author or food author?

[chefg]

M-

Hey, glad to see you are doing this! Obviously your focus and successes have been orbiting aroung the restaurant industry and food. Do you consider yourself a writer exculsive to that subject? Do you feel you could be successful at other types of writing? Did you consciously choose this focus? And what non-industry subjects interest you? And finally, what do I have to do to get you to Trio for dinner already!

Best,

G.

[Michael Ruhlman]

Grant,

Great to hear from you. I split my time between food and non-food. When I was writing FL cookbook and soul of a chef simultaneously, I burnt out on it. so we moved to martha's vineyard so I could work in a wooden boatyard. While I was working with Eric Ripert, a gentlman and a fantastic cook, real finesse with seasoning like I've never seen, a great sprititual cook, I was reporting and writing a book about pediatric heart surgeons. You think you see grace under pressure on the saute station on a saturday night? Observe the OR of a great surgeon rebuilding a baby's heart, the size of walnut, with the clock running. I like to write about craftsmen, men and women who work with their hands for living. In cooking I find bigger issues about personal standards, a quest for excellence (or an acceptance of mediocrity), about compassion and care--those bigger issues are the important thing to me, not the cooking itself. Though I love cooking just for cooking, too, and admire intensely those who do it for a living and those who do it carefully for their family.

For anyone reading this e-mail, I'm responding to Grant Achatz, who is among the country's best chefs, a cook I really admire, and I urge everyone who cares about excellent food to go to wherever Grant is cooking, which happens to be Trio outside Chicago.

Don't stop cooking, Grant.