Prep meeting for the next day's service. (Photo: Michael Cirino)

Ladies and gentlemen, meet Michael Cirino. The frontman of traveling supper club A Razor A Shiny Knife got some serious ink this winter for his re-creation of chefs Grant Achatz and Thomas Keller’s 20-course bacchanal. Last month, in preparation for his Chicago dinner, Cirino was invited to stage at Achatz’s molecular temple, Alinea. See part one of this series here; part two you’ll find here. For the third and final installment, click on through:

It was at exactly 13:12 on Friday, January 16, that I was handed my first bowl of potatoes to peel. Chef de cuisine Dave Beran plopped them in front of me and gave me in short detail Alinea’s potato chip recipe. Here it was finally, the clichéd menial task I had been anticipating, and I reveled in being able to accomplish it with grace. (I sneaked a bite of one of these chips in the midst of plating, and it was pretty awesome.)

As service picked up later that night (90 covers, described to me as “mildly busy”), I quickly got into the flow of the kitchen. Service was paced so that no one station was inundated at any given time, allowing each (except for the grill and hot garde manger) the ability to respond to demand and help with plating.

By 19:00 I was more comfortable on the line, and was able to take in the astounding food we were creating: some of the most elaborate and beautiful dishes I have ever seen. The lamb dish had ten components, four of them meat, three of them sauces and an aromatic device that delivered “coffee air.” A chestnut dish had a total of nine components, each with a recipe of its own. The sea bass had 15—five proteins (sea bass, whelks, razor clams, mussels, littleneck clams), four sauces and six garnishes (candied garlic, saffron puffs, celery leaf, celery noodles, chervil, saffron threads).

But I reserve a special place in my heart for the incredibly complex spice-cake dessert. It was one of the dishes we were able to re-create with great accuracy from the beginning. The recipe we wrote required five legal-size pages with a nine-point font. It needed 111 ingredients to create the 11 components that would need to be plated on the dish. One item called “crumbs” required three days of prep and five separate recipes to accomplish. Needless to say it was incredible to see the dessert come together in more experienced hands.

It wasn’t long before it was 23:45 and the meals were starting to come to an end, with a steady stream of guests coming down for a quick peek into the kitchen. The rest of the stages had left at 22:00 after roughly 12 hours of work, but I felt I owed the restaurant a little more elbow grease, so I committed myself to be there until close.

It was here that the emphasis on perfection was really driven home. After another scouring round of spit and polish, I was shocked to learn we weren’t even close to being finished. The inside of the vents and air ducts had to be cleaned. The garbage cans scrubbed, the sinks, the faucets. The stainless steel counter was scrubbed, polished and sanded to remove scuffs and marks obtained throughout a night of service—then it was polished again. (It wasn’t until the next week, after many glasses of wine and our 21-course re-creation of his food, did sous chef Andrew Graves explain to me that although he liked my enthusiasm, it was disturbing him to watch me scrub in circles and not back and forth with the grain of the metal.)

As my amateur level of energy started to wane, I propped myself against one of the freshly sanded stainless steel counters and listened as the chefs went through the next day’s tasks. At the half-hour meeting, the crew detailed what needed to be done to prepare for the next night’s diners. There would be a couple that didn’t eat tongue, a woman who couldn’t have shellfish, a vegan. The requirements were posted and each station called out how they were going to accommodate the guests’ needs. How sauces would change, how agar would replace gelatin in gels, how mushrooms would replace beef and so on.

At that meeting I really saw why all of the discipline was necessary, why it was so methodical. These people loved what they were doing and had an incredible amount of fortitude to withstand the challenges the restaurant presented on a daily basis. Their desire to meet the standards that chef Achatz had set was a badge of pride for each of them.

They didn’t want to just meet Achatz’s expectations; they wanted to excel, to be the best, to learn from the collective of knowledge in that room. And at two in the morning, amid the 12 men and women left standing, craving a taco and eight hours of sleep, I did too.—Michael Cirino