One year ago I woke up not feeling great. I had just returned from Los Angeles and a speaking date at the Dwell on Design Conference. I had arrived the morning before, after an overnight flight and flew headlong into a twelve-hour workday. As morning broke, a slight shiver crawled over my skin, which I fought off with a hot shower and a slow walk in the summer sun to the subway.

My day was slow but was punctuated with two large engagements. First I was to speak on the radio; a long-distance interview with a lovely lady in Los Angeles about modern home cookery and my presentation at that weekend’s design conference. Second, I was scheduled to say goodbye to two of my closest friends, who were preparing to move to Colombia to open a restaurant and plan a Texan wedding.

I arrived at the radio station, with the chill creeping all over my body with relentless attention to detail. In took a nap, bumped into a friend who manages one of your favorite rock and roll bands, and had a glass of water as I stumbled into the freezing studio. The disembodied voice a few thousand miles away poured into my ears and awoke my senses. I tried my best to conjure up some fire and passion, some connective energy to bring my hollow voice to the thousands of listeners who were driving around LA.

It went well, to say I told a joke and conveyed some interesting, if not somewhat longwinded explanations and stories. I stumbled back into the heat of the day hoping for the sun to overcome the cold in my bones. I found Shamus’s restaurant around the corner and although he wasn’t there I filled my shivering shell with soup and starchy deliciousness I was sure would break the cold.

Time swept away and as I finished my last bite I began to meander uptown not in a particular rush to find my wayward friends. It was hot, the kind of hot reserved normally for Augusts in New York. Sticky, offensive and completely unsatisfying to my cold blood, I fell over some where in the mid-twenties. I was in the sun and next to a tree that had the most delicate pink blossoms. I lost an hour next to that tree; awash in sunlight, freezing to the core.

A cab dragged me uptown and dropped me off on the couch of my friends surrounded by boxes in mid-pack. Dinner plans we confirmed and I slept shaking under the slight breeze of the massive air conditioner. As the sun fell I crawled back to the village, surrounded by loved ones but lost to the world.

As I said my goodbyes, after beers and hot sandwiches I struggled my way into bed and a fever that would not break for another thirty days. With a dog-shaped cow by my side, I shivered my way through fifteen days with rumors of swine flu and the vibrations became unbearable. So on the fifteenth of July 2009 I found myself in an emergency room uptown with the hopes of finding out the mysterious monster that was attacking my insides.

It was there that I almost died.

After two long weeks the vicious monster was tracked lingering around, with its guard down, complacent with the total devastation it had wracked upon my body. With a strong blast of chemicals nastier than you could imagine my breath was back. The chill was gone, the shakes were broken and beaten back, but I was ruined and barely able to speak or walk.

Just a few days after my triumphant release I met up for the logistical planning of a super-weapon that was to rain damage upon the meatball world. Laden with a daily toxic intake and a shattered body, I, for the first time in six weeks, was able to look to the future and to all of the things I was so excited to accomplish.

Thank you all for your help and support. Thank you for always being there. Thank you for phone calls, visits, Turkish Food, tears, and letting me beat you at word games!

Prep-list for from Saturday January, 2009 - Photo: Michael Nagrant

Saturday morning started for me in a mid-priced hotel about a mile from the location of our dinner. It has been said that the best coffee shop in Chicago was right around the corner from us – this I cannot confirm or deny. Having entered bed well after 3:00am I was slow to rise when my alarm started making robot noises at 9:00am. It was when I reached over to quiet the singing machine that I noticed that I had missed a handful of calls and text messages from Daniel who stayed in our host’s condo with some of the rest of our team the night before. It was clear from the series of messages that he was trying to explain to me that there was a flood of biblical proportions at the apartment and I needed to come quickly.

After volley of retaliatory missed calls and text messages, I collected myself and prepared for a day during which I would be cooking in what I could only imagine was waist-deep water. Collecting a couple gallons of coffee from the aforementioned purveyor we dove head first into what could have only been a nightmare.

Upon breaking into the confines of our temporary home, I was relieved to see that there was no standing water and the only real causality for the evening was everyone’s sleep and a rug of Crate and Barrel origin. Since I had not been there I leave it to Mayur Subbarao to recount the evenings happenings to you:

Now it was late. Twenty-four courses of culinary madness served and cleared, no thanks to my own rather comical blunders: Cacao spheres in trays that had miraculously managed to invert 90 degrees onto their sides; a freezer-bowl full of cuit sous vide caramel ice cream base that had shot itself out of the freezer door all over me, my fellow dessert cooks, and the floor.

Now it was quiet; most of the cooks, including our fearless leaders Michael and Daniel, had left, and I was tidying up a few things in a kitchen that was dead silent, except for the sloshing and gurgling of a washing machine full of aprons, napkins, and caramel-soaked rags.

Hm, not so much of a sloshing and gurgling any more. More of a splashing and rushing…

I turned around to see what looked like a wave of water issuing forth from the utility room. I think I must have screamed like a six-year-old girl, because Daniel and Akiko rushed into the kitchen in mere seconds, by which point I was already ankle-deep in water. I waded to the utility room in a frenzy, only to realize that there was an office between it and the kitchen. Computers! Arrgh! was the only thing running through my head as I grabbed everything that looked vaguely electronic and piled it on the desk. Daniel and Akiko were right behind me, moving away vulnerable objects and throwing down anything absorbent… most of which was currently in spin cycle in the washing machine that had caused this mess to begin with.

Having removed everything we could (it was too late for the poor rug, RIP), we went into the utility room only to realize that the pipe leading directly into the washing machine had come loose and was now shooting water all over the place. By the time I fixed it, I looked like I’d been thrown into a swimming pool fully-dressed, and the 30-degree temperature inside the utility room was certainly not agreeing with me. Meanwhile, however, the crisis had decidedly separated the professionals from the amateurs; Daniel and Akiko were calmly mopping up the flood and cleaning the kitchen (again).

“For heaven’s sake, this happens all the time at work,” said Akiko. “You don’t want to know what gets spilled on the floor in a given day. Just go to sleep and we’ll deal with it tomorrow.”

We turned in rather calmly, and it occurred to me that somehow, flying to Chicago to execute a 24-course dinner out of an apartment kitchen with a minimal staff of volunteers which involved chilling wine on a garage roof and setting up sous vide baths in a bathroom sink…

…had given me a sense of proportion.

The hot coffee sparked the minds of those who had to battle the deluge all night and we got to work in quick fashion. Hours slipped by, and sometime just after noon I excused myself to do a little grocery shopping and to meet, for the first time, my lovely lady friend’s father.

We were doing great on time having done most of the preparation the night before and I left Daniel, Brian, Akiko and Mayur to polishing off the last few things while Kathryn and I hit up the Treasure Island and made our way to a restaurant that only served small sandwiches for our rendezvous with her Dad.

I know the idea of scheduling such an important meeting on a day already filled to the brim with nervous tension, possible calamity and exhaustion seems reckless but life does not always allow you to choose the field for your greatest battles. I wasn’t too concerned because I had some inside information that let me know that we both liked Ayn Rand, specifically Atlas Shrugged, for what I could only assume was her pride in accomplishment, enduring work ethic and rape fantasy.

Needless to say the tiny sandwiches were small, talk was delightful and uplifting and as we broke from the small building and into the brutal cold I was alive with excitement. That night we would be serving diner to two of the only people in the world who could actually give us an honest comparison to the meal that we were trying to recreate and I was giddy in anticipation.

So with an offhanded comment in a local New York publication inviting me to come and stage (intern in French pronounced with an AHGEE like mirage) at his restaurant, I found myself just a few days later speaking with Grant Achatz confirming the details for the few shorts days I would be spending in the kitchen at Alinea. The timing wasn’t the best as he was going to be presenting at Madrid Fusion the same week we were planning our Chicago dinner, so I came out the week prior for a few days of abuse and learning.

After hearing that her conversation had sparked my impending collision with the kitchen at Alinea, Jordana, TONY journalist, asked me if I would be kind enough to write about my experiences and take some photos from the short time I was going to be staging at Alinea. Owing her at least this much I did my best at capitulating all of the details and information I could.

These words were broken into a three part story that was posted on TimeOut NY in early February, 2009.

Inside Alinea: Part one

Inside Alinea: Part two

Inside Alinea: Part three

Inside Alinea: Inside Alinea – The Slideshow

As are most things in this world, the slide show for TimeOut NY has been edited and subsequently contains only a select number of the photos that were captured during my short time in the kitchen at Alinea. Therefore, for you enjoyment, please fine below the entire collection.

Please click on the little I in the upper right hand corner of the photo to provide you with a brief (or sometime lengthy) description of each photograph and its context.