno,” he says.

In July, Achatz faced the prospect of having a good chunk of his tongue lopped off. He has been told radiation therapy, to begin soon, will obliterate his sense of taste.

The irony of his illness is not lost on him, though maybe a bit overblown, he says.

“What people don’t realize is that smell is taste. So if my palate is impaired, and I have to rely heavily on my sense of smell, then maybe that will be honed,” he says. “And maybe when my taste does come back, I’ll be able to taste even better than when I started. That’s how I’m looking at this whole thing. You’ve got to wrap your whole head around it and extrapolate it, not just paint it black. It’s impossible to paint it all black.”

A white dot

It started in 2004, with a white dot about the size of a coarse breadcrumb on the left side of his tongue.

At the time, he was planning Alinea and working at Trio in Evanston. He figured he was gnawing his tongue because of stress. So did his dentist.

A mouth guard didn’t help. A biopsy in November of 2004 came back clean. End of story, he thought.

Then, in May, the dot “started going crazy,” Achatz says. It grew. It hurt. He couldn’t eat much. His speech was off.

In June, his dentist fitted him again for a mouth guard. “At this point, needless to say, I changed dentists,” he laughs.

An oral surgeon did another biopsy. By this time, around July 4, he had dropped 17 pounds and the pain was “excruciating,” he says.

At Alinea, they knew something was wrong. But, says chef de cuisine Jeff Pikus, “I didn’t know the extent of it.”

The oral surgeon told Achatz it was cancer and referred him to an oncologist. The oncologist exhaled heavily and said, “It’s big.” And then: We need to cut three-quarters of your tongue out.

“In my head I’m going, that’s not an option. That’s just not gonna happen,” Achatz says.

He and partner Nick Kokonas, who was with him in the doctor’s office, went to a bar and drank margaritas. Then, they began a 10-day search to find a doctor who would cure him.

An oncologist at Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York said without surgery, Achatz had less than five months to live. A Northwestern oncologist concurred, but referred him to Dr. Everett Vokes at the University of Chicago.

Vokes’ team told Achatz what he wanted to hear: they could use drugs to wipe out the tumors growing like weeds inside his tongue. They told him he had a 70 percent chance of beating this. Because the cancer had not spread beyond his lymph nodes, “That basically is the difference between cure and control. Life and death, really,” U. of C. oncologist Dr. Ezra Cohen says.

But before this welcome news, while still in New York, Achatz called the restaurant to fill them in. Staff crammed into the first-floor dining room. The room was so silent, the chef — talking by speakerphone — had to ask several times whether the call had been cut off.

His first day back from New York was unforgettable, sommelier Craig Sindelar says.

“He walked through, shook everbody’s hand who was there. He said, ‘Let’s bust this out,’ ” Sindelar says. “Business as usual.”

Looking forward

Achatz is busier than ever.

On Tuesdays, when the restaurant is closed, he sends text messages and makes phone calls while drugs drip through an IV into his arm at the U. of C.

He is working on a mammoth cookbook with some 700 recipes. Next week, he launches an online teaser for the book, where fans can reserve their copy and have access to videos and bonus recipes. A second restaurant in Chicago is in the works — “high-concept” but affordable food, he says. At Alinea, he is rolling out a fall menu, bit by bit.

Achatz isn’t working like mad because he has something to prove. He just has so much to do. “It comes down to survival and quality of life, and my quality of life is right here,” he says. “Aside from my kids, this is it.”

Achatz takes a break from chopping garlic. Outside, it’s near 90 degrees and sunny.

“I’m ready for fall,” he says, breathing in the warm air, before going back inside to the kitchen, to business as usual.

A chef writ large

By Janet Rausa Fuller
Chicago Sun-Times
March 2, 2011
Link to article

The story of Grant Achatz, the young Chicago chef with tongue cancer, had to be written.

So Achatz, 36, did what any other high-profile, busy chef might do: He hired a ghostwriter.

The ghostwriter sent the beginnings of a story to Achatz. “It felt so fake to me. It made me cringe,” the chef says.

Nick Kokonas, 43, Achatz’s partner in Alinea, the Lincoln Park restaurant considered one of the world’s best, was more blunt: “I said to them, ‘It’s terrible.’ ”

Overnight, Kokonas says he typed out about 20 pages — about the day in 2007 when Achatz was given the diagnosis of Stage 4 cancer — and sent them to the ghostwriter’s agent to show them what the story should sound like. Which effectively ended the ghostwriter’s stint.

Kokonas and Achatz continued to crank out pages, a few thousand words at a time. They would e-mail each other what they’d written, then edit each other’s words, their correspondence taking place into the wee hours.

From the start, Achatz and Kokonas were adamant that the story would be told by both of them, in both of their voices.

“It is at times a business book, at times an inside portrait of the culinary world and at times a cancer survival story,” their proposal read.

Five publishers rejected it; a memoir should be first-person, they were told. A sixth publisher, Penguin Group, bit.

This is the Alinea way: Break the mold. Take control. Get it done.

Life, On the Line (Gotham, $27) by Achatz and Kokonas will be on shelves Thursday. The publicity tour for the book has begun. A movie script has been written and a director tapped. They are mulling over two offers for a TV show that Achatz describes as “part-travel show, part-history show, part-food show.”

And in a few more weeks, the pair will open Next and Aviary, a restaurant and bar respectively, on West Fulton that they say will be nothing like what diners in Chicago, or elsewhere for that matter, have yet encountered.

“In terms of complicating my life, it’s a bad thing, because now I’m getting pulled in a lot of different directions,” Achatz says, “but from a media standpoint, it’s kind of like the perfect storm, right?”

Rising star

Achatz has garnered just about every accolade that matters to a chef, including the highly coveted three Michelin stars.

But he’s pretty sure he won’t win any literary awards for this book (though his self-published Alinea cookbook did win a James Beard Award in 2009).

“What we lack in being great writers and amazing prose, we make up for in authenticity,” says Achatz. “Nick said, ‘The book sounds like you’ and to me, that’s awesome.”

The story almost writes itself.

Small-town Michigan kid learns to crack eggs at his family’s diner and, as his friends go off to college, he vows to one day open a “great restaurant — a famous one.”

Even then, the kid’s drive and perfectionism are apparent. He’s an average student but focused as hell: building his first car, a Pontiac GTO, piece by piece over two years; in the diner, pushing himself to see how long he can man the griddles, broiler and fryers himself.

After culinary school, he goes to work for the best — Charlie Trotter, then Thomas Keller. He pursues Keller by writing him 14 letters in a row.

He’s dreaming big now, ready to run a kitchen, and he finds it in Trio, the tiny Evanston restaurant. This is where his star rises, and when the reviews and awards start coming in. He meets Kokonas, a successful, confident trader and regular diner at Trio, and they start laying plans for Alinea.

A frankness permeates the book. Achatz is open about his father’s drinking (“He’s an alcoholic. Still is,” he says to me during our conversation sitting on steps outside his new bar, Aviary), his parents’ fractured marriage and his own failed marriage.

He is unapologetic about his ambition and ego. The day after his younger son is born, “I returned to work, on time, the next morning,” he writes.

Entire chapters are Kokonas’ e-mails to investors detailing the buildout of Alinea, complete with architects’ renderings and photos of dining room chairs and dishes being researched.

You don’t even get to the cancer part until page 305 of the 390-page book.

That part is the stuff of movies, dramatic and awful and inspirational.

Achatz opens the restaurant of his dreams, Alinea, in 2005 at age 30, and two years later is told he has Stage 4 squamous cell carcinoma of the mouth. He is told, by three different doctors at three different hospitals, that his tongue must be cut out and that, even after that, he may die. A team at the University of Chicago proposes something else: drugs and radiation to wipe out the tumors. Which, remarkably, they do.

Achatz drives himself to every treatment session but one.

“Occasionally,” he writes, “I would find it necessary to pull to the side of the road, vomit and then drive on.”

On the inside

Hardcore foodies and followers of Achatz (there are 23,417 of them on Twitter) will lap up the chef and food references.

There’s a young, stoic Bill Kim in the kitchen at Trotter’s; Kim now runs the popular casual eateries Urban Belly and Belly Shack. There’s a pre-“Top Chef” Richard Blais in the kitchen at the French Laundry, and Chicago comrades Nathan Klingbail, John Peters and Michael Carlson cutting their teeth at Trio.

There’s the Black Truffle Explosion, one of Achatz’s most famous dishes (“We would get rid of Black Truffle Explosion and Hot Potato, Cold Potato if people didn’t kill us,” Kokonas jokes to me).

There are the local and national food critics and writers, and the uneasy, complicated dance Achatz and Kokonas know they must do to court the media while swallowing their pride.

And there’s Trotter.

Achatz is 21. First day of his tryout at Trotter’s Lincoln Park restaurant, and he muffs a batch of blanched peaches. A pastry chef tries to salvage them, but too late.

“I turned to see Charlie Trotter standing before me, head tilted to one side, peering over his John Lennon-style glasses,” Achatz writes. “His hands were together in front of him like a praying mantis, and he leaned forward slightly to intimate that he was looking into the ice bath, even though his eyes were on the pastry chef.”

Trotter unleashes a verbal assault on the pastry chef, walks away, then turns back, walks to Achatz and sticks out his hand. “I am Charlie Trotter. If you give a s—.”

Achatz quits the restaurant after only a few months. Trotter’s parting words, according to Achatz: “As far as I am concerned, if you don’t work here for a year, you haven’t worked here for a day.”

Trotter’s presence looms throughout the book. While scouting locations for Alinea, Achatz and Kokonas drive by Trotter’s restaurant. Kokonas jokes that they should buy the spot across the street and call it “F-U-C-T.’ F— you, Charlie Trotter,” he writes.

Achatz, standing now with his hands jammed in the pockets of his peacoat as we talk outside Aviary, shakes his head.

“This is a problem,” he says. “The stories that were in there weren’t intended to be disrespectful. They weren’t intended to be shedding light on the monster that is Charlie Trotter. Believe it or not, I was trying to draw more parallels with him to me than most people are getting.

“His all-out assault to be the best, to be perfect, to make an amazing restaurant — I got that from him.”

His relationship with Trotter today? “Nonexistent,” Achatz says.

But then he tells me this story: A month after being diagnosed with cancer, he and his girlfriend ate at Trotter’s. She’d never been there and they both wanted to do it up.

They ate like royalty. Afterward, Charlie invited them to his house to celebrate the restaurant’s 20th anniversary with a bunch of other chefs. They went; it was a great night.

“People don’t see his generosity and what he gives,” Achatz says.

Achatz wrote that scene, but it ended up getting cut.

Like brothers

The book opens with Achatz at the 2008 James Beard Awards in New York, accepting the award for Outstanding Chef. He had completed treatment five months earlier, but was still recovering — “bald, pimpled, scaled and sore” and unable to taste a thing.

It was Kokonas, not Achatz, who wrote this scene in the chef’s voice, describing a time during which the two were barely speaking.

“People didn’t realize how bad things were during that time,” Kokonas says. “At that point, I didn’t want to deal with him personally anymore. I was just done with him. That’s why I wasn’t there. And he felt awkward being there. He felt awful, he weighed 130 pounds. He’s the one who told me, ‘God, everybody treated me like a leper.’ ”

Theirs is a unique relationship. They are business partners, but even more, “best friend brothers,” Achatz says. “More like brothers than we are like friends. Really close brothers.”

They are both only children. They both like to talk, and they’re direct when they do. They share a work ethic that Kokonas describes as “warped strength.”

“The thing Grant and I have most in common is when we set out to do something, we do it,” Kokonas says.

Nothing is half-assed. It took $2 million to build Alinea (and some 18,000 e-mails between the two, Kokonas figures). They’re exceeding that with their new ventures by “only about eight percent so far,” Kokonas deadpans.

The initial plan was to keep it tight and low-cost. “We were just going to be about food, food, food,” Kokonas says.

That has morphed into this: Next, a restaurant serving food of a specific era and place for three months at a time — basically, a different restaurant four times a year — and taking customers by ticket, not reservation; and Aviary, a bar where chefs make the cocktails and finger food behind a bar that patrons won’t actually be able to walk up to.

“Cocktail exhibition,” says Kokonas. Ever the “serial entrepreneur,” he is starting yet another company modeled around the unusual ticket reservation system at Next.

It was Kokonas who pushed to get a second, third and fourth opinion on Achatz’s cancer diagnosis.

Without Kokonas: “Dead,” Achatz says. He’d be dead.

Another start

Nearly dying hasn’t changed Achatz all that much. He now has a will in place for his kids, and “that sense of being invincible” that every twentysomething boasts, he doesn’t feel that anymore. But he doesn’t dwell on what was, or what could have been.

Time with the boys was always sacred, and more so now, he says. Alinea is closed on Mondays and Tuesdays, and Next and Aviary will follow that schedule because those are his days with his kids.

While on tour for the book, Achatz will be out of town for only one Monday and Tuesday. That was by design. His only other stipulation: that he not do back-to-back stops in various cities, so he’s not away from Alinea too long.

He goes to the U. of C. once a month for checkups. He knows the likelihood of seeing the cancer return is “highly possible.”

And yet, getting older — being supplanted one day by the young It chef, as Kokonas warns him in the book will happen — seems more unsettling.

“I mean, I still feel like I’m 20, despite everything I’ve been through,” he says. “But that’s absolutely correct. Some cook that has either been in my kitchen or I don’t even know yet because they don’t work for me yet, five years, 10 years from now, it’s going to be him in the paper and somebody is going to say, ‘The torch has been passed’ or ‘The guard has changed in Chicago dining.’ And I don’t know how it will make me feel.”

Achatz’s book ends where we are now — with the start of Next and Aviary. But his story is not yet done.