Someone's in the kitchen with Charlie Trotter

Nation's Restaurant News, Sept 18, 1989 by Carolyn Walkup

SOMEONE'S IN THE KITCHEN WITH CHARLIE TROTTER

Exhibition cooking is taken to the limits as Trotter, restaurant chef and co-owner, invites customers to spend an evening sampling food, chatting with cooks, and observing how things run as they dine in his kitchen

CHICAGO -- Charlie Trotter's, a 2-year-old restaurant that has quickly risen to the pinnacle of local finedining acclaim, has taken exhibition cooking one step further by serving a table of guests inside the kitchen.

It may seem strange that people willing to spend from $70 to $75 on dinner would choose to eat in the kitchen. But that table is booked every night about two months in advance.

"The kitchen table is a real manifestation of our desire to show off our kitchen space," says Charlie Trotter, chef and co-owner of the 66-seat restaurant. He decided to open the kitchen to diners after finding that many customers wanted to see it after they finished their meals.

Serving guests in a restaurant kitchen is not a totally new idea, explains Trotter, noting that many European restaurants keep a table in the back of the kitchen, where the chef feeds friends, purveyors and others who come in the back door.

Trotter's guests usually can claim the table for the entire evening, since the extra dishes and conversation that Trotter and his staff provide make the dinner last three or four hours.

Having curious diners in the kitchen has not had made much of an impact on the way the staff functions, Trotter claims. "Spotlessness is a passion anyway," he says. "Now, it's a complete obsession." Any cook who has a free moment between preparing dishes scrubs counters, sweeps or mops.

When the first guests began eating in the kitchen several months ago, the cooks were very conscious of their presence. "Now it seems normal. Nobody gives it a second thought," Trotter says, even though the guests are only 6 feet to 8 feet away.

"Nobody really thinks about it," Trotter continues. "They're curious to get a look at the people, but they're too busy to be affected by the table. They like to see how the guests respond.

"We always send out some plates spontaneously" that weren't ordered, he notes, for the guests to share. He personally serves the table and talks to the guests about the food.

Since the 900-square-feet kitchen is not particularly large, guests can see a lot of what goes on simultaneously. There are three lines -- hot, cold and pastry, and all are accessible to each other within a few steps.

"We need to have the flexibility to have six or seven people at one time working in one area," Trotter explains. "Everyone is cross-trained. Our emphasis is to do all the tricky stuff at the last possible minute, so we have to be able to move people around."

At one unnamed kitchen where Trotter previously worked, he found it odd that the hot and cold lines were blocked off from each other. His pastry section is across from the cold line instead of in a separate part of the kitchen.

"Everybody has a set area, but it's impossible to predict just what is going to happen," Trotter says. "Ideally, everything will happen in the order that the tickets come in, but it seldom happens that way."

A small walk-in cooler frees more space for food preparation. "We get a lot in fresh daily and have no intention of storing anything," Trotter notes. Rather than overbuying, he risks running out of garnishes and having to make substitutions. "We try to leave descriptions of things flexible so we can do that," he says, adding that he is unlikely to run out of primary center-of-the-plate products.

A wine temperature control unit borders one side of the kitchen table, located in the servers area. The complete wine cellar is in the basement of the restored two-flat brownstone.

According to Trotter, diners quickly get used to kitchen noises, which they are more likely to notice at the beginning of the evening. They often comment on how the pace picks up as the dining room fills.

The people who book the kitchen table include practiced amateur cooks, professional chefs, culinary students, and regular customers curious about what happens behind the scenes. They almost always are much interested in food, frequently passing plates around the table for communal tastings.

They should save room for dessert, because each kitchen meal ends with a "wave" of about 10 desserts "for effect," Trotter says.

He changes a few dishes daily and the entire menu monthly. The menu has no permanent signature dishes. He also is fond of creating eight-course, fixed-price dinners to enable customers to taste a number of small dishes.

Dishes not on that night's menu may be created spontaneously if guests in the kitchen choose to let Trotter decide what to serve them. Their choice of wine helps him determine what to make.

Trotter is in the kitchen "95 percent of the day" each of the five days the restaurant is open. He gets "to see every plate that goes out of the kitchen."

His father, Robert, handles most of the administrative details, and his wife, Lisa, is wine buyer and sommelier. Thus the chef is free to concentrate almost entirely on the food, which is exactly what he wants to do.