Twelve
THE ACCIDENT
After eight years in LA, I wanted to go back to San Francisco. It was time. I had loved the weather and the beach and I had loved the healthy lifestyle in LA. But there was also a lot to dislike about the city; the surface-deep judgments, the jostling for position, the importance of money and displays of wealth. I was relatively immune to the rat race, but it was wearing after a while. However much I enjoyed aspects of LA, it would never be home the way San Francisco was. At heart I’m a cold-water fish.
Finding the right job, however, was going to be difficult. After quitting Abode, I wanted to leave the city immediately and went to talk to my contacts at the InterContinental Hotel. I knew I wasn’t suited long-term to working in a large hotel kitchen, but my experiences at Abode had unsettled me. It was as near as I’d come to opening a restaurant of my own, and it had been a disaster. Until I recovered my nerve, I wanted the security of working for professional managers, not fly-by-night investors who disappeared when things went wrong.
As I have learned, there are pros and cons to working for a hotel chain. Having the infrastructure of a large corporation behind you—handing over the time-consuming business of insurance and payroll and all the things that had caused friction between me and the investors at Abode—frees you up to focus exclusively on cooking. On the other hand, your freedom is cramped by layers of upper management and hotel managers who don’t like to take risks.
When the InterContinental Hotel in San Francisco approached me with a job offer, it seemed in some ways a good fit. I would be in charge of creating a new restaurant, a concept in Californian-Italian cuisine, and I could use it as a vehicle for moving back to the city. I would be the boss and could hire Juan Contreras as my chef de cuisine. And I was assured I would be given leeway to make decisions in the kitchen without interference from hotel management.
The restaurant, which was to be called Luce, was being built from scratch. The kitchen of a large hotel has very particular physical requirements because the volume of food being produced is so large. As well as the restaurant itself, we would be fielding room service orders, a constant barrage of demands on the kitchen staff that would require careful thought about space. We would have to think about flow, and the positioning of workstations, to ensure people didn’t get under one another’s feet. I was excited to sit down and start planning.
A few weeks after leaving Abode, I moved back up the coast, went to inspect the Luce site, and gasped. I was expecting a shell. Instead, the kitchen had already been built, without any consultation with me. The designers had made every mistake it was possible to make. The space was open-plan, but all the cooking stations were crammed against the wall. A single tiny area had been designated for room service, which amounted to some five hundred covers a day. Meanwhile, an entire area had been reserved to cook pasta. It made no sense. There was no flow, no logic. I had mentioned to management that they needed to put in French-style stoves, which have a flat top useful for keeping plates warm when you are serving a tremendous volume of food. Instead, they had fitted traditional stoves with open-flame burners.
And so it went on. While no expense had been spared on the dining room, in the kitchen every corner had been cut—a false economy, by the way, since once we opened, all the equipment would keep breaking and we would constantly be on the phone with maintenance. I had taken the job at Luce because my faith in my own judgment had collapsed and I’d convinced myself I still had a lot to learn before I was ready to go out on my own. It was a pragmatic decision, but it was also a decision made out of fear. During those first days at Luce, I felt some of my old defiance return. If I ever ran my own restaurant, however much I messed up I surely couldn’t do worse than the spectacle unfolding before me.
I moved things around as best I could, but ultimately the space wasn’t up to the job and all I could do was try to reduce the pressure on the kitchen by streamlining the menus. I made the room service menu tasty but simple—pizza, hamburgers, sandwiches—similar to the lunch menu and straightforward to prepare. And then I turned my attention to the dinner menu.
During my years at the Manhattan Country Club, I had developed a style of cooking that relied heavily on the promotion of local and sustainable agriculture, and I assumed this would be an even more rewarding approach in San Francisco, where the farm-to-table movement had partly been born. I asked around for recommendations, then began regularly visiting local farmers and small food suppliers.
One of these suppliers was the Passmore Ranch in Sloughhouse, near Sacramento, an eighty-six-acre facility run by Michael and Vandy Passmore. Historically, the ranch, which encompasses a series of open lakes, had specialized in sustainable fish farming and caviar production, but it had recently begun planting vegetables, cultivating miner’s lettuce, bronze fennel, ice plants, and radish greens. When the snap peas had a particularly lush blossom or the tiny tomatoes were perfectly formed, Michael would call me with a heads-up.
I also met with a farmer named Greg Glosser on his ranch in Pleasant Grove. He sold part of his crop—quince, pomegranate, and other fruits—to Zuni Café in San Francisco, and he began planting ground cherries and Iraqi watermelon for me, and eventually a lot more. It is the strength of these kinds of partnerships that can make or break a good restaurant.
The dishes that came out of these visits were an early expression of a style that would eventually culminate in the menu at Atelier Crenn. I tried to combine flavors in a way that recontextualized familiar ingredients and told a small story on the plate. At Luce, the dish Ocean and Land, for example, was a roulade made of raw beef wrapped around smoked sturgeon, mussels, and arctic char, with black olive ice cream on the side. I served mussels with saffron and spring garlic–flavored broth, and a seafood stew loaded up with peas, zucchini, fish, and lobster. The linguine I served came with a shellfish cream sauce with mandarin-flavored olive oil, trout caviar, and grapefruit.
Outside the restaurant, I tried to reach out to other chefs, to crowdsource our approaches and knowledge. Early on at Luce, I came up with a dinner series I called “A Moveable Feast: 12 Chefs Celebrate 6 Farmers in a Series of Seasonal Suppers.” I love these kinds of events, in which chefs come together to celebrate their combined expertise. It ran against the stuffy tradition of high-profile chefs jealously guarding their recipes. At Luce, openness was everything. It can be hard to get traction when you’re running a hotel restaurant, but only a year after opening, we were starting to get noticed. Esquire magazine named me Chef of the Year in 2008. In spite of my grumbles about the kitchen, everything seemed to be going swimmingly. And then, in 2009, I was invited to appear on Iron Chef America.
When I got the call from the Food Network, I didn’t hesitate to say yes. I had done a small amount of TV before—very short cooking demonstrations on local TV stations, which I had enjoyed. I found the performance aspect fun and felt fairly natural in front of the cameras.
The original Japanese Iron Chef was a slightly different beast than the watered-down American version, but the format of the two shows was the same: every week, a guest chef competed against one of the show’s regular Iron Chefs in a timed contest presided over by a panel of judges, and complicated by the introduction of a mystery ingredient. In the original Japanese show, these ingredients tended to be more esoteric than in the Western version—swallows’ nests and shark fins spring to mind—and the lengths to which the competitors went was more extreme. In one memorable episode, a competitor had cooked and discarded over a thousand dollars’ worth of lobster just to provide a hint of flavor to his asparagus.
The American version of the show, then entering its eighth season, was less flamboyant, tending toward kitchen staples for the mystery ingredient, but it still had a theatrical style. Most of the competitors brought with them a fierce performance energy, and I was no different. Watching my episode now makes me laugh. My expression in the early stages is cartoonishly harsh and seems to suggest: “You think you’re going to kick my ass? Well guess what? I’m going to kick yours”—which is exactly what I was thinking. In the run-up to filming, Juan and I had stayed up late at the restaurant to work on our prep. We did timed drills, giving ourselves sixty minutes to complete a series of challenges, as per the show, ultimately bringing our time down to forty-five minutes. This, I judged, would allow us to make mistakes and still potentially win.
My opponent that day was Michael Symon—a formidable chef, bestselling author, and owner of Lola Bistro in Cleveland and Sara’s in Vegas. His style is very different from my own. It was going to be an interesting battle, particularly when the secret ingredient was revealed to be yogurt.
Symon made bread and meatballs and lamb shank. I made fried yogurt with grilled fig, beets, and rainbow carrots—“an entire garden on a plate,” as the host put it. Then I made a series of vegetable-based dishes, including cucumber broth and compressed melon with baby scallop. I dehydrated rose and hibiscus petals to make a hibiscus syrup with yogurt mousse. Everything I made was light, bright, and fresh.
To be a chef is to be a leader, and it requires a robust ego. But there is a difference between good and bad arrogance, and though during the filming of the show I felt full of well-founded confidence, the pressure did get to me once. Unusual for me, I took it out on Juan, snapping at him to hurry up. He was under tremendous pressure too, but instead of snapping back, said quietly, “Don’t push me, chef.” Those mild words were enough to yank me out of my rudeness and the tension diffused.
The cooking itself went by in a blur. I felt full of adrenaline, the way I used to feel as a kid when I was taking exams, and when we won the show, I was ecstatic. I had always believed that if you tried your hardest and stayed true to your vision, you would end up being rewarded.
Iron Chef America!
The studio that I had bought when I’d first moved back to San Francisco was in a brand-new condo building and everything in it was pristine. The walls were white, the floor was polished wood, and the bathroom was full of beautiful marble. But I was working eighteen-hour days at Luce, and when I got home I barely had the energy to take a shower before collapsing into bed. One night, I was even more tired than usual, and rather than undressing in the bedroom as I usually did, I threw off my clothes on the bathroom floor. Then I did something that would probably end up saving my life: I dropped my phone on top of my clothes.
The memory of what happened next still terrifies me. Getting out of the shower, I slipped on the wet porcelain and cut my knee so severely it sliced my patellar tendon in half. I was too shocked to feel pain. I passed out. When I opened my eyes, I looked down and was horrified. There was blood everywhere. I couldn’t move. Looking frantically around the bathroom, there, by some miracle, was my phone, not quite within reach. I grabbed hold of one end of my sweater and wrapped it around my knee to make a tourniquet. Thus bandaged, I could get up a little to grab for my phone.
I called Juan before calling 911. I needed to hear his voice in that moment of darkness and fear. But he wasn’t answering, so after leaving a voice message (that would later plunge him into panic—he said I sounded completely deranged), I came to my senses and called for an ambulance.
I had no idea how badly injured I was. I was in pain and couldn’t move, but the shock had yet to wear off and the full situation wasn’t clear to me. My two dogs were barking so loudly the dispatcher could hardly hear what I was saying, and when the ambulance arrived, the paramedics couldn’t open the door and had to come in through a smashed window. Even then I didn’t understand the severity of my situation. I told the paramedics rather matter-of-factly that I had cut myself and saw them exchange glances; it was only later they told me that another thirty minutes of bleeding unattended on the floor and I might have been in very serious trouble.
The next thing I remember is waking up in the hospital. The doctors had given me morphine and told me that the tendon was cut cleanly and they had been able to stitch it together. It was while I was trying to absorb this information that they said something horrifying: to fully recover, I would need three months of bed rest. Three months! And this is when the real nightmare began.
During our first year of business, the management at Luce had been relatively well-behaved. The general manager at the hotel was great and, apart from the kitchen, we hadn’t had any real disputes.
It was still a large corporation, however, and when you have an accident like this, management simply doesn’t know how to react. Or rather, it knows exactly how to react, and that is as if you’re a number. It’s black-and-white. There’s a total lack of humanity. As far as they were concerned, I was costing them money and they wouldn’t be the tiniest bit flexible in helping me.
Since Luce opened, I had been working hundred-hour weeks. Within a year, I would win them a Michelin star—my first. But instead of protecting their investment—as they themselves might have seen it—or being human—as I saw it—they told me coldly that I could have a short, statutory time off at full pay, after which I would be on reduced wages. They told me that “if your paperwork checks out, you’ll get workers’ comp, but if you’re not at work on Monday at seven a.m., don’t expect to be paid on Friday.” I sat in the hospital bed, staring at the phone in disbelief. I just kept saying, over and over, “What are you talking about?” Say what you like about France, but at least the worker is protected there. And because I was technically a boss, I had no union protection. Appealing to management was my only recourse.
And so I did what people all over this country do when they aren’t given sufficient time off to heal. I took the pain meds. I let the doctors patch me up and I got back to work as quickly as humanly possible. I rang my mother in France, and she was shocked, too. “They’re not treating you right,” she said.
All of this came as a very big blow. I could never have expected something so cursory and ungenerous. After my accident, I had to rely on the generosity of my friends. A friend who had recently moved from LA to San Francisco put a bed in my living room and helped me out during those months, acting as my crutch when I needed to go to the bathroom and helping me in and out of the shower. I watched a lot of movies and read a lot of books, and by the end of the month, I was going crazy.
Though I would have scar tissue for life where the tendon had been severed and would never completely regain motion in my leg, the biggest consequence of the accident was psychological. For years I had been putting off starting my own restaurant, too anxious and unsure to take the plunge. Now all that changed. Whatever happened, I vowed, I would never be in a situation of dependence like this again.
I realized what I needed to do was to create a space—my space—that was safe for me and my staff. That was the bottom line. I wanted a restaurant in which I could create unhindered, and that meant a place of freedom, of liberty, of humanity. I was done with external management. If I was going to mess up, at least let me mess up on my own terms. I couldn’t go on working for people who didn’t care about my welfare.
This realization felt huge. I had spent years resenting the people I worked for without things ever having come to a head. Now, the sheer relief of understanding I couldn’t go on working this way overwhelmed the more difficult aspects of my recovery.
I felt the moment should be marked. I’d gotten my first tattoo when I arrived in San Francisco, a pair of wings on my upper left arm to represent a free spirit. Since then, I’d had another one done, a flag of Brittany I’d commissioned in homage to my parents. Now, I thought, it was time for a third.
There was a Brazilian tattoo artist whom I admired very much, and three months after my accident, I went in to see him. I wanted something very simple, I said; just my name in Arabic, to symbolize this moment of self-actualization. My name has never been an entirely fixed property, and rendering it in Arabic felt, to me, like recognition of the fact that we have multiplicities within us. Between who I might have been and who I was able to become lay all the freedom of the world. I was ready for the next evolution.