Part Two: International Success (1995–2000)

Diners at the kitchen table at Charlie Trotter’s.

“You don’t go to the symphony and tell them what to play.”

In 1995, almost a decade after his restaurant’s opening, controversy broke out over Trotter’s innovative “chef’s table” dining room. Paul de la Garza reported on how the events demonstrated both Trotter’s clout and his restaurant’s significance as a Chicago institution.

It’s October 19, and it has been three weeks since a nationally aired flap at Charlie Trotter’s restaurant had Trotter threatening to leave Chicago, diners frantically calling the restaurant to check on precious reservations and the city Health Department fretting about germs in the kitchen.

At issue was the chef’s table, the coveted spot in the kitchen where diners can watch the culinary artists prepare their meals-and one local example of a tradition that has a rich history in Europe.

Today, diners are still flocking to Trotter’s.

Trotter has not packed a single bag or shipped a sun-dried tomato elsewhere.

In fact, the resolution of this affair can be summed up this way: Two inches and an apology.

That’s how far Trotter moved his chef’s table to appease health inspectors. And that’s what the Mayor’s Office, afraid that he would follow through with his threat to leave, offered Trotter.

The Trotter tussle, which threatened to drain more than $400,000 a year in business from Trotter’s, a tony restaurant in Lincoln Park, underscores the growing clout of celebrity chefs in America.

It also shows how keeping an international draw like Trotter’s, sacred to the city’s world-class reputation, override local health concerns.

As the controversy simmers down, Trotter’s chef’s table is busier than ever, bolstered, in part, by all the publicity.

In the meantime, industry officials say, the city should be glad the flap is fading.

Losing a restaurant like Trotter’s, said Clark Wolf, a New York-based restaurant consultant, “would be a major international embarrassment – and it should be. Like so many other things, like the Art Institute, the Museum of Natural History, Marshall Field’s, for heaven’s sake, it’s always good for the city when a certain sector is world-class.”

Last month, city health officials said they feared the spread of disease if a sick diner sat at the restaurant’s chef’s table, which sits as many as six people and is booked months in advance.

The Health Department said it wanted the handful of restaurants in Chicago with chef’s tables to either move the tables farther from the preparation area or enclose them with a barrier separating the diners from the preparation area. Failing to do that would result in a ban of the tables.

Trotter, who spent $750,000 in March renovating his kitchen, was outraged. He threatened to take his restaurant to the Napa Valley.

What happened next made the city seem like it was backpedaling, although city officials categorically deny bowing to Trotter’s celebrity.

After inspectors visited his kitchen three weeks ago, in the midst of the controversy, they asked Trotter to move the table, not away from the preparation area, but away from the espresso machine.

He did. Two inches.

Trotter’s has a small kitchen, and his options were few.

“We want to make sure you’re happy,” he was told by the inspectors, according to Jennifer Malott, Trotter’s director of marketing.

He also got an apology from the Mayor’s Office, she said.

“We want you to stay in Chicago,” she said he was told.

The man who called Trotter, according to Noelle Gaffney, Mayor Richard Daley’s spokeswoman, was Roger Kiley, the mayor’s chief of staff.

He called, Gaffney said, once the issue had been resolved. “He called on behalf of the mayor just to make it clear that everything had been sorted out,” she said, “to let him know he has one of the finest restaurants in the city.”

Tim Hadac, spokesman for the Health Department, said the inspection of the kitchen satisfied the department’s concerns.

Specifically, inspectors found that the flow of diners to the chef’s table did not endanger the food preparation, and that staff did not have physical contact with the clientele.

As for the proximity between the chef’s table and the preparation area, Hadac said, “I believe (the inspector) said, ‘You can move it slightly.’ If they moved it slightly, that’s fine.”

Hadac said news reports blew the department’s concerns “out of proportion.”

“Our concerns about chef’s tables are theoretical,” Hadac said. “It is a very small issue of concern.”

Hadac said health officials were not as concerned with the Charlie Trotter’s, which runs an immaculate kitchen, as with the smaller, low-profile restaurants that would put up a chef’s table.

“We, at this point, have no plans to make Charlie Trotter’s restaurant do anything with the chef’s table,” Hadac said. “They do chef’s tables about as good as a chef’s table can be done.”

Last month, it was a different story.

Ken Pannaralla, chief sanitarian for food and dairy protection with the Health Department, said health officials wanted “the general practice of having people sitting in the kitchen to stop.” He said the risks of spreading disease were too great.

Pannaralla said the Health Department had contacted the Illinois Restaurant Association, asking it to notify members of the department’s concerns. An in-house memo also told inspectors to be on the lookout for chef’s tables.

“As far as just sitting tables in the kitchen,” Pannaralla said at the time, “I think it’s inappropriate.”

Pannaralla, one of the inspectors who visited Trotter’s, did not return repeated telephone calls Wednesday. His calls were referred to Hadac.

Asked if Trotter’s celebrity forced city officials to back down, Hadac said no. “If that were true,” he said, “that would be abandoning our responsibility to Chicagoans.”

In 1997, William Rice published this retrospective look at Trotter’s rise to preeminence during the late 1980s and the 1990s—which illustrates how the experience of fine dining had begun to change, in part through Trotter’s influence.

In his rapid rise to the rank of prince among chefs, Charlie Trotter has been thrice blessed in the decade that has passed since his restaurant opened in 1987: by the diminishing importance of tradition, by the increasing sophistication of restaurant-goers and by the very healthy American economy.

Tradition

Tradition dictated that one climb slowly toward the role of chef de cuisine (boss of the kitchen). Instead, Charlie Trotter, who says he is “not a food scientist, not an artist per se, not sure if I’m even a craftsperson,” and who had no culinary degree and no patron, created his own status.

Tradition also dictated that the best ingredients, wines, cooks and palates were French.

In the brave new world of Charlie Trotter and his ambitious contemporaries, hierarchies are frowned upon, French chefs are seen as cooks who put on their checked pants one leg at a time and informality – casualness – rules in the dining room and the kitchen.

Gone are the rigid, carefully constructed recipes of Escoffier. Now the food is constructed of tiny bits, dabs and drops. Finished dishes often resemble defrosted architecture.

In his soon-to-be-published book (his fourth), “Gourmet Cooking for Dummies,” Charlie Trotter’s shopping list contains 41 types of fruit and 40 vegetables. He tells home cooks they should learn how to make broths, consommés, flavored oils and vinegars, salsas, relishes and chutneys, and offers one chapter on vegetable cuisine and another on raw and marinated seafood.

Sophisticated diners

Yuppie-era diners, used to negotiating – or demanding – how their food is to be cooked, sauced and garnished, find themselves overwhelmed.

Waiters, in turn, must not only be diplomats, but must be intimately aware of the ingredients in the complex dishes. They seek to facilitate or guide the diner rather than make pronouncements. “Flexibility” is essential, says Trotter.

It may seem self-evident, but the restaurant needs these customers and their good will.

As sommelier Joseph Spellman sees it, Charlie Trotter’s is a series of salons, with rooms and tables as private as possible and the energy created by people thrilled by the exposure to great food and wine.

These customers don’t wear blinders. They are interested in what’s going on in the kitchen and the wine cellar, areas Trotter sees as extensions of the restaurant’s public space. They talk knowledgeably of great restaurants here and abroad and of great vintage wines. They accept Trotter’s challenge to compare their experience with the best they’ve had elsewhere (or on previous visits here) and both sides seem to benefit.

Wine is a major facet of the jewel Trotter’s aspires to be. Therefore chefs and cooks, as well as the wine staff, become involved in seeking flavor matches. In the dining rooms, the crystal glassware and decanters, the bottles themselves, become part of the minimalist decor, providing elegance and splashes of color.

This commitment has paid off. Wine connoisseurs from New York, California and abroad as well as Chicago were among the restaurant’s earliest supporters and remain an “essential” component of the mix.

The economy

At least half of Trotter’s customers are visitors to the city. For most locals, dinner there is reserved for a celebration meal, but the favorable economy makes such celebrations possible. Corporations continue to book private parties at a lively pace too. As business deduction opportunities have shrunk, executives seek more bang for the buck when they pick up the tab.

There is no denying that a meal at Trotter’s is expensive. The cost of the multicourse tasting menu, currently $90 per person, has risen by nearly 30 percent since 1990. Yet that is roughly the same rate as the increase in personal disposable income. Meanwhile, perhaps reflecting the trend to conspicuous consumption of connoisseur foods and wines, the average price for wine has increased from $45 a bottle to nearly $70 since the restaurant opened.

“I’m not a food scientist, not an artist per se, not sure if I’m even a craftsperson.”

But Trotter understands, better than most chefs, that to practice in the rarefied environment he has created, he must produce revenue beyond what the restaurant can take in during five hours of service, five evenings a week. Thus, he does speeches, consulting, cookbooks (which are sold at the restaurant), cooking classes, private parties, out-of-town catering (often for charity) and an upcoming TV series. Nonetheless, Charlie Trotter’s remains an enterprise as fragile as a soufflé on the rise.

Review: 1997

Five years after its first four-star review, Trotter’s set the same high standard when Phil Vettel reviewed the restaurant again in 1997.

It’s probably just a matter of time before Charlie Trotter receives the James Beard Society’s Chef of the Year award. He didn’t get it this year (that honor went, four days ago, to Thomas Keller of French Laundry in Napa Valley), but he was one of five finalists – his third trip to the finals in as many years.

Trotter wasn’t at the New York awards ceremony; he spent most of that day, and all that evening, with his 6-year-old son, Dylan. But in an interview last week, Trotter expressed the proper, it’s-an-honor-to-be-nominated sentiments.

And it’s not as though Trotter, and his eponymous restaurant, are hurting for attention. Awards and accolades have showered down on Charlie Trotter since he first set up shop just about 10 years ago, and his visibility may only increase with his just-published “Charlie Trotter’s Seafood”; another cookbook, on desserts, due out this summer; and an assortment of other irons in the fire.

Charlie Trotter may be 0-for-3 at the James Beard Awards, but he’s a long way from being Susan Lucci in a toque.

His restaurant remains one of the country’s finest, a culinary temple where everything, from the crystal stemware to the fresh flowers to Trotter’s meticulously crafted cuisine, is selected with perfection in mind. Trotter would be the last to claim that his restaurant achieves perfection every time, yet clearly that is the aim.

One thing you don’t hear at Charlie Trotter’s is, “I’ll have the usual.” There is no usual at Trotter’s; every day there’s a new menu, new flavor combinations. The kitchen doesn’t offer the same dish twice. Ever.

Trotter likens his kitchen’s output to that of a Miles Davis combo: “There’s rhythm and melody and, within the framework of the composition, there’s room for latitude and reinterpretation,” he says.

And, to continue the improvisational-jazz analogy, no two performances are alike.

“We will never redo an existing idea,” Trotter says. “Even if we were to use the exact same foodstuffs – say, lobster, artichokes, fava beans and tarragon – we would change the preparation to emphasize different elements of mouth feel or caramelization or meatiness or acidity.”

Distinctions such as these can overwhelm many diners. Indeed, the idea of dining at Charlie Trotter’s is intimidating. The act of dining there, happily, is not.

Service is welcoming, friendly and just formal enough to remind you that you’re in the big league. Waiters, as they hand you the menu, deliver a brief introductory explanation of how things work here. Briefly, Trotter presents two multiple-course, degustation menus: a grand menu, priced at $90, and an all-vegetable menu, at $70. The number of courses is the same for both menus, making it easy, even advisable, for people at the same table to select different menus.

A recent visit found the kitchen in fine form. The grand menu began with a dish of remarkable textural range: big-eye tuna topped with osetra caviar, served with matchstick-sized bits of smoked salmon, a soupcon of horseradish potato salad and a couple of tiny, sweet Olympia oysters. This was followed by seared scallops and fiddlehead ferns set in an incredible sauce of carrot juice infused with asparagus and cardamom.

A cumin-infused broth complemented slices of earthy squab laid over crispy polenta. And slowly grilled lamb loin is paired with caramelized bits of julienned rutabaga, braised legumes (flagolets and black-eyed peas in this case) and a bit of pureed rutabaga.

The vegetable menu was even more impressive, in part because all-vegetable menus are still so rare at this level. First there was a salad of grilled, lightly smoky asparagus and endive, with sliced artichokes. Then a marvelous roasted-eggplant soup, a thick puddle surrounding bok choy leaves wrapped around kim chee; we especially liked the clever pairing of bok choy, or Chinese cabbage, with kim chee (a Korean dish of fermented spicy cabbage).

Mushrooms were the stars of the next two courses: A ragout of fava beans and wonderfully textured, earthy morels; and oyster-mushroom risotto with flecks of radicchio and a red-wine sauce.

Desserts included a trio of sorbets surrounded by chilled lemongrass soup; a triangular apple tart topped with caramelized sugar and ginger ice cream; and a phyllo-dough beggar’s purse stuffed with macadamia nuts, with caramel-tamarind ice cream.

Concluding the meal is a plate of mignardises, miniature candy treats that are, after all the food you’ve tasted, more to be admired than eaten. Not to worry; waiters are ready to box them up.

Service shines even when things are not at their best. On our last visit, there was a prolonged, unaccountable delay between the first and second courses. We did not complain; we didn’t have a chance. Our waiter returned to the table with sincere apologies, assurances that the pace would be picked up (it was), plus a compensatory extra dessert and dessert wine. Our baby-sitter got a little richer, but it wasn’t a night for cutting costs.

Trotter’s exemplary wine list, like the rest of the operation, is no place for bargain hunters either. The selection is broad and deep; Trotter has two wine cellars to hold it all. But if the selection seems daunting, servers are handy with knowing advice, and wine steward Joseph Spellman is the reigning America’s Best Sommelier.

If you want to eat at Trotter’s on a Saturday night, plan on calling at least six weeks in advance. You may need to plan further in advance; Trotter has been talking about serving even fewer meals in the future.

“We used to flirt with 200 covers on a Saturday night,” he says. “Now we try not to exceed 160, and we want to push it down to 140, maybe 120.

“We will never redo an existing idea.”

“Ideally we’d do 100 covers a night, five nights a week, and hit a home run every time with every table.”

Given Trotter’s reputation and prices, a home run every time out is exactly what each customer expects. Given my experiences at Trotter’s over the years, I’d say the customer pretty much gets that home run – at the very worst, a standup triple.

To celebrate the first ten years of Charlie Trotter’s, Charles Leroux wrote this in-depth profile of the chef’s career for the Tribune’s Sunday magazine.

It’s August 1997, and a few weeks ago, Charlie Trotter, chef and owner of the Chicago restaurant that bears his name, was on a guest-chef gig at London’s Lanesborough Hotel. He hadn’t noticed any publicity about his visit and was pleased, therefore, to see the dining room filled.

British chef Gordon Ramsay joined him in surveying the room. “I hope no one in London is eating in another restaurant tonight,” Ramsay said. “Every chef in town is here.”

Since opening his restaurant 10 years ago today, Trotter has gone from absolute zero recognition in the world of fine dining to international stardom. Awards, which began to arrive early in the restaurant’s life, now flow in torrents:

Four Forks and Four Bottles (the highest rating) from The Wine & Food Companion magazine; Crane’s Chicago Business, four forks (highest rating); Chicago magazine, four stars (highest rating and the comment, “This is a restaurant like Cape Canaveral is an airport”); America’s Best Chef, Midwest, from the James Beard Foundation; AAA, five diamonds (highest rating); Chicago Tribune, four stars (“I’d give more,” food critic Phil Vettel wrote, “but that’s all I have to give”); Mobil Guide, five stars (highest rating); and Relais Gourmand from Relais & Chateaux.

Trotter’s sommelier, Park Ridge native Joseph Spellman, tends the wine cellar – itself an award winner – and is one of about 80 of his profession worldwide who has passed the master sommelier’s examination. In June, Spellman captured the Grand Prix Sopexa du Sommelier, an international competition in Paris; he won the equivalent U.S. prize last fall.

In June, Wine Spectator magazine announced its Readers’ Choice Awards. Trotter and Trotter’s triumphed. In the category “U.S. Restaurant that Delivers the Best Dining Experience, Combining Food and Wine,” Charlie Trotter’s edged out San Francisco’s Fleur de Lys. In the category “Best Chef Currently Working in the United States,” Trotter won over Wolfgang Puck of Los Angeles.

The magazine noted that Trotter “combines extraordinary technique and a fertile imagination to create brilliant and innovative dishes. He’s a distinctively American treasure.”

With more forks than Crate & Barrel, more stars than a Soviet general, the 37-year-old Trotter has come very far very fast.

“His success has been meteoric,” said Norman Van Aken, chef/owner of Norman’s in Coral Gables, Fla. “There are few things in this business that compare with it.”

Some food professionals are born to the vocation – Peter and Amy Morton, offspring of Arnie of steakhouse fame, for example. Others experience an epiphany that changes the rest of their lives, as when Julia Child, on her first visit to France, bit into a perfect Comice pear.

Trotter is of the latter group. When he was growing up in Wilmette, his mother, Dona Lee, served husband Bob and the kids (Trotter has a sister, Ann, and brothers Thomas and Scott) balanced, healthful meals. “But,” Trotter recalled, “there was no emphasis on the pleasures of the table.”

On Easter and Dona Lee’s birthday – seldom otherwise – the Trotters would dine out at what the chef remembers as “not great restaurants.”

His culinary epiphany came when he was at the University of Wisconsin majoring in cinematography (later changed to political science). His roommate liked to cook.

“I was fascinated,” he said, “first just by the fact that a guy knew about cooking.”

Then Trotter got interested in the process. He read the modern classics: James Beard’s “American Cookery,” New York Times food writer Craig Claiborne, Child’s “Mastering the Art of French Cooking.” He tried some recipes – made soups, breads, tortes. He found he really liked to cook, but it went beyond that.

“I enjoyed the art of shopping as well,” he said. “I enjoyed cutting up vegetables. I found that every single aspect of preparing food was enjoyable to me.”

This intensely serious young man had fallen lettuce heads over bread heels in love.

Between his junior and senior years, Trotter took a year off and waited tables in the Monastery, a Madison restaurant, where he worked dressed as a monk.

He toyed with the idea of not returning to school, but decided to graduate and did in the spring of 1982.

Then, as many graduates do, he stood facing the real world, wondering what he’d do there. His father had been a founder of Source EDP, a recruitment and placement firm for computer professionals, and had told him (in an instance of wisdom Trotter didn’t fully appreciate until much later) that he could not enter that business. He would have to find his own calling.

“I knew I wanted to do something both physical and mental,” said the former New Trier High School gymnast, who, when in the mood or when challenged, still can do back flips off the small trampoline in the restaurant’s office. “I knew, too,” he said, “that I would have to eat for the rest of my life”

By fall of that year, he was a busboy at Sinclair’s in Lake Forest, a suburban cousin of Gordon Sinclair’s Chicago restaurant, Gordon. Van Aken was the chef.

“He kept asking for a job in the kitchen,” Van Aken said. “I can do this,” he’d say. We didn’t have an opening then, but persistence pays off, and he was persistent. He started by assisting in making salads. I remember he became the most cut person in the kitchen. He was so eager to do the work, he’d grab the knife by the wrong end. I said, “Take it easy, you’re using up all the bandages.”

“He didn’t really know anything then,” Sinclair recalled, “but he seemed to have limitless energy and enthusiasm. I never saw anybody in this business with such velocity.”

“My first day in the kitchen was the day after Thanksgiving,” Trotter said. “I cleaned lettuces, made sandwiches. I was making $4.25 an hour, and I thought I was the luckiest guy in the world.”

That enthusiasm is undiminished today. “When I’m leaving the house,” he said, “I just can’t say to my wife, ‘I’m going to work.’ I don’t think of it as work.”

Sinclair’s was the first stop on what would become a four-and-a-half-year vagabond tour of some two dozen restaurant kitchens. Trotter would work for a place until he felt he had learned what he could. Then he’d quit and move on. When not working, he would study cookbooks, read about the history of food and its role in culture. He attended the California Culinary Academy for about six months, then hurried back to restaurant kitchens.

An apartment he had in San Francisco was furnished with only a sleeping bag on the floor and a reading lamp. All his money went for food and wine. He had no social life and, in a sense, still wore that monastic waiter’s costume from his first restaurant job. As monks forsake everything to devote themselves to God, Trotter was devoting himself to food.

He said, “Dostoevski wrote something to the effect that the young fail to understand that the sacrifice of their youth to a higher thing can result in a payoff 10 times greater than the sacrifice.”

Certainly, Trotter has seen such a payoff, though he never thought of his commitment as a sacrifice. “It was exhilarating,” he said.

Even now, Trotter, who lives within walking distance of the restaurant, seems to have, except for his wife, Lynn (his marriage to his first wife, Lisa, ended in divorce), and 6-year-old son, Dylan, few interests other than food. His response: “I don’t see that as limiting.”

In the fall of 1985, Trotter traveled for three months in France. He had a rail pass and a folding suitcase in which he kept a coat and tie and pants. He ate in bistros and in three-star Michelin Guide restaurants. Often, because he’d be moving on that same day, he had his suitcase with him, stashed under the table.

He’d send postcards home. Nothing so standardly breezy as “Having a wonderful time,” his cards to family and friends came covered in tiny, tiny writing, hundreds and hundreds of words, serious thoughts – very him, recipients agreed.

Trotter credits that tour de France for his empathy with the diner. It shows up in the restaurant in a lot of little ways. If, for instance, he sends an extra dish out to the table of favored patrons, surrounding tables will get extra dishes as well. He doesn’t want any customers thinking, “Why did they get something we didn’t?”

After returning to America, Trotter would work in a pretty good restaurant that was making enough money to stay afloat until he could say to himself, “At least I can do that.”

Confident he could survive should he open his own place someday, he’d move on to a finer, more profitable place until, once again, he’d think, “At least I can do that.”

By 1986, Trotter, at 26, decided he was ready to be a chef/restaurateur. He tuned up by catering sit-down dinners at private homes. His father, who died in 1993, supplied financial backing, business sense and some of the mottos the restaurant still follows—“Never screen calls,” “Never save tables.” That latter helps make what has become one of the nation’s most elite restaurants one of its most democratic. When the restaurant is full for the night, it’s full, no matter how great the influence of the person on the phone begging for a table.

Mark Signorio, in charge of special projects, said, “A couple of times Charlie’s mother couldn’t get a table, and she sometimes works here!”

Blueprints were drawn up for what turned out to be a $1.2 million project, including the purchase and remodeling of an 80-year-old Victorian house on Armitage Avenue just west of Halsted Street in the DePaul neighborhood. The blueprints were labeled “Zeldah.”

“Later, when I joined Charlie Trotter’s and saw those plans, I thought Zeldah was a code name,” Signorio said. “But it was to be the name of the restaurant.”

Zeldah was a character in a novel Trotter had read, a character who underwent changes. Trotter wanted his restaurant to change when necessary too.

Dan Roberts, Trotter’s public relations man early on, remembered, “It took a lot of arguing to get him to name the restaurant after himself. The stakes go way up when it’s your name.”

In fact, it wasn’t his name. Trotter always had been called Chuck, but a restaurant called Chuck Trotter’s would smack more of hefty steaks and shoe-sized potatoes than what he had in mind. He became Charlie with the installation of the small brass plate on the front wall of the building that is the restaurant’s only identifying signage.

Understatement continues inside. Both the entry room, which contains the bar, and the dining room beyond feature copies of Viennese architect Josef Hoffman furniture and fabrics, the visual calm providing backdrop for rather than competition with the food.

The food.

Trotter’s menu is basically two offerings, both degustations (tastings). One is all vegetable at $70 not including wine; the other features seafoods and meats and is $90. The degustation menus represent a series of small-portion dishes beginning with offerings that are appetizer-like in that they have lighter, crisper flavors. The flavor intensity builds to entree-like offerings and ends in an exaltation of desserts. No one dish is intended to be more important than another, and it is the totality of dishes and the way they relate to each other and to the wine that accompanies them that is the experience, an intellectual as well as gustatory treat.

Trotter’s cooking comes peppered with wit. He’ll put the same ingredient – carrots, say – in three guises: a puree, sautéed and raw, in three different dishes, a subplot of sorts. He’ll slip peasant ingredients into these princely plates: a bit of blood sausage, some braised collard greens, pigs’ feet (the last also perhaps a pun on his last name). He surprises with a sorbet course that comes, for example, after a venison dish and before dessert. Positioned that way, the sorbet is not a palate cleanser but a virtuoso flourish.

“You might have expected such intense flavor in game,” he seems playfully to be saying, “but who else can produce a sorbet dish even more intensely flavorful?”

Dinner at Trotter’s, he said, is “like a tune. It’s not all there until it’s over.”

A recent menu seemed almost to offer a culinary version of Walt Whitman’s poetry, a consumable “I Hear America Singing.” Though created with classic French techniques and firmly, Trotter contends, “within the mold of Western European cuisine,” his food celebrates this nation.

“It’s summer across America,” the menu seemed to sing. “The halibut are biting off Alaska. Morel mushrooms are springing up in the forests. Florida apricots are at their peak.”

Aware that America now is a multiethnic, multicultural place, Trotter melds in accents from elsewhere –Japanese soba noodles, pearllike Israeli couscous – one recent evening.

Trotter claims that, in the summer, all his fruit and produce is organic. All poultry served is free-range, all game farm-raised. He pays fishermen a premium to line-catch fish, thus avoiding the flavor-altering stress and rough handling that net-caught fish undergo. He says he will go to whatever lengths it takes to get the absolutely finest, freshest ingredients.

Diners are beneficiaries of a network of some 90 suppliers – a man in Oregon who Trotter says grows the only organic hazelnuts in America; a Wisconsin farmer who supplies the root vegetable, salsify; a former ad exec from Glencoe who sends incredibly rich chocolate from Hawaii. Trotter said many of these people came to him saying they wanted their special products to be in the hands of someone who appreciates them.

From time to time, unannounced, a group of kids will show up at the back door, their arms full of squash or lettuce. They are from a produce-growing venture, Cabrini Greens, and have brought their goods from gardens near their homes in the Cabrini-Green public housing project. Trotter buys whatever they offer and uses what he can.

Aware of the growing health consciousness of Americans, Trotter, who at home eats very simply, substitutes purees, infused oils, vegetable and herb sauces for the butter and cream of classic French cooking.

“I want you to wake up the next morning hungry for breakfast,” he said.

The recipes for an evening’s service will be created earlier that same day, only after the meat, fish and produce shipments have come in and Trotter has set aside anything that isn’t absolutely pristine and any parts he disdains using. Staffers benefit from such pickiness. At around 3:30 each day, the staff dines on extremely elegant leftovers. Lobster was featured recently in the restaurant, but Trotter serves only the tails, so his staff was able to feast on lobster claws in a Japanese horseradish sauce.

Trotter will look over the day’s ingredients and, from them, compose what some critics, at a loss for a definition, have termed “Trotter food.”

Though sensitive to food allergies or ingredients a customer just doesn’t care for, when it comes to what goes on the plates, Trotter alone calls the tune at Trotter’s.

“You don’t go to the symphony and tell them what to play,” he explained.

The menu Thursday will be somewhat different from Wednesday’s, totally new by the following Wednesday, each beautiful dish doomed to the most ephemeral life.

One customer, a businessman who flies back and forth between New York and Chicago, eats at Trotter’s once a week. The staff estimates he’s had some 175 meals, more than 1,000 dishes, never the same dish twice.

Though it may seem that Trotter is making an extremely difficult task nearly impossible by incorporating daily changes, he sees change as part of a creative process, like jazz.

“We do a huge degree of improvisation and variation on themes,” he said. “Miles Davis never played ‘All Blues’ or ‘Some Day My Prince Will Come’ the same way twice.”

Criticized at one point for gratuitous complexity (Esquire a few years ago wondered why a dish “such as ‘bob-white quail over Hokkaido squash puree with white-corn grits strewn with foie gras and poached quail egg with mushroom sauce and squab’ just sounds like something you hit with your car?”), Trotter has cut the menus to six dishes from as many as 12 and reduced the number of flavors in each dish.

Seeking now what he calls an “Emersonian sense of balance and harmony,” he’s no longer content to merely dazzle customers with a fireworks display of brilliance and creativity; he also labors to give them the transcendent dining experience – three hours, more or less – spent as close as possible to perfection.

“The restaurant has matured,” Signorio said. “Ten years ago, Charlie Trotter’s was a high school girl going to her prom. Now, she’s getting married.”

The total dining experience, by Trotter’s definition, includes wine in symbiosis with the food. Wines are chosen from a 40,000-bottle cellar with a recently installed $50,000 cooling system for European reds; they are served in Riedel crystal. Food and wine magazines say the prices of Trotter’s wines are reasonable, considering their quality.

Wine will be even more in focus at Trotter’s immediately after the 10th anniversary. He is planning to discontinue serving cocktails, to offer only wines and brandies. He’ll have the back bar torn out and replaced by a wall-sized, temperature-controlled, glass-fronted case containing 30 types of champagne.

The total Trotter’s experience also includes impeccable service from wait staff trained to be helpful rather than hovering, informative rather than imperious. Trotter’s waiters wear dark business suits, and they seem a little like Secret Service agents, their eyes constantly darting from table to table, noting a glass to be filled, a fork dropped.

When Trotter was a waiter in monk’s clothing, he viewed his job “as a game of chess. I’d try to outthink the customers, anticipate their needs, be there just before they’d realize they wanted something.”

One night recently, he reprimanded a waiter, “Don’t be a robot. I hate robots,” then sighed and told a visitor, “I can’t force people to love what I love.”

A table at Trotter’s has become the favored place in Chicago for celebrities – Newman, Redford, the McCartneys, the Dead – to dine without being gushed over; for corporate heads to close the biggest deal; for couples to celebrate the major anniversary. Reservations taker Carolyn Cannon is skilled at subtly extracting information – what’s the occasion, which anniversary? When the dinner ticket is created, such data is coded on in symbols to let the wait staff know which diners are there for a special occasion, though there are nights, Signorio said, “when all the tables are specials.”

Reservations can require six weeks’ notice, especially for the up-to-six-person “chef’s table” set up in the kitchen. Some corporate presidents have booked that table in order to have key managers watch a leader obsessed with excellence put his team through its paces. Dining at the kitchen table, which brings in some $400,000 annually, costs up to $150 a person on weekends. In the heat of battle, Trotter sometimes forgets for a moment that guests sit a few feet away. A sloppily presented dish, a gaffe in service will trigger the chef’s extended vocabulary.

The kitchen is the engine room of this luxury liner. Two years ago, Trotter had the kitchen redone at a cost of $750,000. Along one wall is a huge $200,000 Bonnet range, a fire-hearted beast of gleaming steel and bronze on which hot dishes are prepared. (“He paid more for that range than I did for Gordon restaurant,” Sinclair said.) A second, smaller Bonnet in the rear produces pastries. Yet another oven supplies sourdough loaves for the bread baskets. Cold-dish preparation takes place on a stainless steel counter in front of the pastry station. Every work area is well-lit, spotless.

Trotter, in traditional chef’s white jacket but minus the tall chef’s hat, stands at the front of the kitchen, just inside the door. There, he checks each dish before it is released to the dining room, buffing up a garnish here, a line of sauce there; sending a plate back to be wiped of fingerprints; grinding, with shoulders hunched, his focus completely on that small act, a bit of pepper atop a serving. He writes on the ticket the time each dish leaves the kitchen. Later, he will go over the tickets to see that the timing of courses was correct and constant. If not, he will find out why.

He has an uncanny sense of what is going on at each of the 64 tables out in the dining room. He tracks, for instance, wines ordered and may adjust food to better match those selections; notes if uneaten food is on any of the plates that return to the dishwashing station, sends a waiter to find out why.

The private dining room at Charlie Trotter’s.

“As Saul Bellow said of himself,” Trotter said, “I am a first-class noticer.”

Though Trotter often mentions the Miles Davis quartet, in the kitchen it is more the Woody Herman Herd or the Count Basie Band he leads, a 17-piece aggregation of talent that really cooks.

Dr. Lee Smith, a West Virginia plastic surgeon who describes himself as “a frustrated chef in surgeon’s clothing,” switched the metaphor.

“Being in that kitchen is like being in a great operating room,” he said. “So many things have to happen so fast, and, at the same time, there is a tremendous commitment to precision. There are certain plates (Trotter’s serves courses on a series of different plates, perhaps a Chinese porcelain bowl early in the meal, an iridescent glass plate for a dessert) that have patterns on them. Charlie insists that the food is aligned with the pattern. Then, of course, the waiter will place that plate in a precise alignment with the customer. You have to keep aware of things like that.”

“Never screen calls.” “Never save tables.”—Restaurant mottos at Charlie Trotter’s

Smith, an advanced amateur chef, talked Trotter into letting him spend a week’s vacation working in the kitchen – for no pay, of course. The doctor flew to Chicago, took a room at a bed and breakfast near the restaurant, then put in 14- to 15-hour days working various stations: the hot line, where he burned a hand grabbing a pot handle without remembering first to grab a towel; the cold station, where even his professionally dexterous fingers were defeated in attempting to manipulate two spoons to form egg-shaped ice creams.

After five days that were “every bit as hard as being a surgical intern,” he went back to medicine. “I do a lot of emergency room work,” Smith said, “and the intensity level in that kitchen is comparable. It’s because Charlie wants every customer to have a great experience and every plate must be wonderful. He’s never satisfied.”

Trotter readily admits to ever raising the bar for himself and his staff. Part of the regular 5 p.m. staff meeting is devoted to a critique of the previous night. “What one thing,” he’ll ask, “could you have done to improve your performance?”

Chicago magazine put Trotter on its list of “Meanest Chicagoans,” citing his relentless drive to excel, quoting him as saying, “When you come to work at Charlie Trotter’s, you basically give up your life to the pursuit of perfection.”

“I want you to wake up the next morning hungry for breakfast.”

Trotter often mentions the one person listed ahead of him in that article, Michael Jordan. Sometimes the chef becomes a coach and employs locker-room psychology. Chef Roger Verge of Moulin de Mougins restaurant near Cannes will be attending the 10th anniversary dinner tonight as will Italian wine producer Angelo Gaja. Trotter posted photos of these food world giants in the kitchen, “to motivate the staff to kick things up a notch.”

He has told employees, “We’re like the Bulls in the playoffs except that, for them, it extends over only a few weeks while our playoffs last 250 nights a year. The Bulls can have an off game sometimes. We can’t. Our margin for failure has become more or less nonexistent.”

In 1998, Trotter will be doing a PBS cooking show from the demonstration kitchen next door to the restaurant. He is active in a variety of charities – the $1,000-a-person anniversary dinner tab goes entirely to the Mercy Home for Boys and Girls. He hopes to become an even greater force for social and cultural betterment, what he calls “an enlightened entrepreneur.” And he knows that the empire he has so speedily built and the empires he dreams of need to stand on the tightrope of that “more or less nonexistent” margin for error.

He wouldn’t have it any other way.

“If we go for perfection, we’ll hit excellence,” he said. “I’m more interested in striving for perfection than getting there. If I got it perfect, I’d have to start over.”

Charlie Trotter’s July 9, 1997 Vegetable Menu

Napoleon of Roasted Red Beets, Artichokes & Portobello Mushrooms with Beet Juice, Dill Oil & Pinenuts

Sweet Corn Soup with Lobster Mushrooms and Scallion Oil
Fennel Strewn Cous Cous with Eggplant Puree

Ragout of Morel Mushrooms & Haricot Vert with Wild Mushroom Sauce & Red Wine Emulsion

Whole Roasted Apricots with Candied Plums & Plumcot Sorbet & Vanilla-Yogurt Sorbet with Rhubarb Strawberry Compote

Rice Pudding with Tropical Fruits & Kaffir Emulsion
Mignardises

Charlie Trotter’s July 9, 1997 Grand Menu

Smoked Atlantic Salmon with Osetra Caviar Cream, Japanese Yellow Tail with Asian Spices & in Lobster

with Soba Noodles

Alaskan Halibut & Ahi Tuna with Olive Oil Poached Tomato & Fennel Infused Vegetable Broth

Illinois Rabbit Loin & Seared Foie Gras with Morel Mushrooms, Swiss Chard & Cumin Scented Sweet Corn Emulsion

Millbrook Venison Saddle with Braised Apricots & Candied Plums & Vanilla-Yogurt Sorbet with

Strawberry-Rhubarb Compote
Macadamia Nut Phyllo Beggar’s Purse with Honey Crisp Peaches & Lavender Ice Cream
Mignardises

At the end of the millennium, Charlie Trotter found himself at the top of one “best-of” list after another, achieving international eminence as expressed in rankings by publications ranging from Zagat to Wine Spectator. A sampling of reporting from the time shows Trotter at the top of his game.

***

1998: Readers of Wine Spectator, a sleek magazine that concerns itself with lifestyles of the wine-obsessed, selected Chicago’s Charlie Trotter’s as “the best restaurant in the world for wine and food.”

The Readers’ Choice Awards appear in the magazine’s June 30, 1998 issue. This is the second consecutive year the Armitage Avenue foie gras and truffle emporium won the category.

More than 1,000 restaurants were named on various ballots, but Trotter’s collected nearly twice the votes of the runner up, Fleur de Lys of San Francisco. The highest ranking European restaurants were Enoteca Pinchiorri of Florence, eighth, and La Tour d’Argent of Paris, ninth.

Chicago itself was third, behind New York and San Francisco, in the best U.S. city for restaurants category.

***

1999: In a ceremony billed as the Academy Awards of the food industry, Chicago restaurateur Charlie Trotter was voted the nation’s most outstanding chef on Monday, May 3, in the 1999 James Beard Foundation Awards.

Since 1990 the James Beard Foundation has honored food and beverage professionals in North America for excellence. During the gala black-tie event, more than 60 awards were handed out to everyone from chefs to restaurant designers to cookbook authors.

In his acceptance speech before the crowd of about 1,500, Trotter credited his staff for catapulting Charlie Trotter’s restaurant to fame. He also revealed his secret for making a restaurant a crowd pleaser.

“When you come to work at Charlie Trotter’s, you basically give up your life to the pursuit of perfection.”

“There is no such thing as the word ‘no,’” Trotter said, referring to the policy of honoring any customer’s request.

After accepting his award, a giant silver skillet, the smiling Trotter said he was surprised the honor had been bestowed upon him. The contenders for the coveted award included Nobu Matsuhisa, known for his inventive Japanese dishes served at his New York and Los Angeles restaurants, Nobu and Matsuhisa, respectively, and Eric Ripert, head chef at New York’s renowned Le Bernardin.

“I thought Nobu would get it,” said the bespectacled Trotter while clutching his trophy. “He’s just extraordinary.”

But the night belonged to Trotter as restaurant owners and chefs alike showered him with praise.

Trotter and photographers Tim Turner and Paul Eldridge took home another award for “Charlie Trotter’s Desserts,” which won for its food photography.

In addition to his two awards, Trotter’s restaurant was nominated for outstanding service (the award went to Le Bernardin). His television program, “The Kitchen Sessions with Charlie Trotter,” was nominated for best national television cooking show.

The top chef award solidifies Trotter’s reputation as one of the most important chefs in the country.

***

In 2000, the Tribune’s Good Eating section also mentioned Trotter’s community work in its “honor roll” of food scene achievers:

Charlie Trotter’s talent as a chef and restaurateur has been recognized by his peers, the restaurant industry and the media for almost as long as he has been in business. What doesn’t get much of a spotlight, though, is the Charlie Trotter Culinary Education Foundation, a fundraising enterprise (more than $100,000 has been raised so far) that awards scholarships to culinary arts students. Also served under the Foundation’s umbrella are Chicago-area high school students who arrive twice a week for meals, interviews with the staff, and mini-lessons in food, organic farming and etiquette. The aim is to demonstrate the pleasures of the table as well as the commitment needed to run a successful business.

His success “wouldn’t mean anything if we couldn’t help better the community and the city,” Trotter says. “This is the most rewarding thing we do.”