Gotham Books March 2011. Jacket Design by Marten Kastner/Crucial detail. Jacket Photos by Lara Kastner.
BOOKS READ 37: LIFE, ON THE LINE BY GRANT ACHATZ
This was the first book in a long time (years) that I could not stop reading. That kept me up late. That made me want to know so badly what came next. It is so good. The writing is frank, simple, direct, and the the story itself is incredible and filled with the most ironic of ironies that is cathartically, in the end, undone.
The book is a memoir by the famous chef/owner of Alinea in Chicago, Illinoizzze, Grant Achatz. The guy is seriously bad ass, a force. Holy. Worked at some of the biggest and highly regarded restaurants in the world, Charlie Trotters, The French Laundry, and El Bulli. Opened up his own restaurant (Alinea) by the time he was 30, innovated and paved the way for molecular gastronomy (crazy chemical reaction, science technique approach to food) and received the James Beard Award for Best Chef in no time (which is the shit in the food world). AND GUESS WHAT! Somewhere in there, he uh, you know, had cancer, stage IV (stage basically before death), IN HIS MOUTH, so yes, tongue cancer, went through rigorous chemotherapy and radiation that took away his sense of taste and was of course in an incredible amount of pain (like the skin of your tongue and throat shedding everyday kind of pain) and he still went to work almost everyday while undergoing treatment. And oh, as you can see, he, pshh, beat the cancer and thankfully, later, regained his sense of taste. I call in sick when my throat just gets kind of scratchy and I feel a tiny ache coarsing through my body. As if you can’t already tell, I really admire him.
What was interesting was he was of course able to accomplish all of this (and still kill it to this day) because he was incredibly driven, had a pretty big ego (haha, um, see book cover for reference), super clear vision, and unwavering stubornness. When he achieved all the things he set out to do, he was of course elated, but once the cancer hit, and he worked through it and set that new goal for himself of keeping Alinea at its standard and for him to be the one to do that, he…seemed kind of empty once he beat the cancer. From what I can tell, this emptiness came from putting every bit of your existence into surviving (but in the back of your mind knowing you could very well die) and creating and continuing a legacy, and then finding one day, that, you’re going to live. Even though you did everything you possibly could do to live, to be told all of the sudden that you’re not going to die, you just don’t expect it. And there is this weird transition period of going from living your life expecting to possibly die and knowing how and why to living your life expecting to die from old age. To go from something that extreme, where all the stakes are so high, to having everything become just life again, it all begins to get banal. And I think a large part of that for Achatz was because he didn’t have his sense of taste, but once he did, it connected him back to his core that helped him navigate his life and make it feel meaningful and alive again.
Hold onto the thing that makes you human - that keeps you here - and it will navigate itself and always return you to where you need to be.
