He’s calm, swirling the poker in the liquor inferno like he was stirring sugar into midsummer iced tea. “The intense heat allows you to actually caramelize the sugars in the drink,” he tells me, which is something you could never do by heating it on a stove without boiling off all the water, which, you know, wouldn’t make for a very liquid drink.

I take a sip. It was right tasty before, a bright mix of ale, cognac and lemon, but now it’s incredible, totally transformed, tasting of toast and butter, darkly complex with a subdued sweetness. Still, mixing a drink with a flaming sword is not among the most technologically advanced of Dave’s tricks.

He and Nils Noren, the institute’s vice-president of culinary and pastry arts, are superstars of the cooking-geek firmament. Their latest blog post tells you how to make ketchup that melts and hardens like chocolate, and one of their greatest hits is turning fish into a wood-print. (Huh? Right … watch the video.) But it’s not just navel-gazing showoff stuff. Their goal is to push the boundaries of what we think is possible in food and make what they find useful for chefs and, in some cases, ambitious home cooks.

I, frankly, am not ambitious enough to build a low-temperature rotary evaporator distiller for my sauces, but I appreciate their work for how inspired they are. I confess that I also tasted in my glass of Red Hot Ale the giddy flavor of novelty, but it turns out that the idea is older than any suspenders-clad hipster bartender would dare to go, back to colonial taverns that kept loggerheads hot in the fire for their drinks. (Maybe because no one’s remade a fashionable tri-corner hat yet?) It’s the obscurity of this inspiration — in a sense, this respect for tradition — that convinces me that Dave and Nils aren’t enfants terribles, out to destroy the old in the name of their egos, but rather genuinely excited and profoundly creative cooks, just ones with lots of toys.

Recently, a few days after their holiday cocktail class, I sat down with them to talk about that creative process, what they think we’ll all gain from their work, and how much garlic you can eat in one sitting.

Let’s start with how you got into this. Nils, you moved on from being an accomplished chef to being an administrator at this culinary school, and Dave, your background isn’t even in food. Why does this lab even exist?

Nils: Well, it doesn’t hurt that it’s fun; I don’t actually get to work on this stuff enough. Research and development is such an important part of what universities do, and we think that’s what this school should be doing. We want to support the culinary industry, and these experiments are hard for chefs to do in restaurants, because of time, space and the demands of running a kitchen, when you have service to prep for and orders coming in. At Aquavit, where I was the chef, we were doing some of these things, but didn’t really talk about it.

Dave: Right. We publicize the technology because we want people to use it, not because the customer needs to know. That’s when you really win: when it just tastes amazing and for the customer, it’s not about the technology. Here, we get to go overboard to get the very best possible result. But for every 10 things we do that won’t go very far outside of these walls, there’s one that can have real lasting impact in the way people cook.

Take cooking a burger. You can: 1) overcook it, 2) leave it underdone in the middle, where it’s all squashy or 3) use a low, even temperature to get the whole burger the right texture. That’s why people sous-vide. You don’t want to sous-vide a burger, because the first thing about burgers is you want to be gentle with the patty to keep it tender, and the vacuum packing in sous-vide will crush the patty. So we learned to flash-fry the patty to set the shape, then put it in a ziplock with butter or beef fat, so it’s floating in there, all happy, and you can cook the pouch in a slow water bath to the right temperature and flash-fry it again to finish browning it.

Sous-vide is actually a great example of how industrial and fine-dining techniques can become useful at home. The technology for maintaining water at very steady temperatures was originally for medicine, and then made its way into fine dining. But you know, it’s great at home for parties. It switches the work from service time to prep time; all your food can sit, hot and ready to go any time. I had a bunch of people over for steaks, and the whole party was in a water bath.

It sounds like we’re talking about a different kind of party now. Hot tubs aside, how does your partnership work?

Dave: Ha. My background was in philosophy and sculpture. Anyone who says they “do art for themselves” is lying. Art is all about eliciting reaction, and cooking gives a lot of the same sort of immediate feedback.

Nils: I started cooking because I couldn’t make a living playing reggae in Sweden.

Dave: In art, most pressure is internally driven, except when you have shows. So I wait until just after it’s impossible to get things done, and then I get to work. But Nils is very organized. He has to be, with his experience running kitchens. And we’ve been doing this for three years. We respect and trust each other’s approach and palate.

Nils: We often don’t even need to talk. We can work and taste something and know exactly how we want it.

Dave: It’s interesting when we disagree, though, because while there’s room for opinion, most of the time it’s just right and wrong. I probably shouldn’t say that, but you know, there’s delicious, and there’s not so much.

So how do get you inspired to do your projects?

Dave: Sometimes it just starts with “I wonder …” David Chang came up to us once to talk about ike jime [a Japanese fish slaughtering technique, supposed to produce better flavor and texture]. He was like, “Harold McGee says it’s bullshit.” So we say, “Well, is it bullshit?” and it started from there. We’ve done a bunch of experiments on this, to the point of anesthetizing the fish before killing it, and we’re getting amazing results.

Nils: We often return to our experiments. We might stop working on something, but we’re never done with it.

Dave: You never stop learning about something. You might think you’re pretty close, but then something can throw you for a loop and you start over, excited to try it again.

What is a project you’ve done that will have long-range influence?

Nils: I think our pressure cooker work is really exciting. Most people use pressure cookers to just cook things faster. But you can make amazing stock in it. And we’ve found that you can use it to create new flavors — the high heat and pressure can kill sulfur, for instance. So onions become so sweet you can make them into ice cream. You can make horseradish that has all its flavor without the pungent heat, and you’ll find that it’s sweet, because it’s a root vegetable after all. You can make garlic that you can eat whole — two whole heads and still be able to talk to people. You can’t even do that with roasted garlic.

Dave: Yeah, that’s a problem. I once roasted a bunch of garlic, and then didn’t have anyone to talk to at the party. I sat there and just kept eating garlic. So then, the next day, I didn’t have anyone to talk to either.

Nils: Yeah, that’s just kind of how he is.

You can follow the adventures of Dave and Nils on their blog, cookingissues.wordpress.com, where they also post information about upcoming classes.

Sushi, of course, is the ultimate in simple food: Mostly just rice and a piece of raw fish, it would seem that anyone with a knife and one functioning hand can make it. But take an impossible eye for detail and apply it to fish—Where did it come from? How long should you age it before serving for best flavor? How long should you massage it to make it tender, but still have texture? Where should you cut a piece from, and at what angle, to highlight the flavors of different parts of the muscle? Since temperature affects aroma, how warm should you let the fish get in your hand before serving it? How hard do you press the fish into the rice to form a bite that has integrity, but is not dense?—and you begin to see where a simple food is not so simple. You don’t have to buy into all the minutiae a sushi master trades in to know that the pleasures of great sushi span from the animal to the emotional and the intellectual, which is a great trick for anything to pull off, let alone a piece of raw fish on rice.

What animates a sushi master? What drives someone to be so focused, to be a god of small things?

Jiro Ono, 85 years old and counting, is a revered sushi chef who runs a restaurant inside a Tokyo subway station, and “Jiro Dreams of Sushi” is easily the best, most beautiful movie about sushi you will see this year, or, let’s face it, probably any other. The film is part documentary bio-pic, part food-blogger’s wet dream. (OMG, did you see the super-macro shot of that tuna??!? NOM NOM. Etc.) It doesn’t take us into the world of technique: Jiro has mastered rice, too—his rice dealer claims that he doesn’t bother to sell his best stuff to anyone else because they wouldn’t know what to do with it—but while he describes how he does it, the film never shows us the whys and what-fors of his method. (Though, as Silvia Killingsworth reports for the New Yorker, the French-American star chef Eric Ripert describes Jiro’s rice as “tasting like a cloud.”)

Instead, the movie focuses on the life of a man who is utterly devoted to his craft. Jiro doesn’t have a secret to why his sushi is more astonishing than anyone else’s. What he says, over and over, is that great sushi—and, by extension, greatness itself— is the result of hard work, of dedication, of a commitment to excellence that, in the end, trumps everything else in life.

His search for perfection is eternal.  At 85, he hasn’t stopped working; he says he hates holidays because they are too long to spend away from the restaurant. Chefs, in particular, who have seen the film don’t hesitate to call it “inspiring.” To watch the gorgeously shot scenes of him forming pieces of sushi, jewel-like and dripping with soy sauce and life, is to wish that you might one day make so much beauty. (Indeed, a film critic friend said that her reaction to seeing this was not hunger, but to want to go home and make jewelry.)

Still, there is another side to this mastery, to this inspiring devotion. Jiro has two sons, and it’s hard to tell exactly what their relationship to each other is, or to their esteemed father. The master admits to not being at home when they were young, telling a story of how one day he slept in, and his children complained to their mother that there was a strange man in the house. The younger one seemed, at first, to be the favorite, because the father helped him open his own restaurant. The older son, Yoshikazu, is still an apprentice to the father … at 50. But Jiro tells the camera, with a laugh, that when he helped his younger son open his restaurant, he told him, “Now, you can never come home again.” As he recounts his own life, leaving his home to begin his career at 9, it’s not clear that he was kidding with his kid.

With an inflection of either humble pride or resignation, Yoshikazu says that in Japan, it’s the oldest son’s role to take over for the father. He works dutifully; he has taken over the selection and buying of fish since Jiro had a heart attack 15 years before. He, not the acclaimed master, was the one who served the inspectors who granted Jiro three Michelin stars, the highest recognition in the restaurant world. And yet, Jiro’s restlessness keeps his son forever in his shadow, unwilling to let him stand for himself.

“You must fall in love with your work,” Jiro says. He refers to himself as a shokunin, literally an “artisan,” but more accurately someone who commits the entirety of himself to his work. It’s a term with gravity; you won’t find shokunin bread in the grocery store. One of his young apprentices wells up when he tells the camera of how he finally earned the term from his master. It was after he’d worked for Jiro for 10 years. He’s signed up for a life of dignity and honor and hard work. He’s signed up for the life of Jiro’s sons, men who may or may not have their own sons to mentor and pass their restaurants down to. He’s signed up for a life given—or lost?—to the making of beautiful things.

We became cooks without realizing it. My brother says it happened for him one night when my mother baked him brownies to mollify an especially heartbreaking moment in adolescence. He wrote me about them recently. They were “rich, dense with a double dose of chocolate in chips and batter; a single bite causing the following series of reactions: eyes widening, slight, blush-inducing moans beginning, a smile developing, finishing with the inevitable, ‘Oh my god.’” He is that dramatic about all food.

I have been a cook since I received a birthday present of glass beakers painted lightly with the names of spices: turmeric, African bird pepper, cardamom, each filled with a mysterious powder.

When I was twenty-five, an editor at a magazine, a cri de coeur rose from somewhere inside me: the spice filled beakers, the deep pleasure I felt at the evening energy humming from my favorite restaurant, which I walked by evenly each day: they were what I longed for. I got an unpaid part-time job cooking there, hiding it from my fellow editors.

As soon as my brother heard the news, he snapped: after years trailing behind me through elementary, middle, and high school, always chilled by what he tightly called my “intellectual shadow,” he decided that by cooking professionally I had trespassed onto the sovereign territory to which he had secretly laid claim.

And we were off.

He got a job as a line cook at the only good restaurant in our hometown of Pleasantville, N.Y. Enraged at my intrusion, he’d walked into the restaurant, resume full of accomplishments like “student body president,” “fraternity treasurer,” “stage-manager, numerous student productions,” and made an argument like the one I’d made to the chef who let me into her kitchen. Because small town kitchens are different from big city ones, he wasn’t offered a tentative weekend job, but an oily chef’s coat, a pair of ugly hounds-tooth pants, and a grueling work schedule.

The early battles were pure sibling predictability. I didn’t know anything, but I had lived longer and cooked at a better-known restaurant. I am stubborn and utterly sure I’m right. Our contests pitted my mistrust of him against whatever he did, no matter how legitimate his experience. I watched him like a hawk. I embarrassedly recall the holiday meal we grandly offered to cook for my mother and her husband in the little apartment where they were living while repairs were done on our childhood home. I had chosen it from a magazine: fillets of sea bass with cippollini onions agrodolce.

My brother and I each took our places and heated our pans. He let his get smoking hot. I observed his machismo and felt superior about my more moderate approach. I added a thin stream of oil to my delicately warm pan. He told me to wait. I imperiously told him I knew what I was doing. I added a fillet of fish, which settled in calmly. He turned red and waited and heated and waited for an eternal minute before oiling his pan and adding his fish, whose middle threatened to buckle in an ugly way the instant it felt heat and had to be subdued with a spatula.

When it was the time to flip our fishes, I nudged my pan, expecting a whisper of an arc as my fillet gracefully turned itself over. When it didn’t budge, I nudged harder. Then I tried nudging with a spatula. When that didn’t work I began to press and scrape frantically. It still stuck, and I eventually gave up and turned broken pieces of sad, white fillet over, even more pathetically using my fingers.

Out of the corner of my eye I watched John tap his pan and his crisp-skinned fish obediently upend itself. I stalked around while he cooked the rest of the fish. We all sat down to eat. I hid my homely, broken fillets under dark onions. Everyone marveled at the gloriously browned bass skin. My brother and I eyed each other coolly over our plates. Point, John.

We got older. Our cooking plodded ahead. I followed my college roommate to Georgia where friends of ours wanted a restaurant attached to their farm, and we were to be chefs. My brother stayed in New York and moved slowly up the ladder at Blue Hill at Stone Barns. I tenuously ruled a kitchen of tattooed Southern teenagers who called me “ma’am,” grabbed heavy pots out of my hands against my protests, and ignored everything I said.

Each day I cooked with the sole purpose of maintaining my authority. Each day my brother relinquished more of his.

Our divide created strange, if occasionally delicious, meals. I flew home every few months and in a flurry cooked great, salty, buttery pots of grits, ignoring any objections my family dared make. I made quarts of sugary jam, mouth-puckering pickled okra and chilies, remanded any ingredient in my sightlines to a smoker. I made mayonnaise in a blender, drank soda out of plastic quart containers, strutted around the kitchen, displaying my burns.

My brother insisted on staying clean and straight in a white chef’s coat and apron on the hot Saturdays we managed to both be in our home kitchen. For an easy family dinner, he’d first steep garlic cloves in a shallow pot of olive oil and cook them at a bare murmur until they were soft; he’d maintain that it was absolutely imperative to cook onions in duck fat until they were a single teaspoon of sweet, sticky, rich onion confit; then he’d make a fennel stock with a sachet of herbs, straining it and cooking it again. Two hours into his preparations, aromatic confits and fortified fennel stock in hand, he would retie his apron, wipe down his cutting board, and feel ready to cook.

We were considerate and civil. He admired my power; I was impressed by his skill. When I was in a terrible mess over having to butcher and prepare 70 ducks for a fancy dinner in Georgia, he flew to teach me. Each week, I sat on the phone with him late into the night reassuring him that if I could do one soul-crushing, back-breaking service after another, he could, too. We regarded each other across our mother’s kitchen island: he wondering at my authoritative pickles, I intrigued by the submissive decorum of his fennel tian. It was an era of amicable draws. We’d not think too hard about it, and go wash our knives.

Then, our détente broke. John spent three months cooking at Arzac in Spain, St. John in London, Le Manoir aux Quatre Saisons in Oxford. I moved from Georgia to California to cook at Chez Panisse. John returned and quickly got a job cooking at Per Se.

At Per Se, the universe’s contents were uniform; survival meant being able to measure existence in precise, replicable shapes. Berated for having trouble creating Balsamic dots that decreased proportionally in size and distance, he spent days off alone in his home kitchen, reducing two gallons of Balsamic vinegar to a syrup then solemnly dotting his roommate’s mismatched plates. Daily, as though gravity itself hinged on it, he wrestled ingredients into tiny perfect cubes.

On the West Coast, cooking was a spinning top; the universe a tilted gyroscope. I cut vegetables and meat directly on huge wooden cutting blocks. Measuring was contemptuous, uniformity prosaic. Our ladles were mismatched, and too small or too big. Unpredictability was the soul of true cooking, so we forgot our towels places, decided we didn’t like aprons, cooked directly in deep fireplaces and ended up smudged with coal.

My brother came to visit me in Berkeley. We planned to cook a dinner party for a group of my friends, chefs he respected from the area. I assured him it was just a few people. I assured him we had enough food. I mocked him for wanting to stop drinking beer and make lists. When we took inventory a few hours before the dinner was scheduled to start, our booty looked perfectly reasonable to me and catastrophic to him.

We had two pounds of grits, three packages of ground pork, one of spare ribs, a few frozen sausages and the fat from a cured pig shoulder. We had ten pounds of green tomatoes, good garlic, and a garden full of kale and Swiss chard. I was cheerful and triumphant. We could make grits and pork ragu of all the different cuts, and griddled green tomatoes, and sautéed greens. There wasn’t exactly enough of anything, but I was sanguine. I knew I could muddle my way toward dinner and end up with something delicious, certainly. My brother saw things differently.

He refused to participate. This wasn’t cooking. He fumed. He stomped. He huffed. Then he stopped talking to me altogether and began to punctiliously brunoise green tomatoes. He salted them. Then he drained them. Then he drizzled them with white wine vinegar. Then he sifted and drained them. Then he let them sit. I realized, suddenly, that he was going to make me cook the rest of the meal alone, and I scrambled to brown meat, cook grits, stem greens. He ignored me, daintily stirring his pickles occasionally.

Eighteen of us: chefs and their children, housemates that wandered in, sat down late to a Sunday supper of grits and pork and pickles. Everyone loved the grits and the long table. Everyone loved the pickles. The joy of dinner was muzzled, though, marred by something we’d learned and now couldn’t shake. Neither of us thought the other could cook. My brother thought I was careless. I thought he was a prig.

I flew back east for a holiday. We cooked in unpalatable doubt. Dinners were stilted and cold. John did preposterous things to beets: he picked them for identical size, then scrubbed them, peeled them, blanched them, braised them, seasoning the oil he used with garlic and herbs, then straining both out, cooking everything covered in parchment paper. I made a big fuss of imagining I was acting on vegetables’ behalf. I never washed anything well: what wasn’t overwrought was gritty. John went in for gilded architectural masterpieces. I served anything I could raw.

But maybe I’m not telling the story correctly.

Our cooking is probably a story of two people withdrawing from rage. When we were fifteen and eleven, after six terrible months of illness, our father died, and our house and table emptied. I am sure our meals were still good, but there were fewer guests. My mother’s oily eggplant sandwiches tasted sodden. I stopped eating lunch altogether. My brother became insatiable. Our appetites warped by empty, searing rage.

Maybe the rage of loss drove us each to cook like we did, like we had no choice and each of us like ourselves and not at all like the other.

For the two years I was at Chez Panisse and John at Per Se, the food we cooked, which seemed to work fine for each of us alone, was terrible when we came together. Mutual doubt bred mistakes. Mistakes bred doubt. We botched and bungled. The kitchen could clearly only hold one of us; the other would sit outside and gloat. I would innocently lament to my mother how unfortunate it was that John had been cooking so long and still not become truly excellent. She would sigh, turn a page of her magazine, and assure me that he was excellent. I don’t know what John said about me. The gist was evident. If he convened the menu and prep meetings that in our house stand in for deciding what to eat for dinner, I would be coldly assigned washing lettuce, then table-setting.

Then, one Thanksgiving, our mother got sick and requested that John and I cook a small dinner at home.

He had left the tense pantomime of Per Se a few months earlier. When that subdued Thanksgiving rolled around, John was already sous chef of a rustic Brooklyn restaurant called Franny’s where he cooked in a big deep oven with a live fire. I’d come back to New York to write a book about home cooking. I had spent weeks of research flipping through recipes from an earlier time, among which were quaint, lovely ones, like “Crème Vichyssoise with sizzled baby leeks and buckwheat blini” that had, along with African bird pepper, pulled me toward the living, perishable world of the kitchen.

Worried more about my mother than about who cooked the beets, we haltingly began negotiations.

We spoke gingerly, all discussion hypothetical. One of us: “I might do halved eggs with anchovies to start. I don’t know, just cook them until the whites are set and halve them, and sprinkle them with a little crunchy salt, olive oil, then an anchovy filet. But what do you think?” The other, timidly: “Parsley?” “Yes.” “With a few pickled onions?” Then a brave question: “Pickled in brine, or just soaked in vinegar?” And then — because even the tiniest confidence breeds as much and as fertilely as doubt — the respondent would reply and mean: “Either way.”

That first meal was good. We complimented each other unceasingly. We took photographs of each of us clowning in front of the stove. My blowing kisses to his herby fingerling potatoes, his salivating over my buttery roast chicken. The relief made us giddy.

But maybe I’m telling it incorrectly again.

Our mother’s illness was discomforting but not terrible. It’s probably simple. John’s thinking about food now involved mandatory disorder. Mine included a recognition of the necessity, in certain circumstances — like making blini — of precision. In his new, esteemed position as sous chef, he had nothing to prove; contented to be writing the book I’d always dreamed of, neither did I. We had done what children who share mourning do as over time their rage breathes life into their passions. We’d grown together. And grown up.

It was early spring and it was a dish very much of the moment, the bird served with wilted ramps, spring onions, pearl onions and a sauce of cream infused with onions. A few baby spring turnips. All things with bite, mellowed by youth and cooking. As I ate, I thought, “What makes duck more delicious than onions?” And also this: “In a few weeks, when spring is gone, this dish won’t be here anymore.”

Franey’s cooking is elegant, muscular and ephemeral. He refers to “microseasons,” like the part of the onion season when the onion is most delicate. As a result, his cuisine is ever-changing; it’s a cuisine of creativity and spontaneity; it’s a cuisine of what’s new. It’s about a sensibility and a philosophy more than it is a collection of established “signature” dishes. Of course, Franey’s not alone in this — it’s the prevailing ethos of most ambitious young American chefs. Which is why it seems a little strange that the wildly talented Franey’s first executive chef job is at Canlis — 60 years and counting of marriage proposals, anniversaries, and meeting the in-laws. It’s a vibrant restaurant, not a museum, but it’s still known for the signature dishes it started out with, dishes that include a twice-baked potato.

Here’s a snapshot of what American fine dining was like back in 1964. On the cover of “Famous Foods From Famous Places: Specialty-of-the-House Recipes From America’s Leading Restaurants,” there is a bowtied waiter wearing a bright red sportcoat, drowning bananas in orange glop. The big, wilty magnolia blossom on the table is passing out from the heat of the chafing dish, looking like a sea monster dying to crawl back to the water. Bon appétit!

Inside, there is a section on Canlis, then 14 years old. Restaurant years being similar to dogs’, Canlis was already an elder statesman, and the book describes its speciality-of-the-house dishes: broiled steaks, steak tartar, prawns sautéed with vermouth, and, daringly, a Canlis Salad that, “with no apologies to Caesar, contains mixed greens tossed with croutons, minced bacon and grated cheese,” prepared by “pretty Japanese girls wearing bright colored kimonos.”

The meaning, the very point of a signature dish is that it doesn’t change. Rarely do chefs themselves set out to create one; it’s a designation conferred by the public, and yet, once you accept it, it becomes a pact with your diners: If you come here, you can have this thing. It’s both an honor and a bind. So how do you deal with that if your entire culinary philosophy is based on change?

Through most of its history, Canlis was considered a steakhouse. And while the ’90s redesign of the stunning mid-century modern building left a gorgeous, sleek, muted space, there is no missing its history: A massive, copper-plated grill station juts into the dining room like the prow of a mighty ship, where the Chef-cum-Captain, be-toqued and grand, would stand at the helm, meat sizzling before him.

“Back in the day,” Franey said, pointing to the grill, “the chef would call into the kitchen on a microphone for his plates. They might have all had the same vegetable, the same potato, the same garnish. He’d just put the steak on and send it out from the grill.” Fifteen years ago, Canlis made the shift to being a modern restaurant under chef Greg Atkinson, focused on seasonal Northwest cuisine, but the first thing Franey did was change the structure of the kitchen. Literally. He personally sawed down all the racks in the middle of the line so he could have his own station in there, cooking with his crew.

And this is what I mean by cooking: curing venison in pine ash. Slicing opakapaka into sashimi, serving it with fennel pollen. Spherifying a Tequila Sunrise. And also searing steak teriyaki, sautéeing prawns in vermouth, and plating massive Canlis Salads that dwarf almost anything else coming out of the kitchen.

The classics are delicious, to be sure, but isn’t their unyielding presence frustrating for a chef so inspired by newness?

“I’m not driven by my ego,” Franey said. “I work for this family, and those legacies are part of this family. Mr. Canlis said to me, ‘My name is on the door, but this place is bigger than me. It’s bigger than all of us.’ I’m here to cook for the guests. If you’ve been coming here for 30 years, and you’re thinking, ‘Don’t mess up my steak teriyaki!’ I need to earn your trust.”

It was a lovely answer, but, frankly just a little too diplomatic. Pressed, he eventually admitted that it would probably be easier to start a menu from scratch. But then he smiled and added, “But what’s the fun in that?” Learning to make really killer Peter Canlis Prawns was, too, a form of change.

We got back to talking about the duck. Even just remembering it made me a little wobbly. “What did you … do to that thing?” I could only manage to ask.

In his modest way, he said, “Well, we roast it at 450 degrees for 16 minutes.” Then he added, “We rub it in honey first.” I asked about brines or injected marinades or sorcery — what gives it that crazy, amazing flavor? “Oh,” he said casually, “and we dry age it for 14 to 24 days first.”

The aging, for which he works exclusively with specialty butcher Tracy Smaciarz, gives the duck a wild flavor, flavor you can’t make in a lab or a kitchen, flavor that is the handiwork alone of enzymes and bacteria and time. Coming out of the oven, it’s a powerful scent: the unparalleled aroma of browned bird skin, the sweetness of toasted honey, the floral perfume of the herbs stuffed into its cavity. But the thing, the thing that you can’t miss, is the funk. The funk the bird casts off like a lure, a smell like the edge of a prosciutto. If you get close enough to be impolite, it’s a bit like the part of the cheese counter where only eagles dare to fly. Woven into the taste of the meat, the funk is subtle, a backdrop of complex, floating, lingering flavors you can’t really place. It tastes deeper than duck you’ve had before, darker, weirder, and yet also somehow lighter. Less bloody and mineral, sweeter, a cheese-rind-tang rising through the fatty succulence. It tastes like genius.

“How did you think of that?” I asked.

“Well, I learned it from Daniel Humm,” he said, matter-of-factly, referring to the chef he worked for at Eleven Madison Park in New York. “And he learned it from his mentor, Gerard Rabaey.” And he probably learned it from his, and so on. It turns out that the tradition of hanging game birds to age is, well, very, very old. Medieval. Franey smiled. “Daniel said to me once, ‘We don’t really make anything new. We just do it well.’”

After I left the restaurant, I tweeted about my incredible meal at Canlis. The tweets came flooding back: “Did you have the duck?” “The duck!” and “Please say you had the duck!” I laughed. Looks like Franey has a signature dish on his hands.

Still, even beyond the stunning creativity, intelligence and emotional expression in his work, it may be because of Grant Achatz’s biography that he will become a household name. Growing up in a diner family in small-town Michigan, he was cooking at 5, and in the diner kitchen at 11. By high school, he knew he wanted to be a chef, a great one. After culinary school, he wrote the then still-obscure chef Thomas Keller at the French Laundry in Napa Valley a letter every day for weeks, until Keller took him on as a cook — and under his wing — as that restaurant was becoming known as the “most exciting place to eat in the United States.” Four years later, Achatz was running his own kitchen, and a just few years after that, his own restaurant, Alinea, was called the best restaurant in the country by Gourmet magazine and its editor, Ruth Reichl — who put Keller on the map with that pronouncement years before. But then — and this is the movie stuff — Achatz was diagnosed with tongue cancer. Yes, tongue cancer, and bad; he was given just months to live.

His memoir, “Life, on the Line,” was published last week: a story of being utterly driven, of finding and focusing creativity, and of friendship and survival. He spoke candidly with Salon over the phone about how you can be a great chef and not enjoy food, his creative process while he lost his sense of taste, and on how his drive has burned and rebuilt bridges.

There’s often an assumption that chefs have to be obsessed with eating food. And so I was struck by a comment I read by a chef who cooked with you at the French Laundry, back when it was first hailed as the best restaurant in America by the New York Times. He said that you ate very little fat, only lean meat and egg whites because you were a health nut. How can you eat like that and be a great chef?

Well, there are so many ways to look at food. In all honesty, there was no pleasure in eating like that. Boneless, skinless, boiled chicken breast? It’s really not that good. But what that afforded me was pleasure in something else — I was a workout freak. I was competitive in that area. You set a goal, you achieve it, goal, achieve, goal, achieve. Eating like that wasn’t about flavor, it was about the pleasure of attaining a different kind goal.

But you can still approach cooking and food in an evaluative, focused way. I could still taste and evaluate that sauce I was making. I didn’t necessarily enjoy that spoonful of sauce while I was pouring sweat cooking on the line, 95 degrees, but I could taste it and tell that somebody three minutes later, in the dining room on their anniversary, would really enjoy it.

My food has to be delicious, first and foremost, but so much of the experience is about other things. If Heather and I come across some figs, she might eat it and think, “Oh my God,” and I might be thinking, “Yeah, it could be better with a little salt, crack of black pepper, and balsamic vinegar.” But if we’re in the Napa Valley, taking a walk, find them on a tree … the figs are just going to be better than if you seasoned them “perfectly.” Ultimately the perfect meal is when those things come together – circumstance, the food, ambiance, and you’re with the person that you want to be with.

It’s one thing, though, to be eating bland food by choice, but you later lost your sense of taste for months during your cancer treatment. In your memoir, you wrote that you grew to almost hate eating, not just because it was physically painful, but because when you couldn’t taste the food, the sensation was just full of loss — what you couldn’t do. How did your cooking and your creative process change at that time? How did it feel different?

Well, the sense of satisfaction was much different. Once, we got some amazing artisan shoyu [Japanese soy sauce]. I smelled it, and could detect coffee and chocolate, and said, “We’re going to make a dessert with this.” Jeff [Pikus, who was Achatz's second-in-command during his treatment] was like, “He’s lost his freaking mind. Way too much Vicodin.” So I made him smell the sauce and the chocolate. I had to talk him into why it might taste good. And then when we put it on the plate, I had to ask him, “Does it taste good?” You’re never really in that position as a cook, not knowing.

So the satisfaction was intellectual, but the big payoff moment of putting that first spoonful in your mouth isn’t there.

In some ways, it was more satisfying, because you’re tuning into something that you didn’t before. And we developed far more collaboration, far more trust.

Another thing, too. When I was just getting my sense of taste back after treatment, I can probably say that the food at Alinea was too sweet.

When my taste was gone, I was hyper, hyper, trying to tune into it. My taste eventually came back in stages: first sweet, then bitter, then acid, then salty. But when that was starting to happen, I noticed myself using a lot more bitter flavors. I was never a bitter flavor lover, but post treatment, just because I could discern it, I was putting it in everything. I yearned to have the satisfaction of tasting something, anything, so I used a lot of sweet and bitter flavors, just so I could taste it. But eventually, it really, really made me understand taste, and the way components come together. Because we never normally have the opportunity to isolate taste.

There’s this old cliché that the Chinese have a proverb, “May you live in interesting times,” and you can never tell if it’s a blessing or a curse. So you’re young, you’ve reached the heights of your field, survived life- and career-threatening cancer, but you write in the epilogue of the book that coming back to “normal” life after treatment was the hardest part. Why?

My personality was always such that I always look straight forward, never behind or to the side. I compartmentalized. Anything that could ever prevent me from achieving a goal, I put in a box, tape it up, throw it over my shoulder. You aim for a goal and attain it. Then you look to the next one.

Then something like this happens, you get incredibly lucky with a great medical team. You make it. Then you come back to work and you’re like, OK. When I was at Trio [Achatz's first kitchen], the goal was to get a four-star review in the paper. Done. At, Alinea the goal was to get Ruth Reichl to call you best restaurant in the country. Done. Then it’s to be in the Restaurant magazine top 50 in the world, and you get that. And then you might die, you beat that … and then what? What do those stars mean now? What do you have to achieve?

It shorted my system, and I went into a panic, like, “Whatever happens at this point, will I ever get satisfaction from it?” The competitive side of me felt like there would never be a great challenge anymore. Then I got into this weird place mentally, where all the sacrifice, all the work, guys grinding it out — for what? So what? Everything I ever believed in, everything that was important, completely got lost. And all I saw was the grind of it.

After I hit that low, I spent a couple weeks at that low. Pikus quit. The guy was the ultimate soldier. He worked at Trio, helped us make the “best restaurant in the country,” led Alinea through the most difficult time. He soldiered through all of that. Then one day, after my treatment was over, we were working on developing a new dish together when he imploded and walked out. He looked up at me, said, “I can’t do this.” Our eyes met for a second and I said, “OK.” After that, I just looked back down on the dish and thought, “I gotta get this on the menu tonight.” But then I was invigorated by the challenge. It went on the menu that night. That’s what it’s all about. It’s not about achieving, it’s about trying to achieve. Now I realize that it wasn’t until I saw someone else lose focus that I realize how much I’d lost focus too. During that low period, I was like, “Screw this, screw them.” And when I saw him have that attitude, I finally saw it in myself too. And the first time I talked to him, two and a half years later, was a month ago.

Speaking of strained relationships, there’s a lot been made of your chapter about working briefly for Charlie Trotter, the other Chicago chef whom many have long considered to be among the best in the world. You idolized him from reading his books, worked with him for a few months, but had a couple of icy exchanges during that time. And when you tried to talk to him about wanting to leave, he basically said, “If you leave without working here a year, I don’t know you.”

Well, a lot of what people reading the book are like, “Oh man, I bet Trotter is pissed off.” For me, as a young cook, that experience was disheartening. But it’s not like he’s a monster! He’s a perfectionist who won’t let anything get in his way. And I told those stories to draw parallels to my own personality. His “If you leave now …” was really just like my, “Fuck Pikus. You walk out the back door, you’re gone.” I’m not trying to get back at the guy. I was a 22-year-old cook. A lot of people are trying to pit the two of us against each other, but that’s not what it’s about. He’s on an all-out assault to make the best restaurant in the world. If there’s one thing I regret in the book is that I don’t show enough that I respect him, as a chef that’s completely driven.

And then there’s another story of strained relationships that doesn’t necessarily get resolved in your memoir. You tell the story of being 14 and building your first car with your dad. Later, we find that there are problems in your family, and you don’t talk to him for many years. So why is the story of building the GTO so prominent in the book, and in your mind? I’ve heard you tell the same story to aspiring chefs.

Well, there are so many parallels between that experience and being a chef. Putting the car together is like organizing a kitchen. I didn’t know that then. But when we were building Alinea, I kept drawing back on that experience. The most important thing is that it’s hard work. You want something that’s great? Build it yourself, actually reap the tangible benefits of it. I was 16 years old, and I had the coolest car in town from a $1,400, literal piece of junk to something great. That’s the critical thing.

My dad and I built that thing from scratch, over two years, to show condition. But when my parents got divorced for the second time, I said to my mother, “I don’t really give a shit what you do with the car.” So she sold it to my cousin. It totally went out of my consciousness.

Then in the book, there’s a story about your father coming into Alinea randomly one day, but we don’t get to see how that meeting goes.

That was the first time I’d seen him in 10 years or something, and you have all that residual resentment. Part of me thought it would even take too much effort to repair a relationship at that point. So he agreed to come in for dinner, but I said, “Oh, he won’t get it, he won’t even like it.” That was me emotionally protecting myself: “If he doesn’t understand this food, he won’t understand me.” But he had dinner, had my food, and he got emotional. He got it. We talked about it for a long time after his meal. And that … that was the starting point of our relationship again.

Postscript: For the release party of “Life, on the Line,” Grant’s business partner (and co-author) Nick Kokonas found the old GTO and had it rebuilt as a surprise. Grant’s father was at the party, too.

I have no idea why Claude chose to hire me. Perhaps nobody else applied for the job. Or maybe nobody else applied who could pass the hotel’s strict background checks and drug tests. In any case, he was the only chef among dozens I contacted who was willing to take a chance on a freshly minted culinary school graduate who was 1) nearing middle age and 2) whose most recent job title was “Teaching Postdoctoral Fellow.”

But that wasn’t the only reason I was lucky to be hired. Claude had worked under several three-star Michelin chefs and had won numerous awards for his desserts. This was precisely the kind of chef I dreamed of working with. Someone who was serious about pastry. Someone who could teach me everything.

And I found out way more than I wanted to know.

“Ah,” he said during the pastry team’s 10-minute morning break one day, shortly after I started. “Tomorrow I go back to Las Vegas. I will finally get my driver’s license back!”

I knew that he had previously been the lead pastry chef at a luxury hotel restaurant in Las Vegas, and that he still owned a house there — but the driver’s license bit, I didn’t get.

“Oh, what happened to your driver’s license?” I asked.

He hemmed. “Eh. It is complicated.”

Mike, one of the other cooks, beamed gleefully. “Three letters: D … U … I!”

Back in cooking school, the instructors’ mantra was “the chef is always right!” Chefs, they warned us, were like four-star generals: They were not to be questioned, challenged or, God forbid, mocked. Ever.

Apparently, Claude’s pastry team never got that memo. And neither did Claude — he just kept on feeding us ammunition for our relentless barrage of jokes (most of which went over his head) and (usually) affectionate teasing. The DUI was just the start of it.

“You know what ze womans like at Hennessy’s?” he said one day, referring to his regular watering spot. “When you bring zem tacos from ze bar. Without zem asking.”

“So, wait — you introduce yourself to women by buying them tacos from the bar?” Mike asked.

“Not buy zem — zey are free. At the bar.”

“So you bring these girls tacos that are already theirs for the taking and you expect them to be all impressed?” Renata, another cook, asked incredulously.

“But zey are free — and ze womans, zey like it!”

“Allo, my dahling,” purred Mike in his best French accent. “I bring you tacos from ze bar. Zey are free! Now weel you come to bed wees me?”

Claude was — in his own words — “a very bad boy.” But he treated us women in the pastry kitchen with perfect courtesy. Ditto the team’s guys. When he showed up every morning (usually hung over), he’d solemnly circle the room and shake our hands. When our shifts ended, he made a point of shaking our hands again and thanking us for our work.

By this time — late afternoon or early evening for those of us on the day shift — it was often clear that he’d taken a generous swig or two from the bottle of Jack Daniel’s he kept in his locker. But where his team was concerned, his professionalism never wavered.

As for women outside the pastry department, all bets were off.

“Hola, mamacitas,” he’d purr ungrammatically to Elizabeth, his favorite Mexican-American dishwasher.

“EEEE!” she’d squeal in reply. Whether she squealed from pleasure, embarrassment or bemusement with Claude’s mangled Spanish was anyone’s guess.

Claude knew he couldn’t treat women employed by the hotel the same way as those he found at Hennessy’s. And female hotel employees were smart enough to keep their clothes on around him, at least while in heavily trafficked areas. But then, a brief and wondrous window of opportunity opened for him: He was offered a job back in Las Vegas by one of his Michelin-starred mentors, and he promptly gave his two-weeks’ notice.

Now what could hotel management do, fire him?

On his last day at the hotel, Elizabeth was at the dish sink when Claude approached her with a napkin-covered plate and a big grin on his face. “I make zees for you!” he announced proudly.

Elizabeth dried her hands on her apron, pulled off the napkin — and jumped back screaming.

“Ay! Ay! No me gusta! I don’t like it!”

The rest of us ran over to the sink and stared at the plate, which was now on the draining board.

Smack on the center of the plate sat an anatomically correct, slightly larger than life-size penis baked of biscotti dough. Because Claude was a consummate professional, he had carefully rolled the thing in sugar before baking it, just as our recipe required. And because he was Claude, he had decorated it in great detail with several kinds of chocolate.

I hope I never see white chocolate used that way ever again.

It was easy to see why Claude chose biscotti dough as the medium for his project: we always had tons of it at the ready. Biscotti are great cookies to make during the holidays because they travel and keep well (both the dough and finished cookies can be made ahead). They’re also cute — when made normally, they look like little slices of bread — and they taste great.

Biscotti are traditionally served as an accompaniment to coffee. But recently, I discovered biscotti that were actually flavored with coffee, and they were addictive. Here’s my version of coffee biscotti, studded with hazelnuts and topped with a safe-for-work drizzle of white chocolate.

Espresso-Hazelnut Biscotti