It was hard to tell if Curtis Duffy was about to cry. The Chicago chef who loves both heavy metal and tweezering tiny herbs is not someone you would call effusive.
We were on the sidewalk outside the Lincoln Park townhouse that was once home to Charlie Trotter’s, the seminal restaurant where Mr. Duffy learned what fine dining meant. He was trying to explain his father, Robert Duffy, who was 18 when his son was born.
The elder Duffy was a longhaired Army vet and a tattoo artist who practiced a style of parenting that involved regular applications of a leather strap. His biker buddies nicknamed him Bear.
That’s also the name of the television series in which Ever, Mr. Duffy’s Michelin-starred temple to the tasting menu, appears as the fictionalized greatest restaurant in the world. His intricate dishes, including a magic trick that makes a puff of cotton candy disappear into hibiscus soup, star as the work of the show’s chefs.
Mr. Duffy is quick to point out that “The Bear” — which just started its fourth season — is not based on Ever and that he is not Carmy Berzatto, the tortured, talented chef at its center. But the emotional mess at the heart of the show is not far off.
In August, Mr. Duffy will publish “Fireproof: Memoir of a Chef,” which he wrote with his friend and novelist Jeremy Wagner. They met when Mr. Wagner brought Kirk Hammett, the lead guitarist of Metallica, to Ever. (Mr. Wagner also owns Dead Sky Publishing, which is releasing the book.)
The memoir comes at a time when Mr. Duffy is considering his third act. He has two teenage children from his first marriage and two stepchildren from his current one. His wife, Jennifer, lives in Miami. And he just turned 50. He has left the daily work of Ever to chief operating officer Amy Cordell, who has worked with him for almost 20 years, and his chef de cuisine, Lucas Trahan. His focus is building the Duffy brand.
Some new restaurants are in the works. He’s finishing a documentary and toying with television, though he professes disdain for competitive cooking shows. And then there is the book. It helps polish his profile but it’s also a way for him to make sense of what is arguably the most violent back story in chefdom.
“I just needed to let it all out,” he said, “so I can be done with it.”
The book begins with the worst day of Mr. Duffy’s life.
He was 19. The country club where he worked had given him the day off, and he had just returned home from culinary classes at Ohio State University. It was his parents’ 18th wedding anniversary, although they were in the middle of an acrimonious divorce his father didn’t want.
Around noon, Bear drove to the supermarket where Mr. Duffy’s mother, Jan, worked. He pulled out a gun and took her hostage. After 10 hours, with Curtis Duffy listening to negotiations with the police in a nearby house, Bear shot her, then turned the gun on himself.
After it was all over, Mr. Duffy got his father’s leather biker jacket and tattooing equipment. On his shoulder, he still has a tattoo Bear gave him. It says “Love, Dad.”
Mr. Duffy found a blue spiral-bound notebook in his father’s house. He had written his son a goodbye note, telling him he had no doubt that someday he would be the best chef in the world. And he offered a warning: “Please don’t walk in my footsteps because you’ll be in a world of pain, hate, and sure won’t be loved and won’t be able to show love.”
Mr. Duffy is the kind of man who prefers martial arts, dogs and early-morning runs to therapy, but he has come to see that his story is actually his strength.
“If my parents had not passed away, would I be where I am?” he said. “Would I be successful? Would I have the fire?”
His parents, who never ate at any of his restaurants, are the people he would most like to make a meal for.
They would see a driven man who thrives on control and welcomes suffering. His look is built on a good haircut, black patent-leather Prada sneakers and a Rolex “Panda” Daytona. He’s doing an Iron Man this year because he knows how good it will feel to get through something that hard.
Mr. Duffy landed in Mr. Trotter’s kitchen in 2000 after talking his first wife, Kim, into leaving their comfortable suburban life in central Ohio. He abandoned a stable, $80,000-a -ear job cooking at a country club for one that paid only $18,000 and required total fealty to Mr. Trotter, a man once considered the country’s most talented and temperamental chef.
“If the guy would have said, ‘Go upstairs and scrub the roof of the restaurant until it’s white, and after I want you to go downstairs and clean the dumpster with a toothbrush,’ I would have done it,” Mr. Duffy said.
Mr. Trotter was among the first to Americanize seasonal, multicourse prix-fixe dining, influenced by the great French menu dégustation restaurants and Spain’s El Bulli. In the 1990s, chefs like Thomas Keller would refine the concept. By the early 2000s, Grant Achatz — the chef at Alinea, in Chicago, who became another mentor for Mr. Duffy — pushed the tasting-menu form to its modernist pinnacle in the United States, sometimes offering 22 interactive courses that gushed, exploded, smoked and baffled.
Like many ambitious chefs in the 1990s, Mr. Duffy wanted nothing more than to be part of a disciplined team creating highly technical dishes for diners willing to pay hundreds of dollars. He was drawn to the quiet order of the militaristic kitchen brigade system, and to work that was based on endless refinement.
Those kitchens were exactly what his childhood was not.
When he was 12, his parents moved their three children from a house in Colorado to a cheap two-bedroom apartment in tiny Johnstown, Ohio, to be closer to Bear’s family. The only place for Mr. Duffy to sleep was his parents’ bedroom closet. He came home from school to an empty refrigerator, the smell of marijuana and biker parties. He was always looking for a fight, but also a way to escape.
“It was like, there’s got to be more than this,” he said.
Salvation came in a sixth-grade home economics class. His teacher, Ruth Snider, taught him to make pizza from refrigerated biscuit dough and sew a backpack for his skateboard with material she bought because his parents were too broke. She cheered him on when he got his first restaurant job and was a balm when his parents died. Mrs. Snider would be the most important guest when he opened Grace, his first restaurant.
“If anyone says angels don’t walk among us, I’ve got a two-word rebuttal,” he writes. “Ruth. Snider.”
Mr. Duffy opened Grace in 2012 with his partner, Michael Mauser. The white leather chairs alone cost $1,000 apiece. When Michelin awarded it three stars two years later, it became one of only two Chicago restaurants to hold that accolade. The other was Alinea.
But Mr. Duffy abruptly walked away in 2017. The $3 million restaurant had been bankrolled by a real estate investor. The two men had signed a contract without consulting a lawyer, and it turned out that the investor controlled everything. The two were little more than salaried employees, each making $160,000 a year.
After months of tension, the investor fired Mr. Mauser, who was general manager. Mr. Duffy quit shortly after. The restaurant closed and a flurry of lawsuits followed.
Redemption came when the two opened Ever three years later with money from another investor. “This time around we were smart enough to get lawyers involved,” Mr. Duffy said.
The restaurant got two stars from Michelin a year after it opened and has kept them ever since. But Ever is not without its drama. Mr. Duffy and Mr. Mauser split up earlier this summer and are speaking only through lawyers. Mr. Duffy said Mr. Mauser seemed burned out and didn’t want to grow the business. “We’re not in coast mode right now,” he said. “We need to be grinding.” Mr. Mauser declined to comment for this article.
They designed Ever to be as luxe, quiet and controlled as possible. Tables are spaced so far apart, the effect is like dining in your own private bubble. The ceiling is covered in soundproofing felt. Mr. Duffy is such a stickler for silence that the stainless-steel containers that hold used tasting spoons are lined with silicone mats to muffle the clink.
His approach to each dish is the same. There is one star ingredient on the plate, and three supporting flavors. “I don’t want to take things so far you have no reference for a dish,” he said. Still, the dishes are exercises in complexity.
That might mean poached white asparagus with green asparagus foam and some yuzu with a toasted bit of brioche and a tiny sage leaf. To a dish of dry-aged Ōra king salmon, he adds six variations on fennel, vegetable demi-glace, pickled mustard seed and mandarin.
“The Bear” has brought a new wave of customers willing to pay $325 for his 10-course tasting menu. Occasionally, a tour company pays the restaurant to let a small group visit the long counter where Richie, one of the show’s main characters, learns about fine dining by polishing forks. Diners who love that episode might be invited into the kitchen to polish a fork that Mr. Duffy has engraved himself with the restaurant’s name. Of course, they get to keep it.
The show has reignited interest in what has come to be known as tweezer food, but the wider appeal of the tasting menu as practiced by Mr. Duffy’s generation may be sunsetting. Over a quad espresso and a fresh Topo Chico at Ever, Mr. Duffy took a minute to consider why.
One reason is generational. The high art of the expensive tasting menu is increasingly the province of a niche audience of gastro tourists. And the tasting- menu concept — albeit less elaborate and sometimes poorly executed — has become common in cities across the country.
Kitchen culture has changed, too. There are fewer cooks who have “Yes, Chef”-ed their way through the world’s best kitchens and would scrub the roof with a toothbrush if commanded.
Mr. Duffy employs young cooks who say they want to work less and make more. They didn’t come to work at a top-rated restaurant to make bread all day, they tell him.
“Everybody’s too soft now,” he said.
Even so, Mr. Duffy will keep searching for ways to motivate the next generation.
The key, he tells them, is to focus on perfecting one thing a week. “I don’t care what it is.” he said. “If it’s folding the towels the right way, do it for a week every single day and make it perfect.”
The perfect fold will lead to the perfect sauce and the perfect dish and the perfect restaurant. It’s the lesson that saved him.
“The way you do one thing is the way you do everything,” he said. “And then that becomes your identity.”
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Kim Severson is an Atlanta-based reporter who covers the nation’s food culture and contributes to NYT Cooking.
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