Tru

Introduction
 
The Tru Story
 
THIS IS THE STORY OF A RESTAURANT IN CHICAGO CALLED TRU.
 
By the time Tru opened on a bright, sunny day in May 1999, Gale and I had been involved in fifteen other restaurant openings. You’d think we could have done it with our eyes closed, but opening a restaurant is incredibly stressful and agonizing.
 
While our experience meant we did not need a guidebook—we could write the guidebook!—it also meant we were well aware of what could go wrong. Happily, the debut went smoothly and we opened to critical praise and, better yet, booked tables.
 
In so many ways, this was the culmination of our dreams. Tru represented an opportunity to open a fine-dining world-class restaurant. In doing so, we could touch thousands of diners from both our beloved Chicago and around the globe.
 
We could put our mantra into action: fine dining with a sense of humor.
 
Getting to this point had been a long, exciting, and sometimes painful journey. Looking back, much of what went before seems to have been a well-conceived progression of career moves. Believe me, most of it was blind luck driven by an abiding love of food, a passion for the table, and an obsession with all that goes into producing superb meals.
 
BEGINNINGS
 
When we opened Tru, Gale and I were seasoned chefs who had been in the business for a number of years. I started when I was fifteen years old, working at a Wendy’s in Rochester, New York, where I was born. I owe a debt of gratitude to Dave Thomas, Wendy’s founder, who created a work environment where a kid like me, who didn’t really fit into school, could thrive, move up, and grab on to skills that would serve me for a lifetime. Once I was bitten by the restaurant bug, I never managed to complete my formal education, but my culinary education became a movable feast, eagerly consumed in one restaurant after another, one city after another, even one country after another.
 
Before too long, Greg Broman hired me for the Stathallen Hotel in Rochester. Under Greg’s guidance, I began to understand what it takes to produce fine food and survive in a professional kitchen. While there, I met Gale, who had graduated from the Rochester Institute of Technology’s School for American Craftsmen and, with Greg’s coaxing, had decided to work in the restaurant. We both found our true homes in Greg’s kitchen and are forever grateful to him.
 
Greg encouraged us to go to New York City. By the mid-1980s, I found myself cooking on the line at the Gotham Bar and Grill, while Gale worked at Jams. During our years in the Big Apple, we cooked in some of the best kitchens in town. We lived in a hot, stuffy fifth-floor walk-up in the West Village with a roommate and mice in the oven! It was all part of our New York experience. We were young and ready for anything.
 
I have been cooking for twenty-six of my forty-one years and can delineate stages of my self-taught professional education. The early days in Rochester, New York, were like culinary high school. When I moved to New York City and cooked in restaurants such as Tavern on the Green, Aurora, and La Reserve, I became a serious culinary college student. Later, I spent several years in Europe, where I completed a graduate course in fine cuisine. Finally, the years I have had the good fortune to work with Rich Melman of Lettuce Entertain You Enterprises have been intensive courses in the business of running a restaurant. My association with Rich truly has been a blessing.
 
I am not finished with this education; far from it. As long as there is one more technique to master, one more flavor combination to try, and one more customer to please, I will work at my craft. When you are a chef, you never stop learning.
 
As a self-educated chef, it has been important for me to read a lot, travel, and experience the cooking of others. I spent years doing just that whenever I could, both in this country and abroad. In my quest to elevate my own craft to lofty heights, I am always inspired by the work of others.
 
CHICAGO BECOMES HOME
 
Gale and I hooked up with Rich Melman by chance. When Gale moved back to her hometown of Chicago from New York in 1987, I followed. She set up some interviews for me, one at Scoozi, a large restaurant serving progressive Italian cuisine. In the middle of the interview, I told the manager I wasn’t interested in such large-volume cooking and got up to leave. The corporate chef stopped me, saying he thought I should meet “the boss.” Neither Gale nor I had heard of Rich Melman or Lettuce Entertain You, but the next day Gale drove me to the corporate offices and ended up waiting in the car for two hours while I met with Rich.
 
Rich and I hit it off immediately. He was fascinated with my background and the humble beginnings at Wendy’s that had led to line-cook jobs in some of New York’s best kitchens. He was impressed that I had worked with restaurant legend Joe Baum when he opened Aurora. I explained that I did not want to cook in a big restaurant and Rich said he would find a place that would suit me, and to just trust him. I’ve been trusting him ever since. When Gale asked me what had happened, all I could say was that I had a job but didn’t know where or for how much. She thought I was crazy! The job turned out to be at Avanzare (Italian for “to move forward”), a popular high-end Italian restaurant housed in the same space currently occupied by Tru. As it turns out, this space is a spiritual one for me.
 
I moved on to another restaurant, Bella Luna, in 1988 and Gale joined me as pastry chef. We had worked together at Gotham Bar and Grill and other restaurants in New York and so we knew this would be a successful alliance. It was; we got married at Bella Luna. Gale made the cake, I catered the food, and Food Arts magazine ran the story about the celebration in their first issue.
 
Not too long after the wedding, we got a call from Bob Payton. I had no idea who this hale and hearty guy on the other end of the phone was, but he invited Gale and me to join him for breakfast at the Drake Hotel to discuss a job in England. We were curious. Bob ordered a huge stack of blueberry pancakes and a Diet Coke for breakfast and told us our names had shown up on lists of possible chefs he was considering to help him out. The job was “fixing” the broken restaurant at his five-star country-house hotel in England, and he seduced us with references to “sunny Leicestershire” in the United Kingdom. It was a remarkable performance. Bob, a former Madison Avenue advertising guy, pitched the job even as he interviewed us. The lure of Europe coupled with his larger-than-life personality were too much for us to resist, and before we knew it we had signed up! In true Payton form, six weeks later work papers, green cards, and first-class airplane tickets arrived at our front door. We were off.
 
MUSEUM DAYS
 
Gale refers to the years we spent abroad working for Bob Payton and our shorter trips to Europe as our time in the museum. By this, she means we studied and observed much of what had gone before us. Gale studied art seriously before she began cooking, and, for her, museum visits are common but also treats to be savored. Certainly our time in Europe was one to be savored to the fullest.
 
Bob hired us to turn around the kitchen at Stapleford Park, where everything but the restaurant was first class. Within a year, we had earned Michelin’s Red M and even the hardest-to-please food critics were impressed.
 
The hotel, about ninety miles from London, was absolutely beautiful. We lived in a grace-and-favor cottage on the estate with a thatched roof and tea roses by the front door. We also worked from morning to long after dark, which is not unusual when you are doing a total makeover of a menu, kitchen, and staff. It was consuming and exhausting work, but even so, we took every opportunity to slip away and see more of the world.
 
We sometimes said that the best thing about England was France. We were only a few hours from the finest restaurants in the world and Bob encouraged us to take advantage of this. He made calls to friends in the business to open doors and gave us the use of his many apartments in Europe. Bob’s generosity was amazing. Whenever we had a few days off, we headed for France, Italy, Spain, Switzerland, Wales, or Scotland.
 
I refer to those years constantly throughout this book. The greatest chefs of Europe opened their hearts and kitchens to us, and consequently we learned an amazing amount. We ate at one fantastic three-Michelin-star restaurant after another and compiled what we called the “Dream File,” a compilation of our favorite ideas and most compelling experiences. We staged in as many of Europe’s kitchens as we could, too. In the food business, to stage is to study for a prescribed time in another chef’s kitchen without pay. The stage may be days or even months, depending on your relationship to the chef, his needs, and, to some extent, your budget and your ambition.