Slideshow

Farewell at Charlie Trotter’s: Inside the Legendary Restaurant’s $2500-per-Person Gala Event

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This is the end…

After 25 years, it came down to Sunday: the big farewell for Charlie Trotter’s. There are two more weeks of service followed by a special informal party on the 31st, but last night’s 25th anniversary benefit for Nathan Myhrvold’s charity was unquestionably the last hurrah and biggest event featuring the restaurant working at its peak of perfection, a level of culinary and service aspiration that changed American dining as much as any restaurant ever. In the kitchen with Trotter’s team were three chefs of wildly different styles— Myhrvold, Tetsuya Wakuda and Sean Brock— all of whom felt they owed Trotter a debt for the direction in which American cooking has gone during the restaurant’s 25 years. In the restaurant, paying $2500 per person to attend, were about 60 of Trotter’s oldest and most valued customers, some of whom had been to the restaurant as many as 400 times. We were privileged to dine with them— our immediate table companions included wine writer/novelist Jay McInerney and legendary Florida chef Norman Van Aken, who gave Trotter his start at Gordon in Chicago 30 years ago— while our man Huge Galdones was in the kitchen and elsewhere, capturing the behind-the-scenes story of an extraordinary dinner. Read our account below, or jump to our huge slideshow of everything that went into the night.

Many vastly expensive and sophisticated restaurants have opened in Chicago since Trotter’s first popped up in still-transitional Lincoln Park in 1987, but upon watching his staff welcome many of their most valued customers for the last time, it was apparent that it remained one of a kind when it came to taking the best possible care of the very, very well-heeled. The crowd did not consist of trendies needing to chase the latest hot thing (though an out-of-town guest at our table was coming to Trotter’s after visits on the same trip to Moto and Alinea and recent visits to Sixteen and L2O).

This was an older crowd, many doubtless from the financial industry, in whose lives Trotter’s restaurant had held a central place. It was the place where they discovered the finer things in life when they first made money in the boom of the eighties and early nineties, and which had shaped their tastes as they returned again and again, enjoyed being greeted by name and having their preferences remembered, and built their self-evidently substantial wine cellars with some guidance from Trotter’s legendary sommelier Larry Stone. More than once, as both Trotter and guests spoke about the past quarter century, it was with a note of wistful gratitude for having grown from relative youth to age as a guest here.

Which is not to say that it was a mournful evening— far from it. Trotter was ebullient, a man who seems to have lifted the weight of the world off his shoulders recently, even if the whip-crackingly tough Trotter of legend did pop up once or twice behind the scenes (not least when we tried to interview him while guests were waiting in his presence). But the final staff meeting before service was full of energy, laughs, and some bawdy kitchen humor, with his wife Rochelle, a firecracker herself, paying appropriate tribute to the staff as the restaurant’s family.

Then it was on to the meal. The chefs Trotter invited seemed united only by their differences: Wakuda with his Asian cuisine, Myhrvold and his team of mad kitchen scientists, Brock with his Southern heritage orientation. Yet each of them revealed a different side of Trotter’s influence: Wakuda’s food recalled how Trotter’s Asian leanings made American food that was clean and stripped to the essence of the ingredients; Myhrvold’s space-age creations offered the same shock of tasting something for the first time that Trotter’s farm-to-table food did 25 years ago, and Brock showed how Trotter’s refinement of Midwestern cuisine could similarly work on Southern ingredients.

Of the chefs at work— the fourth being Trotter’s own team under chef de cuisine Michael Rotondo— the one who most dazzled the diners was surely Myhrvold. Whether or not he’s the same kind of chef as the others— or more like the CEO of a technology team made up of trained chefs— isn’t clear, but every single one of the tricks he came up with proved to be no trick at all, but a deep insight into the essential flavor of a dish. A caprese salad drink made of emulsified whey and flavor extracted from tomato seeds was stunning in the way it seemed to deliver caprese flavor without the body of an eaten dish; a raw dish built around the flavor of peas separated from their form in a centrifuge was an injection of spring flavor straight to the pleasure centers of the brain. And a square of pastrami, made from short rib meat and prepared in a complex way we had too much wine to remember now, had the entire room drooling and making guttural noises in delight. Myhrvold and Trotter also went room to room doing a Mr. Wizard demonstration of fun with liquid nitrogen, shattering a rose from one of the centerpieces as their climax.

The wine flowed freely— one guest brought a Melchior, a giant bottle almost larger than sommelier Larry Stone as he struggled to pour it, and shared it with the entire restaurant— and we tasted many things which, we are pretty sure, we will never see (or have the money to acquire) again, courtesy of the collectors in the room whose generosity with their cellars surely has had few better opportunities to be displayed than on this night, wishing an old friend goodbye.

The iconic Chicago restaurant, closing after 25 years. Photo: Eugene (Huge) Galdones/? 2012 Galdones Photography LLC
No expense was spared by either the restaurant or the diners, many of whom shared bottles from their cellars freely. Photo: Eugene (Huge) Galdones/? 2012 Galdones Photography LLC
Prepping dishes to show to the staff during the pre-service meeting. Photo: Eugene (Huge) Galdones/? 2012 Galdones Photography LLC
The staff gathers in the former TV studio turned reception area next door. Photo: Eugene (Huge) Galdones/? 2012 Galdones Photography LLC
Guest Chefs Nathan Myhrvold (center) and Tetsuya Wakuda (right) listen in; that’s Trotter protege David Myers (of LA’s Comme Ça) between them in black. Photo: Eugene (Huge) Galdones/? 2012 Galdones Photography LLC
Trotter speaks as Sean Brock, Modernist Cuisine co-author Maxime Bilet and his wife Rochelle look on. Photo: Eugene (Huge) Galdones/? 2012 Galdones Photography LLC
Sean Brock explains what catfish is doing on a menu at Charlie Trotter’s. Photo: Eugene (Huge) Galdones/? 2012 Galdones Photography LLC
Wakuda describes his menu. Photo: Eugene (Huge) Galdones/? 2012 Galdones Photography LLC
Bilet got a lot of razzing, here from Au Bon Climat Winery owner Jim Clendenen, about the sexiness of his hair and French accent. Photo: Eugene (Huge) Galdones/? 2012 Galdones Photography LLC
The kitchen goes to work— here, reassembling Myhrvold’s oysters, which are dropped in liquid nitrogen to kill the oyster and open the shell without shucking. Photo: Eugene (Huge) Galdones/? 2012 Galdones Photography LLC
Grating fresh wasabi for Myhrvold’s pastrami. Photo: Eugene (Huge) Galdones/? 2012 Galdones Photography LLC
More grating. Trotter’s kitchen has the nicest copper pots we’ve seen. Photo: Eugene (Huge) Galdones/? 2012 Galdones Photography LLC
On the back patio, grilling Trotter’s take on beer can chicken— squab on tiny cans which actually held cheap wine, emptied out and replaced with beer. Photo: Eugene (Huge) Galdones/? 2012 Galdones Photography LLC
While the wine team prepares as well. Photo: Eugene (Huge) Galdones/? 2012 Galdones Photography LLC
Appetizers. Photo: Eugene (Huge) Galdones/? 2012 Galdones Photography LLC
More appetizers. Photo: Eugene (Huge) Galdones/? 2012 Galdones Photography LLC
Guests mingle at the reception. Photo: Eugene (Huge) Galdones/? 2012 Galdones Photography LLC
Suddenly the word goes out— gather out front for a curbside greeting. Photo: Eugene (Huge) Galdones/? 2012 Galdones Photography LLC
Trotter and Myhrvold await the special guest. Photo: Eugene (Huge) Galdones/? 2012 Galdones Photography LLC
Trotter and Mayor Rahm Emanuel exchange hugs. Photo: Eugene (Huge) Galdones/? 2012 Galdones Photography LLC
Emanuel works the line as Donna Lee Trotter, mother of the chef, greets the mayor’s wife. Photo: Eugene (Huge) Galdones/? 2012 Galdones Photography LLC
Then it’s back to the kitchen for Bilet and Myhrvold. Photo: Eugene (Huge) Galdones/? 2012 Galdones Photography LLC
Wakuda’s team plates. Photo: Eugene (Huge) Galdones/? 2012 Galdones Photography LLC
Brock’s sous-vided catfish on the grill. Photo: Eugene (Huge) Galdones/? 2012 Galdones Photography LLC
Myhrvold’s deconstructed caprese salad. Photo: Eugene (Huge) Galdones/? 2012 Galdones Photography LLC
Only a small fraction of the wine glasses that will be used tonight. Photo: Eugene (Huge) Galdones/? 2012 Galdones Photography LLC
Guests, including the mayor, begin to fill both floors of the restaurant. Photo: Eugene (Huge) Galdones/? 2012 Galdones Photography LLC
The parts of Myhrvold’s “cryo-shucked” oyster, awaiting reconstruction (in nicer shells, but with both oyster and liquor preserved). Photo: Eugene (Huge) Galdones/? 2012 Galdones Photography LLC
Cryo-shucked oysters, assembled and garnished with pickled roses. Photo: Eugene (Huge) Galdones/? 2012 Galdones Photography LLC
Trotter’s Chef de Cuisine Michael Rotondo takes plates out. Photo: Eugene (Huge) Galdones/? 2012 Galdones Photography LLC
Myhrvold’s raw vegetable dish, in which peas were spun in a centrifuge to extract their essence. The “CT25” is daikon radish, dyed with beet juice, cut with a $75,000 laser which can cut with such precision that only the individual cells being cut felt any heat; the rest remained raw. Photo: Eugene (Huge) Galdones/? 2012 Galdones Photography LLC
Wakuda’s tian of Queensland spanner crab (the same species as Hawaiian kona crab), with bean curd aonori and junsai. Delicate and ultra-refined, yet with familiar soy sauce flavors from the junsai, this tasted like the best Chinese takeout dish ever. Photo: Eugene (Huge) Galdones/? 2012 Galdones Photography LLC
Brock’s incredibly silky, clean catfish with butter beans and a lovage-whey sauce— Southern flavors at a remarkable level of refinement. Photo: Eugene (Huge) Galdones/? 2012 Galdones Photography LLC
Trotter’s staff prepared lobster and fried sweetbreads, cooked with a sauce made from a certain type of liver which he disavowed any knowledge of his staff using. Photo: Eugene (Huge) Galdones/? 2012 Galdones Photography LLC
The beer-can squab, with a stewed tripe-filled ravioli which grounded the squab in earthy flavors. Photo: Eugene (Huge) Galdones/? 2012 Galdones Photography LLC
Pouring Myhrvold’s milkshake of distilled goat’s milk, bourbon flavor and banana essence. Photo: Eugene (Huge) Galdones/? 2012 Galdones Photography LLC
Another amazing essentially raw dish, of perfect in-season fruit (including nitrogen-frozen blackberry bits, which popped in the mouth), which would be topped with a light canteloupe-flavored broth and a cucumber sorbet. Photo: Eugene (Huge) Galdones/? 2012 Galdones Photography LLC
Brock’s take on chocolate-banana pudding (with a little saba).  Photo: Eugene (Huge) Galdones/? 2012 Galdones Photography LLC
The menu for the 13-course, $2500 valedictory dinner. Photo: Eugene (Huge) Galdones/? 2012 Galdones Photography LLC
Farewell at Charlie Trotter’s: Inside the Legendary Restaurant’s