Chuck, full of ambition

DISH IT OUT Shown here in 1998, Trotter has always kept a careful eye on the details.

During the three days I spend with Trotter, he quotes Nietzsche. He cites philosophical books like The God of Small Things and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and imparts the wisdom of Jerry Garcia. When I ask him if he ever had aspirations to have the best restaurant in Chicago, he brushes off such goals as immaterial with a Henry David Thoreau–inspired quote: “You’ve got to journey within to find truth,” he says, his eyes twinkling but his expression completely serious, “to find the ultimate kind of satisfaction.” 

But for all of the philosophy he references, Trotter nevertheless comes off as perpetually restless. His pursuit of excellence (he eschews the term perfection, saying the idea of being merely perfect bores him) started when he was as young as 8, cleaning gutters in his hometown of Wilmette with unusual scrutiny, mowing the lawn in perfectly straight lines. At 12 he had a paper route, and—put off by the other delivery boys’ sloppy ways—stopped his bike at every house to make sure the paper landed at the front door. He grew up with a severe case of dyslexia (he still experiences trouble distinguishing right from left) and while attending University of Wisconsin–Madison found himself falling behind other students in his reading assignments. “I would always be embarrassed to read out loud in class because I would transpose words and letters and things... I literally had to take a year off college, just to read books,” he remembers. “In the beginning I thought ‘How do I compensate for this?’ But in the end, I think there are people who take something that could be conceived as a shortcoming and they turn it into a strength. Now I look at that as something that made me...not stronger, but more introspective. More willing to sort of put in an effort to learn something.”

His subject choice, of course, was food. But he never attended culinary school. Instead, he spent three years apprenticing at ten different restaurants around the country, his most influential time being spent with Norman Van Aken at his renowned restaurant Norman’s in Florida. And by the time Trotter opened his restaurant, he had already decided that being simply “good” would not suffice. He also knew that if he was going to achieve excellence, he’d need a team that wanted it as badly as he did.

There are plenty of horror stories about the way Trotter treats his employees—tales of humiliation, his notoriously bad temper and seemingly silly practices such as making servers wear tape on the bottom of their shoes to remove lint from the carpet. But these stories unfairly categorize the man as a monster. What Trotter really is—what I discover watching him interact with his chefs, his assistant, even the photographer taking the cover shot for this magazine—is simply a master manipulator. Trotter doesn’t get what he wants by yelling—he just imbues a parental kind of control over everything he does. He instills his values in his employees, makes them terrified to disappoint him. He manipulates people as he manipulates food, coaxing greatness out of them at any cost. “The things that he said were very parental,” Chang remembers.

As Bowles puts it, working for Trotter “becomes who you are and not what you do.” Trotter doesn’t give his employees schedules, timelines or even titles. He simply puts them in his restaurant and tells them it’s “all about the guest.” It’s a funny kind of authority—employees have to do exactly what Trotter wants, but how they do it is completely up to them.