I will never be mistaken for a food connoisseur. I enjoy a good meal and am blessed to be married to a personal chef with a yen for healthy, natural food. But as one who keeps the Jewish dietary laws, my taste buds are necessarily restricted by what we call Kosher.
That said, how could one not be inspired by the recent news that Chicago’s Alinea restaurant, an uber-modern eatery, was named the No. 1 restaurant in the United States by Trip Advisor’s Travelers’ Choice Restaurant awards?
True, the Lincoln Park neighborhood restaurant is only miles from our company’s headquarters in Oakbrook Terrace. But it is not bias that pleases my editorial palate. Rather, it’s the story behind Alinea’s famed chef, Grant Achatz.
Seven years ago, the restaurateur was diagnosed with stage 4 tongue cancer. Achatz went to the top cancer specialists, including Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York. The diagnosis was unequivocal: To live, he must lose his tongue.
A chef lives by his tongue—his ability to taste, to swallow, to lick, to appreciate the texture and flavor of every ingredient that goes into his recipes.
Achatz rejected this path and instead went to the University of Chicago Medical Center, where researchers were working on an experimental protocol of intensive chemotherapy and radiation.
In the end, Achatz lost his ability to taste for about one year, but both he and his tongue are doing well today. Achatz’s challenge reminds us of Beethoven, the masterful composer who in adulthood suffered from deafness. Achatz, in an interview with Food & Wine one year after he began treatment and started to regain some of his taste, offered a very powerful perspective on his situation.
“It’s going to make me a better chef,” he told the magazine. “As an adult, when you taste things, there’s always a blending of flavors on your palate. So imagine that you can taste salt, sweet, bitter and acid.
“Now strip all those away except sweet, because that’s the first thing that came back for me. … You taste sweet, and so you crave sweet; all you’re eating is Häagen-Dazs ice cream.
You’ve isolated sweet and understand it, because you’ve tasted it on its own. Then one day you have a swig of coffee.
“All of a sudden, you’re like: Wow, that coffee is bitter, I can taste bitter! A little light goes off, and now you are perceiving the pure relationship of bitter and sweet for the first time ever. You understand how they balance, when they are out of balance. It becomes a very intimate thing, very strange. Then when you start to taste salt again, you just put another piece in the puzzle. You understand how salt actually cancels out bitterness, and the relationship between salt and sweet.”
As I write this, we are entering the holiday season and the end of the year. We are racing to meet our 2014 budgets and finalize our budgets for next year. In a sense, we are completing one journey and beginning the next.
But have we savored the experience? Is it only about results or the countless steps we take to get there?
On a bike ride at the end of summer, I took a different route to reach a familiar destination. I saw homes
and streets I had driven passed but never really noticed. My eyes saw, my nose smelled what in the car had been a senses-free routine. I was experiencing. I was feeling. I was sensing. I was living.
Achatz temporarily lost a gift but gained an essential life lesson: to understand the beauty of taste, of both bitter and sweet.
Perhaps it’s time that we as business leaders and creations of this world slow down just a bit so we can savor the many things we often miss in our daily lives.
Happy holidays.
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