A lotsa pasta: Italian Village to celebrate 80 ‘very nice’ years

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

Plastic spoon in hand, Frank Capitanini dipped into sauces simmering in the kitchen of the Italian Village.

“Very nice, very nice,” he said, nodding to the cooks moving around him.

This is a four-day-a-week exercise for Capitanini, 74. He wants to make sure each spoonful tastes exactly as it should — exactly how his father, Alfredo Capitanini, the restaurant’s late founder, had done it.

The Village, thought to be Chicago’s oldest Italian restaurant, turns 80 this year. For the Capitanini family, three generations of whom have shepherded it through the decades, the motto seems to be this: Change with the times. But not too much.

Secret to longevity

The building at 71 W. Monroe — actually three restaurants under one roof — offers carryout and delivery and recently started doing room service for the nearby Hampton Majestic hotel. They produce a line of pasta sauces sold at Whole Foods and Sunset Foods stores. But the twinkling lights and frescoed walls of the upstairs Village are of a different era.

“It’s like a chocolate chip cookie,” said Gina Capitanini, 48, Frank’s daughter and Alfredo’s granddaughter who now runs the place with her brother, Al Capitanini, 44. “Why put cinnamon in it if it doesn’t need it?”

Italian immigrant Alfredo Capitanini opened the Italian Village in 1927, using a cigar box as his cash register. In 1955, he opened a second restaurant, La Cantina, in the basement.

Business hit a low after the 1968 race riots sparked by Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, said Frank’s brother, Ray Capitanini.

“We came out the door and looked west and saw all the fires,” Ray said. “Nobody came downtown after that.”

But they dug in and held on, and customers came back. Sons Frank and Ray made their mark in 1961 with the opening of the upscale Florentine Room on the main floor. In 1990, it was grandchildren Al and Gina’s turn, with the makeover of the Florentine Room into Vivere.

Gathered around a platter of biscotti in a cozy nook of the second-floor Village, the Capitaninis talk in rapid-fire succession about lasting in an industry where failure often comes in the first three years.

“We show up every day to work,” Ray said.

“We put the customer first,” Gina said.

“There’s always a Capitanini here,” said Al’s wife, Pam.

The next generation

There have been menu flops through the years — frog legs, tripe, ribs. But chicken Alfredo and cannelloni — both Alfredo Capitanini creations, according to the family — remain. The recipes haven’t changed.

Some waiters have been around so long they are assigned to only one table. “With a captain backup,” Al laughed.

The captains, as it happens, wear tuxedos and bow ties.

There’s a fourth generation of Capitaninis coming up. Al and Gina’s children are too young yet, but Gina’s 12-year-old daughter wants to take cooking classes at Kendall College.

Starting from scratch

By Janet Rausa Fuller
Chicago Sun-Times
June 8, 2011
Link to article

“I’m thinking if this works,” says Mary Jane Tala, not two minutes into her first cooking lesson, “the Cubs are gonna win the World Series.”

Translation: If Tala — a Lean Cuisine devotee who went 15 years before turning on the oven in her Near North condo — can learn how to cook in six weeks, anything is possible.

In May, Sun-Times readers chose the 57-year-old accountant as our guinea pig for a culinary makeover under the guidance of chef John Bubala.

Our goal: to show Tala that cooking is not to be feared or dismissed as mysterious or too much of a bother. By familiarizing her with her postage stamp-size kitchen and getting her hands dirty, we’ll get it done.

Our lessons are once a week, two hours at a time. We’re halfway through our experiment. Tala has done the bulk of the chopping. She’s shelled fava beans, cut corn off the cob and sliced an eggplant, all for the first time.

Bubala did step in to cut up a chicken and peel and de-vein shrimp. Tala couldn’t bring herself to do that, not just yet. The shrimp look like “giant insects” and the chicken “sounds slippery,” she grimaces.

Chicken, the world’s most popular protein, is part of our first lesson. One chicken can produce multiple meals. The other part, at Tala’s request, is gazpacho. It is one of her favorite things to eat. And it is, she now knows, the easiest thing to make.

Square one

Everyone in Tala’s family can cook. But she never learned and just didn’t bother when she was married, because her then-husband was a fantastic cook.

It seems to make more sense to stock up on frozen meals and ready-to-eat foods, or go out to eat, or stick with salad and bottled dressing.

“If you are what you eat, I’m going to live to be 120, because I am preservatives,” Tala says.

The upside: Tala has been on a health kick ever since her appendectomy last fall. She hasn’t smoked a cigarette in eight months. She walks to work. She has discovered Pilates. Learning to make wholesome meals is the next natural step, and she’s eager to learn.

In her freezer: Lean Cuisines, low-fat ice cream, frozen fruit bars, frozen daquiri mix and a loaf of oat bread. In the refrigerator: juice, milk, a pitcher of Crystal Light, jarred spaghetti sauce, fat-free salad dressing, yogurt and two bottles of Chardonnay.

Her kitchen measures roughly 6 feet by 10 feet. A plaque on the wall reads, “Everybody has to believe in something. I believe I’ll open a bottle of wine.”

Bubala has his work cut out for him.

“Do you have butter in the fridge?” he asks.

“I have I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter,” Tala replies as Bubala shoots me a wary look. “Honey, I cut out trans fats.”

She owns two knives and three pans. The pantry is dicier — no salt, no pepper, a bottle of oil with a label that looks about eight years past its expiration date. Bubala cheated a little, bringing his own knives. But, he tells her, a tricked-out kitchen loaded with shiny gadgets isn’t necessary if all you want to do is make dinner.

“I never buy my knives new. I buy them used,” from Northwestern Cutlery at 810 W. Lake, he says.

Tala does have a shiny blender, which is all she needs to make gazpacho. And her 8-inch skillet, though not a natural choice for making soup, is the largest one she owns, so that’s what we’re going to use.

Wait to salt

Gazpacho takes only a few minutes, so the chicken is first up. Always start with whatever takes longest to cook, Bubala says.

He keeps a plastic bag within reach for scraps. Cleaning as you cook is a good habit to pick up.

After a shaky start (“What does one use to wash vegetables — soap?” Tala asks), Bubala has her chop a carrot, shallot and part of a fennel bulb. He shows her how to smash a head of garlic into cloves with the side of a knife — a broad spoon or the bottom of a pan also works — so the cloves are easy to peel.

The vegetables, sauteed in a bit of the questionable oil, are the base of the stock. They’re flavor-building blocks, always good to have around and they keep well in the crisper drawer.

Tala sprinkles Mrs. Dash into the pan — just a dash. “You can always add, but never take away,” Bubala says. “As the stock reduces, it gets saltier.”

He nestles chicken pieces into the pan to brown, and wraps the rest of the raw chicken in plastic wrap and foil for the freezer. Later this summer, when we are out of Tala’s life, she’ll be able to pull out the chicken, labeled as such, and make a meal, or three. Roast chicken, chicken soup, pasta with chicken . . .

The pan is sizzling. Tala pours in cold water to cover the chicken and turns up the heat to bring it to a boil, then back down to a simmer. Bubala shows her how to skim impurities from the top with a spoon.

She’s cooking now.

Two soups

Tala gingerly chops a tomato and other vegetables for gazpacho. The cuts don’t have to be perfect, since everything will get pureed.

The cuts don’t have to be perfect, period (but the thumb and fingertips of her free hand have to stay tucked in while she chops.) “You have to do what makes sense for you,” Bubala says.

In the blender they go, with some flat-leaf parsley, basil and cilantro leaves and the juice of a lime. Rolling the lime on the cutting board primes the juices — and momentarily transports Tala to her bartending days at the old Playboy Hotel. A whir in the blender and, voila, gazpacho. It’s soup, but it could be a sauce or marinade, too.

Bubala seasons it, and Tala tastes. “You can taste every little thingy we put in there,” she marvels.

Since she quit smoking, Tala says her palate has become more attuned to how salty, or not salty, foods are.

After 30 minutes, it’s time to pull the chicken from the pot, the meat off the bone and strain the broth, then combine the meat, broth and vegetables in a bowl. Chicken soup — done.

Dressing down

The day before our next lesson, Tala sends this e-mail: “Due to an experiment, I now have red wine vinegar, extra virgin olive oil, black pepper, celery and freeze-dried chives (couldn’t find fresh).”

She has made gazpacho again using a recipe she found online, and it’s sprightlier than the first version, though she grumbles, “The recipe said 15 minutes, but it was more like one hour with all that chopping.”

Bubala has brought two lovely cod fillets plus salad fixings, including sun-dried tomatoes, olives, balsamic vinegar and baby spinach. I have kosher salt, black pepper (with a built-in grinder), more olive oil and butter. The pantry is now stocked.

Tala eats salads often. Homemade vinaigrette is a must.

The typical ratio, Bubala says, is three or four parts oil to one part vinegar, “but it all depends on your palate.” The biggest mistake is adding salt at the wrong time. “Add the salt to the vinegar. If you add it after the oil, the salt won’t dissolve and it’ll just taste salty,” he says.

Tala stirs a pinch of salt into 1/4 cup of balsamic vinegar, then measures out 1 cup of olive oil. She adds a bit of chopped garlic and shallot. A few seconds and a few turns of a spoon is all it takes.

Variations are plentiful — add chopped herbs, use different vinegars, whisk in feta or grated Parmesan. For a true emulsion, whisk in a dab of mustard.

Fish, quickly

The dressing comes in handy for our second dish — fish a la microwave. Microwave cooking can be overlooked, but it’s ideal for solo cooks such as Tala. Cleanup is minimal, and it doesn’t stink up the place. It just takes a watchful eye.

Vegetable prep is first: scallion bottoms, thin slices of ginger root and lemon, some of last week’s fennel, julienned. Fish prep comes last. “Always do your raw product first or last, never in the middle,” Bubala says.

He shows how to check for stray bones, running his fingers along the fillet. “Never leave the fish house without your fish on ice,” he cautions. “You want to keep the fish as cold as possible until you get home.”

He lays the aromatics and a plump sprig of oregano on top of the cod, then splashes it with white wine and some vinaigrette. Plastic wrap over the fish will help create steam.

Tala’s microwave is old-school — no rotating tray — but after four minutes on high and a rotation halfway through, the fish is opaque, as it should be.

Bubala pours the hot liquid from the fish into a small bowl, where a pat of butter waits to be whisked. The fancy term for this technique is monte au beurre. Butter sauce, baby.

“We not only have a dish, we have art,” says Tala.

The second fillet gets cracked black pepper and more vinaigrette as its seasoning, and a few minutes in the microwave. Set on top of lightly dressed spinach and olives, it’s yet another meal.

“The dressing ended up on everything,” Tala murmurs. “And each dish is really only five ingredients,” Bubala adds.

There isn’t much to clean up, mostly ingredients to wrap up and store for next time.

“Next time,” Tala offers, “can we do scallops?”

Danny Macaroons, a N.Y. favorite, finds a place in Chicago

By Janet Rausa Fuller
DNAinfo.com Chicago
March 25, 2013
Link to article

GOLD COAST — Dan Cohen is not a pastry chef. He never liked to bake. He is not big on sweets.

One Passover during college, as a friend raved about the macaroons his family ate for the holiday, Cohen was like, “Huh?” His wasn’t a macaroon-loving family.

Yet here he is, making a career out of the chewy coconut cookie he calls “the ugly sibling” to the prettier, shinier French macaron.

Cohen, 33, is the creator and baker of Danny Macaroons, a newcomer to Chicago’s artisan food scene. His nearly 50 varieties of macaroons range from Salted Caramel, his most popular, to Spiced Pumpkin. Already a hit in New York, Cohen said he is poised to open a production facility here by early fall, “maybe sooner.”

He started in 2010, in the kitchen of his apartment in New York’s Spanish Harlem. In that time, he has gone from hand-delivering his macaroons to coffee shops to getting on the shelves at Bergdorf Goodman to supplying Fresh Direct, a New York grocery delivery service and his biggest customer yet.

His cookbook, “The Macaroon Bible,” is due out in October.

In mid-January, Cohen moved to the Gold Coast to be with his girlfriend (also his publicist), though macaroon production remains in New York. His treats have been picked up by a half-dozen restaurants and shops, including JP Graziano Grocery in the West Loop, Belly Shack in Bucktown and, just last week, The Goddess and Grocer in the Gold Coast.

Expanding to other cities — or countries — isn’t out of the question.

“I have to get to Australia. Australians love them,” Cohen said. “If you look at Google search terms for ‘macaroons’ and ‘coconut,’ the top countries are, like, Canada, the U.K., Australia and the U.S.”

“I’ve had trouble keeping them in stock,” said Jim Graziano, owner of JP Graziano, where a four-pack sells for $11. “They’re not cheap, but you get what you pay for, that’s my motto. They’re awesome. My wife loses her mind for them.”

On Saturday, an unassuming Cohen, wearing a sweatshirt and knit cap, stood at a small table inside The Goddess and Grocer, 25 E. Delaware St., a small pile of cut-up macaroons at the ready. He wasn’t quick to call out to customers, but if they happened to glance his way …

“Please, have some macaroons,” Cohen said to three shoppers. “They’re really delicious. They’re better than you think they are.”

That’s the thing about macaroons. They’re forgettable, or just plain bad.

“Most people have a relationship with coconut macaroons and coconut in general that’s really not great,” Cohen said.

And here’s the thing about Cohen: He isn’t using some cherished family recipe. After telling his mom about that macaroon conversation with his college friend, she replied, “Why don’t you make them?”

He searched online and cobbled together a bunch of recipes into one “that sounded like something I’d want to eat, because I don’t love sweets,” he said.

When his uncle’s 90-year-old mother-in-law tasted his macaroons at a Passover gathering in 2010, “She did the whole Jewish grandmother thing. ‘You should sell these,’ ” he said in his best Jewish grandmother voice.

Two weeks later, he took a batch to his favorite cafe, intent on bartering them for coffee. Instead, they wanted to sell them. It wasn’t long before he left his job at a software startup and began baking full time.

He’s since refined his five-ingredient base recipe. His macaroons are at once crispy and chewy, not cloying or fake-tasting.

“It’s way cheaper to use artificial coconut flavoring, or sub in flour for some coconut,” Cohen said. “I don’t do anything other than not cut corners.”

Marcy Meckler, a customer at The Goddess and Grocer, could tell the difference.

“Usually, they’re so dry, no flavor,” she said, chewing on a salted caramel nubbin. “These have a lot of taste and texture to them.”

She bought a four-pack.

For all his success in such a short time, Cohen works simply. He and three employees bake by hand in 100-piece batches. He figures his hands alone have formed at least 100,000 macaroons.

He likes pushing his product face-to-face — walking into a cafe to ask if it might sell them, or handing out samples. He’ll be at the Steppenwolf Red or White Ball April 5 at Venue One, 1044 W. Randolph St.; at the April 7 Fashion Rocks benefit at bellyQ, 1400 W. Randolph St.; and at Bow Truss Coffee, 406 N. Wells St. on April 26.

The last event is a popup sale, no tickets or fancy attire required:  just a guy behind a table, with macaroons.

Woman sees nothing but Blue Sky: Nonprofit runs fledgling job training program, A Taste of Success

By Janet Rausa Fuller
Chicago Sun-Times
November 28, 2007

The youths showed up, without fail, to the North Side rented kitchen at daybreak every Wednesday and Thursday this summer, ready to bake.

They assembled Caprese sandwiches for catering orders and mixed up batches of Cheddar chive scones and peanut butter oatmeal cookies. Then they sold the goodies at the Wicker Park and Printers Row farmers markets. It was rare if they didn’t sell out.

At $7.50 an hour, it was a decent gig — and all the more remarkable, considering the youths were homeless.

“It took a long time and a lot of hair-pulling and screaming and yelling, but I had kids taking, by the end of the summer, two buses and a train and then walking four blocks and being on time for every shift,” said Lisa Thompson.

Thompson is the founder of Blue Sky Inn, a nonprofit that runs the fledgling job training program called A Taste of Success out of Kitchen Chicago, a shared use facility in Ravenswood Manor.

Summer, of course, came to an end — as did the teens’ track record.

On a recent Wednesday, Thompson stood alone in the kitchen, mixing up yet another batch of peanut butter cookie dough.

Erica, a single mom whom Thompson had counted on more than anyone, was an inexplicable no-show on this day.

Derek and Karen — both of whom had worked all summer, both of whom live on the L — hadn’t showed up to work in a week.

“It’s the nature of their lives,” said Thompson, a former sexual assault victim’s advocate with the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office. “I don’t think it means the program can’t work, or that these specific youths can’t work.”

Last week, Thompson hired two more eager youths, Korvell Ford and Tyiquite Norwood. Both are 18, high school dropouts and residents at Belfort House, a transitional youth home at 3739 S. Indiana. Both were kicked out of their relatives’ homes.

A vocational worker at the shelter told them about the job. They didn’t have to think twice.

“I want to try and stick through it,” said Norwood, an aspiring Navy chef.

“Since I want to go to cooking school, this would be a good thing,” said Ford, who has worked at Krispy Kreme and Burger King. “The more I know, the farther I get.”

Thompson, 34, was drawn to working with at-risk youths after volunteering at a Lakeview shelter five years ago.

“I never thought a white girl from Wheaton was going to have a lot to offer these kids,” she said. “But they want things every other kid wants. They want to be happy. They want to be part of things that are productive.”

Her original concept for Blue Sky Inn — one she still hopes to bring to fruition — was a bed-and-breakfast by the same name operated by homeless youths.

She lacked the capital, so she began an art program in local shelters. She also wanted to offer a job-training program that would be a moneymaking venture for the kids.

“I have always loved scones and I think most of them are garbage, so I said we’re going to make some really good ones,” said Thompson, an avid baker and Food Network fan.

A Taste of Success started in May. Thompson fired several youths along the way; others simply didn’t show up.

At the Wicker Park farmers market, restaurateur Debbie Sharpe tried the pastries. This month, Sharpe started carrying the scones at the Gold Coast location of her gourmet foods shop, The Goddess and Grocer, 25 E. Delaware.

“I like what she does and her scones were delicious,” Sharpe said.

The Taste of Success program has netted nearly $18,000 from the farmers market sales and catering orders. The next step, Thompson said, is to find their own kitchen. That may be the key to the program’s success, she says.

“If I can offer the youth 40 hours a week in one place,” she said, “maybe they’d stay more involved.”

The last supper: After more than a century on West Adams, the Berghoff turns out the lights

By Janet Rausa Fuller
Chicago Sun-Times
March 1, 2006

How do you say goodbye to the only place you’ve ever worked in your life?

How do you say goodbye to the place you call home and to the people you call your family even if they come from all over the world and may not speak the same language as you do?

If you’re Debra Hawkins from Chicago’s West Side, or Yousef Ghusein from the Palestinian territories, or Chris Nakropoulos from Greece, you work.

They worked Tuesday, their final day as servers and cooks at the Berghoff. Among the three of them, they have logged 80 years and a lifetime of memories at the historic restaurant at 17 W. Adams.

But this was no time to reminisce. That would come after their shift. Not now, when they knew that more than 1,500 faithful diners had come for one last bite of sauerbraten with creamed spinach on the side.

In some ways, the last supper at the Berghoff felt like the thousands of others before it. It was packed, for one. There was a constant, comfortable hum in the dining room. Servers, busboys and cooks hustled, expertly weaving their way around anyone who stood in their paths.

“It’s actually a little slower than yesterday,” said Ghusein, 43, floor chef in charge of the first-floor kitchen, surveying the room.

But then, all the camera flashes were hard to ignore, coming not only from customers’ cameras and cell phones but from employees’ as well. And the hugs and handshakes, menus being autographed and people leaving in tears.

The last supper at the Berghoff did not include roast duck, escargot or seafood brochettes. They ran out of those after lunch, Ghusein said, tapping on the computer screen that tracks orders.

But no one seemed to mind much.

“I want to find my friend to say goodbye,” an elderly woman said to no one in particular, her voice and hands shaking as she went through the swinging doors connecting the bar and restaurant. “The guy with the white beard; he’s been here 50 years.”

That guy, Mike Santiago, started as a dishwasher and has worked in just about every position since, including general manager. As closing manager now, it was his job to turn out the lights.

Started at the bottom

So many other employees started, like Santiago, at the bottom. Hawkins, 42, the only full-time female server, started in 1987 as a bathroom attendant and “pantry girl” who cut bread and made coffee. She was just a toddler when Nakropoulos, 65, a Greek immigrant, began busing tables in 1967.

They all have their stories of what it’s been like working at the oldest restaurant in Chicago and what they plan to do today, or someday — go to Vegas, attend culinary school, open their own restaurant, file for unemployment, retire. But on Tuesday, all they could do was work.

‘I want to go out in style’

At 9:30 p.m., Dell Leonard, 69, of Williamsfield, and her 45-year-old son Dan were the last customers to be seated.

“I think I’m still in a state of shock,” said Dell.

Dan Leonard proceeded to order three appetizers, two soups, a roast turkey dinner and — sauerbraten.

“I want to go out in style here,” Dan told his waiter.

At 10:05 p.m. the big, black, bulb-lit sign, beckoning “The Berghoff” in red neon script, went dark.

And at 11:35, after the last diners walked out, closing manager Santiago locked the revolving doors and pulled down the gates.

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.