We had the money. To be exact, we had—my friend Zoe and I—somewhere on the far side of $1,000 to do with as we wished. That might not seem much by new economy terms, but we were an old economy pair. For five years we’d spent our spare cash on a project, a magazine, that, while personally satisfying, on its best days only tentatively wobbled toward self-sufficiency. Last year we pulled the plug, and now we were pleasantly surprised to see our labor trickle back to us in the form of a four-digit bank balance. A celebration was in order. So we made a reservation for two at Charlie Trotter’s.
“It’s all about excellence,” begins Charlie Trotter’s first cookbook, Charlie Trotter’s Recipes, “or at least working towards excellence. Early on in your approach to cooking—or to running a restaurant—you have to determine whether or not you are willing to commit fully and completely to the idea of the pursuit of excellence. I have always looked at it this way: if you strive like crazy for perfection—an all-out assault on total perfection—at the very least you will hit a high level of excellence, and then you might be able to sleep at night.”
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Trotter champions the use of the freshest organic and local produce. He flies in free-range meat and line-caught fish from around the globe. Every fig, every leek, every lobster is inspected upon delivery. He’s pioneered the use of vegetable-juice-based vinaigrettes and light, emulsified broths for flavor, and he shies away from heavy sauces, scorning the classical chef’s reliance on butter and cream. Furthermore, the flowers in the dining room are ruthlessly fresh, each course arrives on a different china pattern, wine is served in crystal Reidel stemware, and the walls are covered with custom-woven fabric.
I knew all this before I ever set foot in the place, because I’d been reading the collected Trotter hagiography. Because Charlie Trotter is more than just a chef—he’s a brand, a multimedia empire. In addition to his cookbooks—Recipes, Vegetables, Seafood, Desserts—he’s got his own PBS series, The Cooking Sessions With Charlie Trotter, with accompanying guidebook, and he’s written himself into the big yellow zeitgeist with Gourmet Cooking for Dummies. He also has his own line of spices, and this December saw the long-awaited opening of Trotter’s to Go, a gourmet takeout shop on Fullerton near Southport.
Recently a friend who moved to the midwest from New York described his own trip to Charlie Trotter’s. It’s so provincial, he sniffed. That sort of thing would never fly in New York. In New York people would say, oh please. Get over yourself. Just give us some food.
Ruhlman celebrates Thomas Keller’s sense of fun as well, but at the French Laundry the jollies are a lot more cerebral. The French Laundry is one of the few restaurants in America generally considered to occupy the same rarefied air as Charlie Trotter’s. Both serve multicourse, fixed price menus; both are helmed by a noted iconoclast.
Did I mention that I am really not a food person? I mean, I like food. Who doesn’t like food? I’m no philistine—I spent my youth scrubbing spinach in a prep sink and know bok choy from chard and hamachi from halibut. But I’m not a food person in the let’s-go-to-Spruce-I-hear-they-have-a-new-chef way. I frequent the same four restaurants, most within walking distance of my home, where the average tab is about $10 per person.
