curtis duffy wife
Roasted carrots,
whipped mascarpone,
Iranian pistachio
It was the most important night of his career. Curtis Duffy hovered over plates inside the gleaming white kitchen of his new restaurant, Grace. Head down, with the poker face that was the 37-year-old'southward default demeanor, he bundled long celery curls, ricotta and fried sunchokes into a three-dimensional wreath resembling the architecture of Antoni Gaudi.
The lock on the glass forepart door was unbolted, and the start customers walked through.
Finally. The eating place was supposed to have opened in March. It was now Dec. The equipment that arrived broken, the delays, the toll overruns — all of it had turned many of his nights sleepless. Simply and then did the pressures of high expectations. Curtis had worked his way up through the finest restaurants in Chicago — Charlie Trotter'south, Trio, Alinea — and earned four-star reviews under his name at Avenues in The Peninsula hotel on the Magnificent Mile. Simply this restaurant, Grace, was his.
What would customers think? How would food critics react? What if the eatery was a failure? The hypotheticals lingered, simply on this December night, the what-ifs became secondary.
He was mostly broken-hearted about the 9:30 p.g. reservation.
It was booked for Ruth Snider. In many respects, she was the woman who had saved Curtis. She steered him at a time his life felt bumming, back when he stole from supermarkets and bullied kids in his neighborhood. She kept an centre on him during his travails, through family turmoil ... earlier and later on the murder. They cried on the phone with each other.
This is a story of the minor-boondocks kid who proved himself in the large city. Of connections forged and lost on the path to becoming the best — no affair the price. Of closing your eyes and hoping your issues disappear.
It's a story of a chef, and what cooking gave him and what it took abroad.
Mostly it'southward a story almost family.
While the glitterati and food critics in attendance on opening nighttime snapped pictures of the nutrient on their tables, Curtis Duffy focused on Snider, the middle schoolhouse teacher who — in a way she'due south likewise modest to have credit for — helped make Grace possible.
Curtis could've booked her reservation at an earlier time. But he chose 9:30 p.chiliad., the final table of the night, when they could have the whole eatery to themselves. At that place was something he had to tell her.
Runaway
Running away was the easy solution. Curtis did so every few months from his Colorado home, over the injustices imposed on a 10-year-old boy: getting grounded, or having toys taken away. Ane solar day, Curtis announced he was leaving the family — this fourth dimension, forever. But Jan Duffy chosen her son'due south bluff.
"Permit me help you pack," she said. "Nosotros'll get to the supermarket and selection up some nutrient for you."
He stewed in the front seat of his mom's car, and got equally far as the supermarket parking lot. It ended with a contrite Curtis in his mother's embrace. She turned the machine effectually. Looking dorsum, the message stung. Yous can never really run away. Some bug will e'er follow you, even when y'all're onetime enough to have children of your own. Even then, there is no running away from what you are.
A couple of years later, in 1987, when Curtis was 12, his father, Robert "Bear" Duffy, gathered his wife and three kids for a family meeting. "We're moving to Ohio," Carry said. No warning, no time to reason or argue. The Duffys would leave Colorado Springs in two weeks.
In Colorado, Curtis had his skateboard, his friends, his ain bedroom, a big backyard to run around. Why leave?
Bear, a Vietnam War veteran given his nickname by his biker friends, pulled in decent money at his male parent-in-police force's tire retreading company. He'd been under the impression the business would go to him when his male parent-in-police force retired. Instead, the visitor was sold to someone else. Conduct was devastated, family members said. They believed Bear saw a convenient escape: Move closer to his family near Columbus. And so his decision was final. There was no talking Carry out of annihilation.
What had been a steady chore in Colorado Springs became a string of odd jobs in Johnstown, Ohio, xxx minutes outside Columbus: a backyard mower repair shop, a tattoo parlor, whatever garage that would spare a few dollars for him. At 1 bespeak, he was fifty-fifty an officeholder in the town's small-scale police strength. January found steady work at a supermarket. Still, the Duffys went from a v-bedchamber house in Colorado to a ii-chamber apartment in Johnstown. There weren't enough beds for Curtis to claim one, so for a while he slept on the floor of a walk-in cupboard.
Curtis felt trapped in a small-scale boondocks, wearing out the tape on his speed-metal cassettes, decumbent to bursts of rage. He and his older brother, Robert Jr., went out looking for fights.
"My brother and I weren't the easiest kids," Curtis said. "We were bored out of our minds."
Around Johnstown, anybody knew Robert Jr. equally "Tig," short for tiger, all paunch and brawn. Curtis was "Bones," tall, lean, a tough shell. The Duffy boys made an intimidating tag squad. They used fists, hammers, fifty-fifty their skulls every bit weapons, Curtis said: One time he pummeled a kid's face and then desperately the boy was subsequently fitted with braces.
Curtis got an later-schoolhouse job stocking shelves at the local Kroger supermarket and quickly hatched a scheme for more money: He stashed a example — dozens of cartons — of Marlboro cigarettes in a garbage tin can and planned to retrieve information technology subsequently-hours, and then sell the cigarettes to friends. An inventory check revealed the missing example, which was easily traced back to one Curtis Lee Duffy. Stealing that many cigarettes was considered a felony, but the shop manager decided against pressing charges. If Curtis' uncle weren't also a cop who turned a blind eye at his nephew's indiscretions, Curtis surely would have landed in jail.
School? If he felt motivated, Curtis said, he'd work for a C. The thought of home economics class was even less palatable, peculiarly when information technology was mandatory for all sixth-graders. There Curtis saturday, choosing a tabular array equally far back as possible in Room 12 of Adams Heart Schoolhouse.
And that is where the switch flipped for him, the filament glowed and the bulb flickered on. All it took was a word: Something something … yada yada … pizza.
His teacher, Ruth Snider, knew what to say to middle schoolhouse boys who thought only girls cooked or sewed. It was an attitude she had seen in many other boyish boys with adulthood to burn.
In her start lesson, Snider promised the officially sanctioned food of 12-year-olds.
By the end of that 45-minute class, Curtis had punched out circles of Pillsbury biscuit dough, slathered on spaghetti sauce, slapped on discs of pepperoni and covered it all with cheese. Cooking provided something defective in Curtis, he'd later realize: a sense of ownership and control, an illustration of crusade and effect. Get your easily in the dough, give a damn well-nigh something, and watch results bubbling from the oven 12 minutes later.
Snider witnessed the transformation. In Curtis she saw a boy who put on a difficult exterior but behind it was sullen and painfully shy, a pupil still adjusting from being uprooted. He was all nervous tics, fingers constantly inside his oral fissure, nails emerging chewed downwardly, arms crossed in a defensive posture. But with every fruit kabob skewered and every cinnamon curlicue baked, Snider watched his veneer scissure, slowly, and so in large pieces, until the male child felt safe in the classroom kitchen. Now Curtis actually looked forward to coming to schoolhouse.
"He saw adults as the enemy, not certain who to trust on the exterior," Snider said. "I know he trusted me."
On the first day of seventh grade, with domicile economic science no longer mandatory, Curtis walked into Room 12 on his own. And in eighth grade, he took Snider'south course a third straight year.
Snider had seen thousands of kids laissez passer through her classroom since she'd begun pedagogy in 1973. Almost she never heard from again. But Curtis ... something about the sadness in his brown eyes. She knew his history. She knew others around town whispered virtually his family. In Johnstown, population 3,200, gossip traveled with the current of air. Fifty-fifty after Curtis left her classroom, she vowed to continue tabs on him.
His cooking fuse lit, Curtis begged for a job at a local diner chosen Ohio Restaurant #2, the greasy spoon on Primary Street people in boondocks called "The Greeks." The boy was at present 14. Later on baseball and wrestling practice, Curtis went at that place and washed dishes for four hours, and was paid $fifteen cash.
Menial tasks became a game to him, and a game was something into which he could aqueduct his angst. He'd rush through washing dishes for the chance to prep food for the adjacent day's service. Even in peeling boiled potatoes, Curtis sought to remove the skin in a unmarried unbroken coil, mesmerized by the challenge. Submitting himself to the kitchen diverted him — from fighting out of boredom, from stealing for the thrill. From listening to his parents' latest screaming match.
Bear and Jan fought with increasing regularity; she'd discovered he was adulterous on her. And money, too, was ever an issue. Carry was a acquit of a man, with tattoos for sleeves and an intimidating chest-length beard to go with his shoulder-length hair. He had been a Golden Gloves boxer in his youth, and now when rage seeped to the surface, he had no problems getting concrete with his wife. In 1989 he pleaded no contest to domestic violence charges and was ordered to undergo alcohol and family counseling after he punched Jan in the chest and oral cavity. January wouldn't retreat — Trisha Duffy, Curtis' younger sis, remembers her mom punching back. The family's splintering seemed irreparable.
Curtis, meanwhile, kept running away to the kitchen.
His high school cooking teacher, Kathy Zay, connected him with her eating house-industry contacts. Curtis took a chore at a state club in New Albany, an affluent Columbus suburb, that contradistinct his concept of food. It wasn't just that wealthier patrons dined on fancier nutrient; rather, it was the idea of cooking equally a course of cocky-expression. Bear was a tattoo artist, and Curtis believed his male parent had passed down an artistic gene.
At New Albany Country Club, Curtis' chore title was dishwasher, but he also learned the i skill every chef must master to succeed: how to properly concord a knife. The cardinal was finding that eye of balance — or else yous risked hurting yourself.
From one kitchen to the adjacent, each more prestigious than the last, Curtis' bosses entrusted him with more than responsibilities. Yet fifty-fifty as he found a job at age 16 cooking at greater Columbus' most exclusive golf club — Muirfield Village in Dublin, Ohio, its 18-hole course designed past Jack Nicklaus — not once did his parents dine where he worked. It was as if Curtis led two lives separated by 25 miles: one catering to the rich, where a set of golf clubs costs more several months' rent, and the other, where fast-food clerk was a career pick for some neighborhood friends. He chose to live in the one-time.
He was devastated that Trisha, then 15, got pregnant. Rather than face up the news, Curtis stopped talking to her. Focus difficult enough on cooking, he thought, and peradventure y'all tin can block out everything else.
Amid the tumult, came one happy moment: the outset time he cooked for his parents. For those few hours, the blame game between Carry and Jan ceased. Curtis, having watched a line cook at Muirfield Village set up penne alla arrabiata hundreds of times, improvised at habitation with tomatoes, garlic, black olives and red chilies. He approximated, tasted, tweaked and tried again. It made and then much sense to him. This was cooking: a subjective, intuitive art with no correct or wrong way. That night his parents establish common ground: They were astounded by their son's cooking.
"It was the start time I cooked something I was proud of ..." Curtis said, pausing, "and the only time my parents ate something I made."
Any residual good volition from the homemade dinner quickly disappeared. The fighting between Jan and Bear intensified, and then too did Curtis' focus. He moved into an apartment with his best friend and wrestling partner, Tony Kuehner. When he wasn't cooking at the country club, he entered culinary competitions through his vocational high school and smoked the field. In a competition staged by the Family, Career and Community Leaders of America in 1994, he carved a floral centerpiece from cantaloupes, pineapple and honeydew in 25 minutes and took first place in his category in the state.
Around the same fourth dimension, in leap 1994, the fighting finally broke Jan Duffy down. She had had enough. By then, Bear and Jan were living in St. Louisville, a 30-minute, state-road drive from Johnstown. She moved out, filed for divorce and took Trisha with her to an apartment dorsum in Johnstown.
Curtis, Trisha and court documents pigment a picture of a man drastic to win his wife back in the months that followed. Thinking that getting in shape would show his commitment, Carry took to the gym and in four months shed nearly 100 pounds. He tried sleeping pills and an antidepressant; he thought they would stifle the rage. When that didn't accept the desired upshot, he quit cold turkey, but cut off the medication then suddenly did more harm than good.
Paranoia consumed him. Bear found out Jan's boss at the supermarket was hitting on her. So he showed up at her workplace unannounced. Although he had left the police department years agone, Bear used his old equipment to tap her phone.
On April 29, 1994, Jan Duffy filed a civil protection club — one step upward from a restraining society — in the Licking Canton (Ohio) Mutual Pleas Court. It barred Acquit from contacting Jan past phone, or inbound her domicile or identify of employment. The order also called for Carry to turn in all his guns to the sheriff'southward department. WBNS-TV, a local news station in Columbus, reported that in a July 21 courtroom hearing, Comport told the judge he "would never hurt his wife."
On Mon, Sept. 12, 1994, the day of the Duffys' 18th wedding ceremony, Bear tried saving his shambling union ane last time. He showed up at Jan'southward apartment door unannounced at 6 a.1000. with a card and a rose. He pleaded. A family friend would after tell The Advocate newspaper of Newark, Ohio, that Behave said to January: "Till death do us part, baby." Merely January said information technology was over.
Trisha was awakened by the screech of her begetter's car peeling away.
That morning in key Ohio was warm for September. The top local story splashed across the front page of the paper: "New City Engineer To Update Computers."
Thirty-seven-yr-old Jan Marlene Duffy left for work at the supermarket.
Seventeen-twelvemonth-old Trisha Ann Duffy readied for Mrs. Sommers' English form at Johnstown Loftier School.
Twenty-year-sometime Robert Burne "Tig" Duffy planned on stopping by his begetter's house.
Nineteen-year-one-time Curtis Lee Duffy studied in his flat on his 24-hour interval off from work.
Thirty-nine-year-onetime Robert Earl "Bear" Duffy switched to Plan B.
Sept. 12, 1994
At 12:15 p.m., Jan and a co-worker crossed the parking lot from Kroger, where they worked, to a McDonald's for lunch. In the dorsum lot, Bear waited inside a two-door brown sedan.
He pulled up next to them, brandishing a carbine rifle. He told the co-worker to run abroad. He threatened to shoot his married woman if she didn't make it the car.
Curtis had a 24-hour interval off from cooking at Muirfield Village Golf game Club, so he studied for his Columbus Country Community Higher culinary classes. He and his brother had fabricated plans to visit their father that 24-hour interval, but Curtis had and then much homework he decided to stay dwelling house instead. He would report until his girlfriend Nikki Davis, a senior at Johnstown Loftier, came to visit after school.
Nikki and Trisha were sitting in the aforementioned English class when Trisha was summoned to the principal's office, where a police officeholder and January's supermarket co-worker waited for her. The co-worker, still shellshocked, explained what had happened. The officer said Trisha had to come up with him now.
Bear'due south motorcar hurtled east toward St. Louisville, 18 miles away, to the home where he and Jan had lived until she'd moved out months earlier with Trisha. He'd already disengaged the locks and removed the door handles.
When they arrived, he made January telephone call her mother in Colorado and relay a message: Don't get the cops involved. January's mother called the Licking County Sheriff's Department anyway, and before long sirens converged at 8146 Horns Hill Road.
Nikki rushed over to Curtis' flat and asked if he had heard what was going on. He hadn't. Non long afterwards, police knocked on the door. "Nosotros accept to go now," the officeholder told Curtis.
By the time police arrived at Horns Colina Road, Comport'south sister Penny Duffy was already pacing in front of the business firm with an envelope of handwritten notes that Bear had dropped off at her workplace after leaving Jan's apartment. Penny hoped to reason with him through the window.
2 hours passed. Bear kept telling officers he was giving himself up.
Four hours. Bear told his sister Penny in that location was no way he was going to prison like their begetter. "You know what they exercise to ex-cops in in that location?" Behave said.
Six hours. Acquit prayed with Penny and reminisced about their childhood.
Eight hours. He said, "There's no way out of this."
Lookout man as police force storm into Robert "Bear" Duffy'due south home. Viewer discretion advised. (Footage courtesy of WBNS-Television)
The chronology of what happened next differs between police and an bystander. According to a sheriff's narrative of the incident, at x:45 p.grand. the sheriff's department heard a gunshot, at which point a half-dozen officers stormed into the house with battering rams and flash-bang grenades.
But Penny didn't believe information technology was a gunshot that triggered the raid. She said it was Bear unlocking the deadbolt from the principal bedroom to the backyard and the audio surveillance unit picking up an amplified racket — what police force thought was a bang. She said that was when they went in and Acquit panicked, firing his gun.
This much was articulate: He shot January once through the chest. He placed her on the water bed, lay side by side to his married woman and fired a single bullet that pierced his heart and right lung. Water slowly drained from the mattress.
He was dead. Jan, though, had a faint pulse when paramedics rushed her to an ambulance.
Curtis was several houses away and nether police protection when he heard the tear gas shells fired into the house. In the noise and defoliation, Curtis recalled, an hour passed before he received any information nearly his mother. He idea he heard that she was existence treated at nearby Licking Memorial Infirmary. He pleaded with his girlfriend's family unit for a ride.
"I need to see my mom."
"I'm sorry, Curt," his girlfriend's mother told him. "She died at the hospital."
Days bled into nights. Sleep proved impossible. The next thing Curtis knew, he was continuing at his father'southward funeral in Newark, Ohio. Many of Deport'south biker friends showed upwards. No 1 from Jan's family attended.
Ruth Snider, the abode economics instructor who inspired Curtis to cook, was at that place too. She noticed the thick, dark rings nether Curtis' eyes. "He looked similar he was in a dream state," Snider said. "Curtis hadn't grasped the severity of it yet."
She handed him a alphabetic character she had written, telling him: "You are non alone."
Jan's family wanted a separate funeral for her in Colorado. Curtis and his two siblings didn't have coin for plane tickets, so they said goodbye in an impromptu gathering at a funeral home in Ohio.
There wasn't even a coffin — January Duffy's body lay on a gurney beneath a white sheet. Curtis' sister, Trisha, reached out and touched her female parent'southward cold skin. "She has goose bumps!" Trisha said aloud. Curtis stood catatonic. He lifted the sheet and saw the bruises, the gunshot wound in the breast. So his female parent's trunk was wheeled away and taken to an airport. Some weeks later, a relative mailed Curtis photos from his mother'due south funeral.
What Curtis remembers most about that fourth dimension was the morning afterward his parents died. He, his blood brother and his all-time friend went back to Bear's house to collect his father's belongings.
The remnants of tear gas burned his eyes. He navigated effectually glass shards from blown-out windows, a T-shirt shielding his nose and mouth.
In one room, Curtis found a bluish screw-jump notebook. He recognized the cursive on the page immediately from the distinctive, swooping "Yard'southward." For such a rugged human being, Bear'due south handwriting was all soft curves, elegant and svelte.
The notebook contained letters Bear had written to family unit members. It was dated half dozen months earlier. Deport had addressed a page each to his daughter, Trisha, his son Robert Jr., his wife, January — before she had filed for divorce. But no words followed for them.
The only person Behave wrote a full letter to was Curtis — 2 pages, single-spaced. The bulletin Bear left behind was prescient, as if alert exactly how Curtis' future would unfold.
Short,
This is dad ...
Southwardlowly Curtis re-entered the world, and he seized upon the one stable thing in his life: the kitchen. When he'd first started cooking five years before, the kitchen was a place to run away to from the fighting at abode, a place that kept him from bullying neighborhood kids.
Now his parents were dead. Every hour focused on cooking was some other hour non dealing with his confusion and acrimony. He dreaded the end of the shift. While other chefs at Muirfield Village Golf game Club went out for drinks after, Curtis stayed in the head chef's office and dived into the cookbooks. One of those, a new improver to the library, caught Curtis' eye: an oversize burgundy-colored volume by a Chicago chef named Charlie Trotter. That proper name would stay with him.
In the moments he surfaced for air, Curtis took off in his Jeep with no item destination, drowning out the whys with the radio'south auto-gun guitar riffs and crashing cymbals.
Similar his male parent, Curtis had an idea for a convenient escape. He could leave Johnstown, make the 20-60 minutes machine ride dorsum to Colorado. He told all-time friend Tony Kuehner, "Let's go." One adventure to change everything.
When they arrived, Curtis and Tony visited the mausoleum in Colorado Springs where Jan was interred.
Years earlier, Jan had saturday Curtis downwards on the living room floor. She had something of import to tell him. His real mother left Acquit, Robert Jr. and Curtis when he was 6 months old. Y'all're not my biological son, Jan said, simply I love you all the same. Curtis cried all night — non out of anger or betrayal, merely for fear of never seeing her over again. Jan assured her son: I volition always be at that place.
The all-time friends also went in search of Bear's ashes, which had been sent to Colorado. Curtis was told his father's ashes were scattered on Pikes Pinnacle, beneath a pino with a wooden cross on it, and they drove up the mountain looking for it. Curtis stared at the photo of the tree from all angles, so scanned the snow-blanketed tableau. They never found information technology.
After coming downwards from the mountain, Curtis and Tony were dining at a pizza parlor when the Harry Chapin song "Cat's in the Cradle" started playing.
When you comin' home, son, I don't know when,
Just we'll get together so, dad,
You know we'll have a good fourth dimension then.
It was a song Bear and Curtis had listened to together. Curtis bankrupt down. This was the human being who had killed his mother.
In the finish, running away to Colorado didn't provide solace. The kitchen jobs paid poorly, and Tony wasn't thrilled with washing dishes. A continuing offering from Muirfield Village Golf game Social club, nonetheless, remained. Whatever fourth dimension Curtis wanted to come dorsum, there was a job waiting for him. Later four months, he and Tony loaded their cars and headed back to Ohio.
His home economics teacher, Ruth Snider, was at that place for him. The 2 spoke on the telephone ofttimes, and in each chat they let their guards drib lower. "Every time I iron my jacket or sew a push, it reminds me of yous," Curtis told her. Eventually, he felt safe enough to cry when they talked. The subjects of conversations were irrelevant; it mattered to him that she listened.
Meanwhile, there was someone at work. He'd been eyeing the server with the flowing brown pilus. Curtis learned her proper name: Kim Becker. She could sing opera and play the violin. After he'd stockpiled plenty nerve to make conversation, he said, "You know, mayhap one day I'll get the lead singer of a band."
"Sure," he said she told him, "as long as I can give you singing lessons."
Others at Muirfield Hamlet recognized the signs of a blossoming romance. A co-worker organized a dinner at his home and invited Curtis and Kim. The evening felt effortless. They laughed together over great nutrient and pours of wine. His hunch grew over weeks and months, and when it passed the point of certainty, Curtis whispered to a young man cook, "I'grand going to marry that girl one day." Iii years afterward, halfway upwardly Pikes Peak side by side to a fallen tree, Curtis got downward on one knee and asked Kim to make it official.
Gradually, Curtis' ties with his Johnstown past faded away. More than fourth dimension passed between phone calls to Trisha and his brother, Robert Jr., until they barely spoke at all. Curtis was making $80,000 a yr at historic period 24 as chef de cuisine at Tartan Fields Golf game Club in Dublin, Ohio. Just he equated pocket-size-boondocks life with small-town ambitions. The good pay meant nothing if the challenge wasn't at that place.
"If my priorities stayed in that town, that's where I would exist. But I've always wanted something greater than that place."
Remembering the burgundy cookbook at Muirfield Hamlet, he drove to Charlie Trotter's restaurant in Chicago to volunteer his services for a few weeks. He returned to Ohio humbled. Curtis thought the recipes described in the cookbook were conceptual dishes meant to inspire and provoke. Trotter was really serving those dishes to guests nightly. He had to move to Chicago.
In Jan 2000, Curtis spent his "Goodbye, Columbus" dinner with — who else? — Ruth Snider. They dined on steaks and offered the obligatory farewell sentiments: Let'south keep in bear on. ... Telephone call any fourth dimension. ... Don't be a stranger. Simply at some bespeak during the night, the words "I dearest y'all" tumbled out for the first time, him to her, her dorsum in response, natural equally an exhale, and information technology solidified what they knew to be true. Curtis was the son Ruth had never had, and Ruth the mother Curtis had now.
Ascent
Southwardure, workdays at Charlie Trotter's lasted fourteen hours, six days a calendar week, the paycheck was a pittance, and he was fulfilling someone else's grand culinary vision. But Curtis was surrounded by agreeing kitchen grunts, uncompromising in their collective desire to become the best. Not the best in Chicago, just the all-time, full stop. Entry-level cooks traded an $18,000-a-year bacon for Trotter's proper noun on their resumes.
In 2003, Curtis went for a meal at the since-closed Evanston eating place Trio, where a young chef named Grant Achatz — just fifteen months Curtis' senior — was making noise with his avant-garde interpretation of fine dining. Achatz remembered that night: This cook from Trotter's kitchen was dining with him, and whenever someone from a competing restaurant visited, he made sure to serve a meal that said, in no uncertain terms: Y'all're not employed at the all-time eatery in town.
After that dinner, Curtis was sold. On a day off from Trotter's, he spent time in Trio's kitchen as a tryout. After seeing Curtis in his kitchen, Achatz told him:
"You don't need to piece of work here. Yous should exist doing your own thing."
"Just I want to work for you," Curtis said.
"Well, I can only pay you $xvi,000 a yr."
"Fine."
At Trio, Curtis ascended from the cold foods station to head pastry chef, condign ane of Achatz's top deputies. The two spoke a common language without uttering a give-and-take. Both were placidity figures amid the noise of the kitchen, and when they did converse, information technology was well-nigh the new cuisine emerging from Kingdom of spain, or the burgeoning usage of laboratory scientific discipline as a cooking technique. It was a workplace where "No" was no match for "Certain, let's endeavour information technology."
When Achatz left Trio to open Alinea in 2005 — a restaurant that Gourmet mag would soon deem the best in America — he tapped Curtis as chef de cuisine, his right-hand man.
Curtis' career took on the momentum of a cycle rolling downhill. Faster. Better. More. To atomic number 82 such an ambitious kitchen, 90-hour workweeks became the norm. Nights, holidays and weekends took Curtis away from dwelling house. He'd return from work to find his wife already comatose for hours. Many nights, fear kept him awake: fearfulness of failure, fear of slowing his frontwards momentum, fear of being second-best.
Then, midflight in his meteoric rise: Kim was expecting their start child. He wished for a son to play baseball game with and ride motorcycles together, equally Curtis had with his father. But the Duffys were bestowed a daughter, Ava Leigh, and when she clutched her father'southward pinky finger in the hospital room, Curtis' eyes welled upwardly. Everything would be for her. And when daughter Eden arrived three years afterward Ava, Curtis felt whole in a way he hadn't since his Colorado childhood. His family unit was intact. He thought back to his Johnstown years: My daughters volition non sleep on the floor of a cupboard.
Curtis left Alinea after three years to brand a name for himself. His goal of becoming 1 of the best chefs in the country was, he said, as much well-nigh personal validation as providing his family financial security. Curtis took on the top position at Avenues, a restaurant in The Peninsula hotel on Michigan Avenue where dinner for two cost $700.
Finally, he could showcase his food, and his good name would rise and fall with the restaurant's successes and failures. He assembled a team that had to jell quickly in the tight confines of Avenues' kitchen, and members of the Avenues family spent more fourth dimension together than with their actual families.
On the day the Chicago Michelin Guide was unveiled in 2010, the Avenues team gathered in a suite at The Peninsula. Curtis knew the eating place was receiving prestigious stars in the international guidebook; the question was how many. The call came to Curtis' cellphone, and a human speaking in a French accent congratulated Avenues on winning two Michelin stars. But ii other restaurants in the metropolis received that honour — one of which was Charlie Trotter'southward. Alinea and L20 received the highest rating that yr, iii stars. In the hotel suite, the Avenues staff burst into applause and champagne overflowed.
"I must forge ahead," Curtis told himself. "I want that third Michelin star."
He had always worked for someone else. He needed to become his ain boss. This was the moment he'd worked for all his life: to become chef and owner of his own restaurant.
Piece of work harder. Push farther. Stay that actress hr.
"What almost us?" he said his wife asked him. "Nada'due south ever good enough. It'south e'er more than and more than and more than. A second restaurant. A cookbook. When will information technology be about our family? I can't ..."
Kim had moved to Chicago not knowing anyone who lived here, he said. She'd made that sacrifice for her husband's career. At last, Curtis saw his selfishness.
"Y'all try to wait for that balance in your mean solar day-to-twenty-four hour period life. (You say) 'I promise and pray that when I get to that betoken, people will nevertheless desire to exist around me," Curtis said.
When he was a teenager, Curtis learned that the central to properly belongings a knife was finding the point of balance. At that historic period, he didn't realize information technology would become a metaphor.
The kitchen was a place to run away from the chaos of his original family, and it had driven him to pursue a goal. That pursuit ultimately toll him another family unit — and his 11-year marriage.
"Opening my own restaurant is supposed to be the greatest moment of my career," Curtis said. "And it's happening at the worst moment of my personal life."
It took many years to arrive at a place of forgiveness, only Curtis has found that place with his father, insomuch every bit anyone could with someone who killed his mother. Still, moments of hatred toward his dad surfaced — Bear, for instance, got in his goodbyes without giving Jan the same opportunity. Curtis thought: What a selfish human activity. Merely the anger subsides, considering love for his parents never goes away.
Once in a while, in his garden flat a few blocks west of where Kim and their daughters live, Curtis revisits the blue screw-jump notebook he institute at his father's house the morning after his parents died.
Bear addressed each page to a different member of his family. But there was nothing written on them, except for one. The simply letter Behave wrote in the notebook was to Curtis.
3/one/1994
Curt,
This is dad. I'1000 telling yous from my heart that y'all're a very special young homo and I wish I could tell you how proud of yous I am … You'll exist a great chef, no dubiety in my mind, y'all'll exist ane of the best in the globe some day …
Your life is just showtime. Endeavor to do all the right things in information technology. Make certain if y'all e'er get married and have children, that you show them and your married woman all the love in the world. Always take fourth dimension to exist with them and show them love. Your wife should be shown the most honey of all. Always accept the time to talk to her and hear what she has to say because she'll be the nigh important person in your life ...
I ask you lot, Curt, to look back and come across how many wrong things you lot have seen me do, and please don't walk in my footsteps because you'll exist in a world of hurting, detest, and sure won't be loved and won't be able to evidence dear. And then delight exist a meliorate person than I was. I know you can ...
Remember I love you, son, and e'er will.
My love,
Your dad
Listen to Curtis Duffy read his begetter's letter
Tomorrow
Ossetra caviar, kumquat,
meyer lemon custard
When Curtis was notwithstanding at Avenues, he became a name in the urban center, and diners started asking for autographs. He pondered what to write. Eventually he signed all menus this way: "It's all about grace."
The give-and-take "grace" rolled off his natural language, effortless and soft. He saw it defined in his cooking style — elegant, frail, the stone 'n' ringlet celebrity TV chef-antithesis. Curtis favored light over heavy in his food, seldom using butter or cream. At Avenues, half his card was vegetarian.
"Grace" was too something he found working behind the hot stove. The significance didn't escape Curtis. The discussion resonated and so much he named his younger daughter Eden Grace.
"If I ever owned a eatery," he told himself, "information technology volition be chosen Grace."
His wine director at Avenues, Michael Muser, was a homo with the opposite personality: boisterous, ebullient, not above pulling practical jokes on strangers. But the two became fast friends over a shared beloved of motorcycles, cigars and fine wine, and they decided to become business partners.
The ii found an Avenues regular — a real estate man named Mike Olszewski — who agreed to help bankroll their dream: to operate the best restaurant in the country, uttered in the same breath as heavyweights The French Laundry and Alinea. They began by leasing an old frame shop in the West Loop, virtually eatery neighbors Girl & The Goat, Side by side and Blackbird.
When Curtis announced he was leaving Avenues in July 2011, he set a goal of opening by the post-obit March. But building a eatery proved unlike from composing a menu.
If he planned to charge $250 a person for dinner, then every detail had to exist thought out. And every detail strained the budget. An Cyberspace router. Paper clips. Light fixtures in the bathroom. They thought about getting trays on the table that would suit a diner's cellphone.
If there were disagreements among the three partners, they typically fell along this line: "Do nosotros buy the best version of what we demand, or should we be cost efficient?" Muser, for instance, wanted horseshoe-shaped white leather chairs in the dining room that toll $ii,300 each. Curtis told him he was crazy. Eventually they decided those chairs were the nigh comfortable, and they talked the dealer downwards to a discounted price of $i,000 each.
Curtis' cooking was the sort of intricately plated food to be consumed in half dozen bites or fewer — just plenty earlier the palate, mentally, becomes numb to the same flavor. "You want diners to say, 'I wish I had 1 more than piece of Wagyu beef, i more slice of salmon," Curtis said. "Y'all want them to not have simply plenty of a dish; you want them to crave for one more than bite."
And so the plateware, Curtis decided, should act as more than than serving vessels and actually raise the taste of a dish, fifty-fifty if only in the heed. A chestnut puree's creamy texture might exist accentuated, he reasoned, if it was served in a basin with no edges. He ordered curved bowls from France that resembled overinflated inner tubes.
Some other idea was serving a dish inside an edible tube fabricated of flavored ice; the diner would crack the tube with the side of a spoon to reveal what was inside. Curtis visited the Chicago School of Mold Making in Oak Park to interact on a custom silicone canister that could freeze h2o into a tube in 45 minutes.
The plates alone cost more than than $60,000. An all-granite-countertop kitchen equipped with the ovens and fridges needed would cost $500,000 more. In all, the partners said, to build Grace from an empty concrete beat cost $2.five one thousand thousand.
As at Avenues, Curtis planned two menus of 10 courses each, one meat-based, the other mostly vegetarian. Labeling his cooking as a specific cuisine is futile — "progressive American," if one prefers pithiness, though obscure ingredients such as sudachi (a green citrus fruit from Nippon) or Queensland blue squash are centerpieces of dishes. When Curtis brainstorms dish concepts, information technology'due south a free-class exercise with pen and paper. Subsequently many years, he'due south developed a "heed'southward palate" — Curtis could proper name iii disparate flavors and, in his head, know exactly how they'd gustatory modality together. In his sketch pad, Curtis would jot down a main ingredient to anchor a dish. Then he'd scribble off supporting ingredients that might pair well, or, if information technology's the effect he's seeking, clash in a palatable manner. His notebook is similar a casting managing director's clipboard: a long list of candidates, whittled downwardly to reach on-plate chemistry.
While Curtis and his culinary squad focused on food, every passing solar day at the Randolph Street space brought a new ready of problems. Sheets of glass arrived cracked. The kitchen ventilation hood came in the wrong size. Structure crews checked out past 3 p.grand. most days. No surprise, Curtis and his partners blew past the proposed March opening engagement, and delays would push it back to April, then June, then Baronial. September came, and the kitchen wasn't even installed.
So October. And November.
Curtis' frustration was visible. He'd lifted weights at four a.grand. every morning — now he didn't have time for it and began gaining weight. Hairs above his ears turned grey in greater numbers.
Merely slowly, surely, exasperatingly, the blond-wood millwork walls and frosted windows and glass pendant lamps were put upwardly, 64 white leather chairs were placed in the dining room, and past December, Grace eatery went from figment in Curtis' mind to reality.
Industry friends were invited in for a serial of three do dinners. Fifty-fifty these test runs required 14-hour workdays. By the cease of exercise dark No. 3, the waitstaff walked with chin up and upright posture. They had passed all the written tests on ingredients, wine pairings and related allergies. Cooks, meanwhile, achieved their goal of five minutes between an empty plate taken away and arrival of the next form. Backside the glass-enclosed kitchen, dinner service was an exacting, choreographed dance invisible to customers.
On Dec. 11, Grace opened its door to the public at terminal. Curtis got his usual iii hours of sleep. If he was excited, there was no outward sign of it — long ago he had learned to keep his head down and focus on the chore.
He knew Kim and their daughters would not attend. They had prior commitments. He wished it weren't so.
"I wanted them to walk through the door before everyone else."
Just in that location was one other person he wanted on mitt for the first night of service.
A taxi pulled in front of 652 W. Randolph St., and Ruth Snider emerged in a red coat and shimmering black gown along with her daughter Lauren.
They had arrived for their 9:30 p.g. reservation.
It had been 3 years since Curtis and Snider had last seen each other, and when they met in the restaurant's front foyer, they embraced, looked each other in the eye and hugged a second time, whispering in each other's ears.
They'd first met when Curtis was 12, when he and his older brother had beaten upwards neighborhood kids for fun. And she stayed with him through all that followed — his parents' deaths, his dash out to Colorado, the christening of his daughters, the pending divorce. Snider was there the moment Curtis fell in dear with cooking, and now she was here on opening night.
Snider and her daughter sabbatum at the tabular array closest to the kitchen window and watched as Curtis plated each dish for them. He instructed his cooks that no one else would fix Table 11's dinner.
Snider watched Curtis float through the kitchen — the same quiet 6th-grader who'd made Pillsbury biscuit pizzas in home economics class — now 37, bringing out an water ice cylinder made from ginger water, with kampachi fish, golden trout roe, pomelo segments and Thai basil intricately embedded inside the frozen tube. She said afterward that it was the all-time meal of her life.
As the last dessert plate was cleared, Curtis sat at her table. He was no longer the reticent boy.
"Y'all've given me something more than whatsoever amount of money can give … unconditional dear and values of life," he told her. "I could never repay y'all. Only the ability to be able to give dorsum to you lot what I practise … melt for you … means more than than anything."
The roads were empty by the time Curtis drove dorsum to his Lincoln Foursquare flat at the terminate of the night.
"Information technology's been a good twenty-four hours," he said.
The clock on his phone read three a.m.
Some things don't always modify. This was his life now, but the chef merely knew one way. Tomorrow had already arrived.
By 7 a.m. Curtis Duffy was buttoning up his chef's jacket once more, back at his restaurant, back at Grace.
kpang@tribune.com
Source: https://graphics.chicagotribune.com/grace/
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