Trotter’s Legacy: A Legion of Chefs

by William Grimes
Published: November 8, 2013
There are two eras in Chicago dining: B.C. and A.C.

Before Charlie and After Charlie.

Charlie Trotter,who died on Nov. 5 at 54, created more than an eating place when he opened his namesake restaurant in 1987. He remade the culinary landscape, introducing a sheaf of ideas on how to buy food, how to cook it and how to serve it. Working from his own idiosyncratic playbook, he trained the chefs and the sommeliers and the waiters who would shape the dining experience that made Charlie Trotter’s the city’s pre-eminent fine-dining restaurant and a magnet for ambitious young professionals from all over the United States.

“He put across the idea that this isn’t just what you do, it’s who you are,” said Graham Elliot, who did two tours of duty with Mr. Trotter, at his flagship restaurant and at his takeout venture, Trotter’s to Go. “You are defined by your ingredients, by the way you touch them, by the flavors you draw from them. Chicago was absolutely transformed.”

The admirers who showed up outside Charlie Trotter’s on the night of his death and held a candlelight vigil might consider chiseling into its walls Christopher Wren’s epitaph in St. Paul’s Cathedral: Si monumentum requiris, circumspice. If you seek his monument, look around.

And not just in Chicago, for his reach was long, extending to chefs, restaurateurs, front-of-house workers and wine professionals across the country.

The legacy starts in Chicago, of course, where the graduates of what Mr. Elliot calls Charlie Trotter University now run the show. The honor roll is very long. There’s Mr. Elliot at Graham Elliot and Graham Elliot Bistro; Giuseppe Tentori at Boka; Homaro Cantu at  Moto; Mindy Segal of  Mindy’s Hot Chocolate; Art Smith of  Table 52; Bill Kim ofBelly Q  and Urban Belly; and Curtis Duffy of  Grace. Matthias Merges, the owner and executive chef of  Yusho, opened a new restaurant, A10, in the Hyde Park neighborhood the night that Mr. Trotter died.

(Mr. Trotter’s son had found him unconscious at home. The medical examiner of Cook County, Ill., found the results of an autopsy inconclusive and stated that more testing would be needed to determine the cause of death. In a statement the chef’s wife, Rochelle Trotter, said that in January her husband had been treated for a seizure resulting from a brain aneurysm.)

Another protégé, Michael Taus, after running Zealous for 20 years, has designed  Coppervine, in partnership with the wine retailer Don Sritong. It is scheduled to open later this month. Gale Gand, Mr. Trotter’s pastry chef for a spell in the early 1990s, and her husband at the time, Rick Tramonto, left to create two serious rivals to Charlie Trotter’s: Trio, in Evanston, Ill., and  Tru. Mr. Tramonto openedRestaurant R’evolution  in the Royal Sonesta Hotel in New Orleans last year with John Folse.
And then there is Grant Achatz, whose endlessly celebrated Chicago restaurant  Alinea, a temple of molecular cuisine, could be thought of as Mr. Trotter’s juvenile delinquent son. Mr. Achatz had a tempestuous relationship with Mr. Trotter, who could be a merciless taskmaster. (Though Mr. Achatz described their battles in his memoir, “Life, on the Line,” he declined to be interviewed for this article.)

Mr. Trotter’s many acolytes bear the imprint of an experience not unlike belonging to a religious order or a cult. Mr. Trotter, like a culinary Maoist, preached endless revolution. Tasting menus, his stock in trade, were improvised daily, and even hourly. He was a fanatic about wine and food pairings and would order his chefs to adjust dishes at the last minute to match the wine order. A fan of crosstraining, he did not hesitate to turn a cook into a waiter or tap his longtime sommelier, Larry Stone, on the shoulder and assign him to pastry duty.

“He created chefs, not cooks,” Mr. Elliot said, recalling the evening when he stood idle, waiting for the grill chef to deliver several quail he was using in a dish.

Mr. Trotter led him to the array of meats sizzling on the grill and told him to forget the quail. “Make something happen,” he said.

And it was not just the food. Mr. Trotter believed in the concept of the restaurant as a gesamtkunstwerk, to borrow the Wagnerian term for a fully integrated work of art that touches all the senses simultaneously. That’s one reason he introduced a table in the kitchen, encouraging guests to talk to the line cooks. The look, the feel, the smell and the taste of the dining room mattered to him, and he could become apoplectic when small details went awry.

Justin Cogley, the executive chef at  Aubergine  in Carmel, Calif., recalled the busy Saturday night when Mr. Trotter pulled him and Mr. Merges into a restaurant bathroom. “He looked at us really intensely and said, ‘What do you see wrong?’ ” Mr. Cogley said. The two chefs, frantic to get back to work, stood rooted to the spot. Mr. Trotter pointed to a bit of caulking that had come loose on the side of the sink. “You have 24 hours to fix it,” he said.

The Trotter message carried much farther than Chicago. His cookbooks fired the ambitions of untold numbers of young chefs, who beat a path to his restaurant. Mr. Cogley drove cross-country after graduating from the Western Culinary Institute in Portland, Ore. (now Le Cordon Bleu College of Culinary Arts), and showed up on Mr. Trotter’s doorstep. “I remember the first day seeing four or five Japanese fish I had never seen before,” he said. “I knew I was in the right place.”

Many of the chefs who trained with Mr. Trotter dispersed. Nori Sugie became the head chef at  Asiate  in Manhattan, before heading west to take over the kitchen at  Nombe  in San Francisco, last year. David Myers has created a small restaurant empire, opening Sona andComme Ça  in Los Angeles;  Pizzeria Ortica  in Costa Mesa, Calif.; several restaurants in Tokyo and, in Century City in Los Angeles,Hinoki and the Bird, with pan-Asian cuisine.

There are others. David LeFevre, who opened  Water Grill  in Los Angeles, went on to create  M.B. Post  in Manhattan Beach, Calif. Michelle Gayer, a Trotter pastry chef, now runs  Salty Tart, a Minneapolis bakery. Della Gossett became the executive pastry chef atSpago Beverly Hills  at the beginning of the year. Michael Rotondo has revived the fortunes of  Parallel 37  at the Ritz-Carlton in San Francisco since taking over the kitchen in January.

The wine world has felt his influence, too.

“When Charlie started, chefs didn’t consider sommeliers as anything more than glorified bartenders,” said Mr. Stone, who joined the restaurant in 1989. At the time, there were only two sommeliers in San Francisco, none in the Napa Valley, a few in New York.

“He elevated food and wine pairing to a level that has never been matched,” said Mr. Stone, who is now the dean of wine studies at theInternational Culinary Center  in Campbell, Calif., and the estates director of the Napa winery  Quintessa.

Mr. Trotter pushed his sommeliers to pass the master sommelier exam, a credential that opened doors in the industry. Many of his former employees went on to other top restaurants, to work with wine distributors or to operate wine stores.

Mr. Trotter’s reputation slid in recent years. When  he closed his restaurant  last year, it was a quarter-century old, an eternity in restaurant time, and the manic energy he poured into it took a personal toll. Increasingly, other restaurants and chefs received some of the love and attention that Mr. Trotter once monopolized.

But that, too, was testimony to his influence. The newcomers making all the noise, and captivating the critics, had something in common. Mr. Trotter had made the world that they now thrived in.