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A Traitorous Tongue: Grant Achatz's Devastating Diagnosis

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By HELEN O'NEILL

The Associated Press

Published: June 25, 2008

[First Of Two Parts]

CHICAGO - The dining room at Alinea is a rare and special place where waiters in dark designer suits glide past tables, carrying trays laden with fantastical creations:

Steelhead roe in coconut suspended from vanilla pods. Granola encrusted bison with oatmeal foam, persimmon and red curry. Jelled apple cider floating in walnut milk and vegetable ash. Sweet potato and bourbon tempura pierced by a smoking cinnamon stick.

Some courses look like miniature Kandinsky paintings. Others arrive floating on pillows of lavender air or suspended on bouncing antennae, one-bite explosions of flavor at times so startling diners cry out in delight.

Dining as performance art. It is one reason people flock to this 4-year-old restaurant named the best in the country by Gourmet Magazine and considered by many to be among the best in the world.

They come for the experience and the mystery. They come for the sheer joy of sampling what the genius young chef with the magical touch has dreamed up next.

''Alinea'' means ''new train of thought,'' and that is precisely what 34-year-old Grant Achatz is all about.

Achatz wants diners to be dazzled by his daring (slivers of bacon, drizzled with butterscotch, dangling from a miniature trapeze), to chuckle at his whimsy (PB&J involves a single grape dipped in homemade peanut butter and encased in a film of brioche) and even to weep at the memories some dishes evoke.

After sitting four to six hours at his table, tasting up to 24 courses and spending several hundred dollars, ''I want guests to feel like they have just experienced the performance of a lifetime,'' he says.

But what few diners know is that the most startling aspect of that performance is not the food. It is that the man who spends 17 hours a day orchestrating it has never tasted some of his most exotic creations.

Last summer Achatz was diagnosed with advanced tongue cancer.

His latest dishes were conceived in a bland little booth at a local chemotherapy clinic as poison dripped into his body, killing not just his malignant cells but also his sense of taste.

All his life, Achatz has pondered food and its relation to the senses. The season's first daffodils make him wonder how to capture the essence of spring. A walk in the woods brings to mind the gnarly root of salsify. Pizza night with his boys wafts around in his brain until eventually he figures out a way to concentrate the flavors into a wafer-thin BEGIN ITALS amuse bouche END ITALS the size of a quarter.

Taste, Achatz says, is more than what happens on the tongue. ''It is about emotion, translating a feeling, a memory, an experience.''

Focus On Food, Not On Cancer

He is sitting in his whites at a sleek black mahogany table in Alinea's upstairs dining room, an hour and half before the night's service begins.

He is thoughtful, deliberate and soft-spoken, his thin, freckled face radiating youth and vigor, though he acknowledges the toll cancer has taken. Gone is the once ever-present can of Diet Coke: Carbonation hurts his mouth. These days he downs protein drinks, trying to build back some of the 30 pounds he lost. He carries a little bottle of lidocaine, which he sips to numb the pain.

But illness is not something he focuses on at Alinea, where everything is about creativity and emotion.

''We want to reset your mind,'' Achatz says, grinning.

This is the boy who once cooked meatloaf and omelets at his parents' restaurant in St. Clair, Mich. His father recalls how, even as an 11-year-old, Achatz thrived on the intensity, the teamwork, the drama of the kitchen. And how he always pushed the plates to be a little more.

''We just needed the food to be good and hot,'' the elder Grant Achatz says. ''He wanted to garnish it with orange rinds.''

Just out of the Culinary Institute of America and only 23, he was determined to get a job at Thomas Keller's renowned Napa Valley restaurant, The French Laundry. He wrote letter after letter to Keller, every day for weeks; Keller jokes that he hired Achatz just to stop reading them.

The night before Achatz started work, he was treated to a Keller classic: Malpeque oysters nestled on a bed of tapioca topped with the biggest mound of oestra caviar that Achatz had ever seen on one plate.

Oysters and Pearls. To this day, Achatz calls it the perfect dish.

Under Keller, Achatz would learn how to prepare dishes like Oysters and Pearls. But he also would learn a philosophy of discipline and humility, a reverence for every task, whether chopping shallots, shaving truffles or sweeping the floor. He learned the sheer force of will it takes to work in a top kitchen where pressure is absolute and dishes must be perfect every time.

''It's a battle every day just to do the job and meet the expectations,'' says Mark Hopper, another Keller protege and head chef at Bouchon in Las Vegas. ''It changes you, humbles you, makes you a different person.''

New Sense Of Inventiveness

Achatz reveres Keller; his youngest son is named for him. But he was restless to find his own culinary voice, to run his own kitchen.

He wasn't exactly sure what he was looking for. Then, in 2000, Achatz spent a week in Spain with chef Ferran Adria at the El Bulli restaurant in Catalonia.

Adria is at the forefront of a cuisine called molecular gastronomy, a kind of fusion of kitchen and science lab. Ingredients such as agar and sodium alginate and carrageenan are used to thicken and mold food in unconventional ways. Foams and warm jellies and liquid nitrogen all play their parts.

Mesmerized by the manipulations of texture and taste, Achatz returned to California with a new sense of inventiveness, one that would find expression the following year when he tried out for top chef at Trio in Chicago.

''His food wasn't just out there,'' owner Henry Adaniya said. ''It was from Mars!''

It was also the best Adaniya had ever tasted. The black truffle explosion — a single ravioli that burst with warm truffle broth when Adaniya bit into it — eventually became a signature dish. But Adaniya was just as impressed by pork belly.

''This kid wants to be head chef in a Mobil four-star restaurant and he's serving what basically amounts to a slice of bacon!,'' Adaniya said. ''And it was delicious.''

Trio became a sensation under Achatz. Diners swooned over his vaporized shrimp cocktail spritzed into the mouths of diners, frozen vinegar digestif with marigolds, puffed lobster with grapefruit and lemon grass. When Achatz won the James Beard Foundation's rising star award in 2003, Adaniya was as proud as if the chef were his own son.

Yet he couldn't help but wonder about the toll on Achatz's health. Even by the grueling industry standards, Achatz worked harder and with more intensity than anyone Adaniya had ever seen, often spending 17 to 20 hours a day in the kitchen cooking, creating, thinking, always so serious, so focused.

''There were times I felt afraid for him,'' Adaniya said. ''I thought how can any man run that way.''

But Achatz had a vision and he was unstoppable. Especially after he met the man who would become his great friend and champion.

Nick Kokonas, a derivatives trader who retired in his 30s, had been a regular at Trio for years. But Achatz' food amazed him. Soon Kokonas and his wife, Dagmara, were dining at Trio several nights a month.

From the start, Kokonas and Achatz felt an easy kinship: both the only children of loving, hardworking parents; both driven, articulate and ambitious. Kokonas sensed that he was in the presence of a great artist who needed his own platform to truly shine.

In January 2004, Kokonas asked Achatz to create a special meal for Dagmara's birthday.

''She's ethnically Latvian, speaks Japanese and loves Thai food,'' Kokonas said. ''I knew it would screw up his week,'' he added, ''but I couldn't wait to see what he came up with.''

That night's 25-course extravaganza — Latvian sorrel soup with smoked ham hocks, frozen Willakenzie verjus with thyme, liquid cake of kaffir lime and banana — became the meal that launched Alinea. Heady with food and wine, Kokonas asked Achatz if he would be interested in a restaurant venture together.

Within three days they had a business plan.

And they had a goal: to build the best restaurant in the country.

First Sign Of Trouble

Achatz first noticed the little white spot on his tongue in the hectic months leading up to the opening of Alinea. A dentist suggested he was biting it from stress. He fitted Achatz for a night guard and told him not to worry.

Achatz was too busy to worry. After searching various neighborhoods, Achatz and Kokunas had settled on a two-story office building in tony Lincoln Park. They would demolish and rebuild it into a 20-table restaurant with one of the most exotic menus in the world.

They made no secret of their goal, courting publicity and finding plenty on Internet food forums and in culinary magazines.

The buzz just grew after the restaurant opened on May 4, 2005. It exploded after Gourmet named Alinea the best restaurant in America in October 2006.

Achatz was hotter than ever. Everyone, it seemed, wanted to dine at his restaurant or visit the inner sanctuary where serious young cooks pored over their stations with an intensity that bordered on the spiritual.

For the kitchen at Alinea is as rare as the dining room. Nothing seems rushed or loud, and there is a startling absence of smoke. Meat and fish are more likely to be vacuum-packed and cooked BEGIN ITALS sous vide END ITALS in pans of warm water than roasted or fried. And the sizzle is as likely to come from the ''anti-griddle,'' which instantly freezes a food's surface as from a searing pan.

Here, every cook is called ''chef.'' Everyone sweeps the floor. And when it is time to peel fava beans, everyone bows their heads over the bright green pods, silently working for 15 minutes as though in meditation.

When something is wrong in this kitchen, the whole staff can sense it.

Achatz has a quiet commanding presence and rarely raises his voice. But by the summer of 2007, he was barely able to speak. The painful white sore on his tongue that had dogged him for more than a year was also affecting his appetite and his sense of taste.

His dentist diagnosed stress. A biopsy came back negative. Relieved, Achatz wedged a wad of chewing gum between his tooth and his tongue and tried to ignore the pain. The divorced father had enough to juggle: inventing new dishes for Alinea, working on a cook book, raising two small boys, romancing his girlfriend, food writer Heather Sperling.

And then overnight in early July, his tongue exploded into a throbbing swollen mass that left him barely able to swallow. Achatz knew it was bad by the look on the doctor's face. But nothing prepared him for the news.

Stage 4 squamous cell cancer. The tumor had infected about 70 percent of his tongue. Doctors needed to operate immediately to cut out three-quarters of his tongue in order to save his life.

''That's not gonna happen,'' Achatz muttered, too stunned to say more.

Kokonas sat beside him, head spinning. The best young chef in the country had tongue cancer, and doctors were saying the only hope was to remove his tongue. It's Shakespearean, Kokonas thought.

In a daze, they stumbled out of the doctor's office and into a nearby Mexican restaurant and stared at each other over margaritas. Kokonas fumbled for the right words. Achatz was in too much shock to think.

''Don't tell anyone yet,'' he said.

Then he drove to work.

Next week: ''If we don't take out his tongue,'' the surgeon had said, ''there will be no life.''

ABOUT GRANT ACHATZ

Age: 34

Education: Graduate of the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, N.Y.

Personal: Divorced father of two sons, Kaden and Keller.

Experience: Executive chef and managing partner of Alinea restaurant in Chicago's Lincoln Park neighborhood; sous chef at The French Laundry in Yountville, Calif.; executive chef at Trio in Evanston, Ill.

Awards: Alinea named best restaurant in America in October 2006 by Gourmet magazine; Alinea places No. 21 in Restaurant Magazine's 2008 list of its top 50 restaurants in the world; Achatz named Rising Star Chef of the Year in 2003 and Best Chef in America by James Beard Foundation in 2008.

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