That the cancer would attack Grant Achatz’s mouth, and his tongue no less, was beyond ironic; it was cruel and seemingly impossible. After all, this is among the most important tongues in the world, belonging to one of the country’s elite chefs. Even demographically he is all wrong for the diagnosis—the usual patient is in his early 60s, a prodigious smoker, and a drinker. And here is Achatz—a boyish 34, a fit nonsmoker who uses alcohol strictly in the company of food. Yet there he sat last July as a doctor explained that the pain he felt in his mouth was cancer. It was like Tiger Woods losing his arm, Steven Spielberg losing his sight. Except for Achatz it wasn’t just his livelihood that was on the line, but his life.“The fear was that he would die,” says Thomas Keller, arguably the most acclaimed chef in America, the Yoda to Achatz’s Luke Skywalker. “And what a tragedy that would be—a young man with such talent and desire who has the ability to set an example for his generation on work ethic, integrity, and determination. It would have been a shame to lose all that.”
At Alinea, the Chicago restaurant Achatz opened in 2005 and Gourmet named the country’s best a year later, the wunderkind treats dining as something beyond an exercise in consumption. To Achatz, eating is an event, combining all the senses. As such, he treats classic comfort foods like an alchemist in his lab, reinterpreting caramel corn as a liquid served in a shot glass, manipulating shrimp cocktail with a wine press to present it via plastic atomizer, encasing a peeled grape in peanut brittle and brioche in a strange (but delicious) take on the PB&J. His meals often consist of 25 courses, take hours to complete, and employ custom-built service pieces—an evening of sensory overload that dazzles Alinea’s 75 diners each night. But despite all the kitchen pyrotechnics, flavor remains the ultimate goal.
Achatz is, by all accounts, a mad scientist, obsessed with deconstructing ingredients molecule by molecule in a quest for the most pristine flavors—the chemistry equivalent of playing with his food. Accordingly, gourmands categorize (unfairly, he protests) his culinary restlessness as “molecular gastronomy,” a discipline that originated in Europe and now includes a coterie of American practitioners who endeavor to use science in the service of their cuisine (see sidebar). Achatz is at the vanguard of this revolution, part Willy Wonka, part Albert Einstein. Some early headlines about the chef: “My Compliments to the Lab,” “A Taste of the Future,” and “Chef Darwin.”
But the mad scientist isn’t mad at all. He’s disarmingly simple; when he’s not cooking, he tends to favor chain restaurant fare like Potbelly sandwiches, HomeMade Pizza Company, and any
other treat replete with salt and starch. In fact, shockingly, Achatz has never dined at his own restaurant. “It’s like a comedian laughing at his own jokes,” he explains. The décor of his Chicago
apartment is unwittingly minimalist; the couple of pieces of furniture include a television (a divorced dad’s concession to his two young sons), a table from Alinea, and a bed—a new addition. “I slept on the floor for months,” he says. Until recently, he made the trip to Alinea in a 2000 Ford Focus. After all, he grew up in Michigan, with a mullet, the adolescent gofer at his parents’ family-style restaurant (“Polish Night” every Thursday!), where he proved himself a prodigy in traditional dining: pierogies, meatloaf, Western omelets. Says Achatz’s father, “At 14 years old, I could leave him with more responsibility than the best chefs or line cooks.” The sole parental rebuke resulted from Achatz’s eagerness to adorn dishes with parsley and orange twist garnishes—a suspicious frill to father and clientele alike. His father’s advice: “Don’t go into cooking. You won’t make any money. Go be an architect.”
After attending the Culinary Institute of America, Achatz willed himself a job at Keller’s French Laundry in Northern California—sending a résumé every week for months until Keller called him. “His early days here, he was quiet—not shy, but quiet,” says Keller. “He was absorbing as much as he could so he could become an even more integral part of the team.” Four years later Achatz
migrated to Chicago, whereupon Food & Wine named him Best New Chef and the James Beard Foundation named him its Rising Star Chef of the Year. The accolades for Alinea were immediate.
And then, last July, the announcement that he had tongue cancer, a diagnosis that threatened his sense of taste, the ultimate arbiter of his peculiar genius. “Let the comparisons to a deaf Beethoven begin,” wrote one blogger. Achatz’s response: “Beethoven composed one of his greatest symphonies when he was deaf.” But still—his tongue? “The irony is just bizarre,” he admits.
Every doctor Achatz saw—all second, third, and fourth opinions—recommended the same treatment: Removal of almost three quarters of his tongue. Only that would save his life. And it needed to happen soon or the pain would become so severe he would be begging them to remove it entirely. To say nothing of how the cancer (stage 4 squamous cell carcinoma) could take his life. Such a surgery would strip everything he ate of taste—food providing only fundamental sustenance. “I kept telling him, ‘Your life is about your brain,’¿” remembers Nick Kokonas, Achatz’s business partner. “¿‘They can cut off your tongue. They can cut off a limb. They can cut off your nose. Your genius is your creativity.’ It’s a logical argument, but your heart isn’t in it.”
At some point his job seemed secondary. The recommended procedure (a glossectomy) would not only take the Achatz’s sense of taste but would seriously impair his speech. A makeshift tongue fashioned from tissue and muscle in the hip or thigh would aid basic function—namely, swallowing. “It was going to change my life in a radical way,” Achatz says. “I had to think there was an alternative method of treatment. It seemed so barbaric.”
Thankfully, an alternative did exist—nine miles south of Alinea at the University of Chicago Medical Center (opinion number five). Here, they told Achatz, they would give him aggressive chemotherapy. Radiation would follow—sometimes twice a day. The chemo would take his hair. The radiation would burn the inside of his mouth and throat, his tongue peeling as though badly sunburned. His sense of taste would be impaired for many months, and the chance persisted that it would never completely return. But they pledged that if the treatment eliminated the cancer, his tongue could remain.
Achatz began receiving chemo almost immediately. His doctors asked that he rest to better maintain energy and weight, but he ignored them. “It’s not that the treatment didn’t affect him,” says Everett Vokes, Achatz’s oncologist. “But you could see that this man loves his job.
After a while the worst thing we could do was discourage him from working. That’s what kept him going.”
Though Achatz’s conversation rarely involved his health, the well-wishers persisted. Another of Chicago’s culinary icons, Charlie Trotter, told the Chicago Tribune that news of Achatz’ diagnosis caused tears in his kitchen. During a visit to New York City’s Gramercy Tavern, Achatz’s presence inspired its chef (whose father was also once afflicted by tongue cancer) to assemble an
impromptu liquid menu for his guest. “It was nice to see him out and enjoying—as much as possible—the food prepared for him by a chef colleague who had already done that type of food and was sympathetic to the situation,” says Keller, a companion that evening. Back home, Achatz declined offers of a night nurse and car service, regularly driving himself to the hospital for treatment, almost always from Alinea, where he would return afterward. “It was nuts,” Kokonas says. “I don’t know if you do that out of bravery, fear, or comfort.”
From the outset, when he was not at the restaurant—a total of 14 servings by Achatz’ count, fewer by Kokonas’—he continually assessed the kitchen’s mood by spying with his iPhone or laptop. If he detected despair of any sort, he arrived at Alinea’s back door to reassure accordingly. In this way, hopefully, he would ensure that nothing changed—most of all, Alinea. As far as Achatz was concerned, if his health was to improve, his restaurant could not slip: “What if I had said during radiation, ‘This is too much. I need to focus on healing and treatment. I’m going to take six weeks off,’ and during that time, the Chicago Tribune would have rereviewed us and dropped us to three stars? That would have devastated me. Would it have been more devastating than dying? I don’t know. But I felt like it was.” He stops: “That’s silly, right?”
To Achatz’s eye at least, the cancer disappeared from his mouth sometime in late fall. Officially, remission arrived in December. He received the news slightly anesthetized, enhancing its dreamlike quality. The result seemed to surprise his doctors, who remain cautious. Their refrain: “It’s gone well so far.” For the next two years, he will visit them monthly. This kind of vigilance is necessary to quickly identify any recurrence.
At 145 pounds, he remains diminutive. A thicket of hair—darker than before—sits atop his head. His diet is limited to oatmeal, scrambled eggs, and a deli cup of extra soft orzo, his preferred food and drink continuing to prove agonizing. He devised the latest Alinea menu without the benefit of his
superior sense of taste. “But it’s certainly been coming back,” he says assuredly, and in late March he was named one of five 2008 nominees for Outstanding Chef at the James Beard Foundation Awards, the industry’s Oscars. In the meantime Achatz proudly relays that everyone he trusts considers the new dishes to be his finest. For now he must take them at their word.