Chuck, full of ambition

But it is, apparently, a successful management style. Chang admits she cried every night for the first three months she worked there, but it wasn’t because Trotter berated her. Rather, she had adopted his philosophy so strongly—that is, she put so much pressure on herself to reach “excellence”—that she ultimately ended up disappointing herself. “Freedom to be great also means freedom to suck,” she says. Yet she and Bowles (and every other former worker I talk to) say that they’d never be who they are today without Trotter’s rigid philosophy.  “I can’t imagine where anyone could have gone—like culinary school or working at any other restaurant—where we could have learned as much,” Chang says. “Honestly, I know it sounds like a love letter. But whatever, it’s true. There’s no place where any of us could have gotten such a cool package or such a cool experience.”

But it is not just his employees that Trotter plays like chess pieces. One morning I arrived at Trotter’s office expecting to spend the day with the chef. But I ended up not seeing him for hours. Instead, I was handed a chef’s coat embroidered with my name and assigned various chopping and peeling tasks in the kitchen. I had not asked to observe how Trotter’s kitchen worked; but apparently it was something Trotter decided I needed to see.

A few days later I saw the chef at the photo shoot for the cover of this magazine. The photographer, Paul Elledge, had been chosen strategically; he had worked with Trotter extensively, and practically guaranteed a smooth shoot. As Elledge showed Trotter mock-ups of the kind of photos he had in mind, a tense hush fell over the room. But Trotter seemed complacent. He held a hand to his chin and nodded, blinking blankly, as Elledge spoke. He said just one approving word: “Okay.”

But a few minutes later his assistant approached Elledge with a big box of knives. We had asked Trotter to bring a few knives with him for the shoot. Of course, in true overachiever fashion, he brought a box of 60. And in the minutes between agreeing to Elledge’s ideas and being whisked into the stylist’s chair, he had decided he wanted to be photographed with the knives in front of him.

“Chef suggests we just pile up the knives,” his assistant said. She was already unpacking them.

And like that, Trotter was in charge.

“I could have stopped him,” Elledge admitted after the chef had gone. “But I liked the idea.” I had a sense of what he meant. I was originally annoyed when Trotter kept me confined to his kitchen instead of allowing me to follow him around. But in retrospect, my time there allowed me insights that I otherwise would not have been privy to. Ultimately, this is why nobody steps up to Trotter when he starts his meddling. He can be bullish, controlling and arrogant, but at the end of the day it doesn’t matter how he goes about changing things. Because more often than not, he changes them for the better.

On my last day with Trotter, he tells me at length about how he runs his team

“Everyone here, I advise them…however high the expectations are for you—[and] they will be high, from me and from this place—your own expectations for yourself have to be higher,” he says. “Those that understand that, they make their own schedule, they work hard, they push the envelope, and they think, I’m going to be a chef in two or three or five years, either at a hotel or at my own restaurant or whatever it is. I encourage that.”

Maybe he shouldn’t be quite so encouraging. Like a kind of Dr. Frankenstein, he became almost too good at creating great chefs, and now they’re coming back to haunt him. Nobody would deny that 20 years in the restaurant business is an incredible accomplishment. But the more great chefs who come out of his kitchen and open their own headline-grabbing restaurants, the less Trotter’s own restaurant seems to matter. These days, Trotter’s biggest contribution to the city’s culinary scene seems to be the quality of chefs he’s produced: Tru’s Rick Tramonto, Boka’s Giuseppe Tentori—chefs who, thanks to him, have the drive and means to be on top.

Among these chefs, the biggest threat is Alinea’s Grant Achatz. Of his experience working at Trotter’s, Achatz says, “I had never been exposed to that relentless kind of pursuit of perfection before. I didn’t even know it existed.” But he quickly soaked it in. Achatz only worked in Trotter’s kitchen for four months before moving on to Thomas Keller’s French Laundry in Yountville, California (Keller is the man who Achatz has said influenced him the most). But, he says, “[Trotter’s philosophy is] such a powerful force that it sticks with you.”

Yet Trotter doesn’t have as many kind words for Achatz. Almost since the day Alinea opened in 2005, Trotter has expressed doubts about its avant-garde food. In The New York Times, he famously referred to Achatz’s chemically enhanced cooking style as “nonsense on stilts.” And during the course of our conversations, he makes several thinly veiled references to the restaurant. “It’s great to see other wonderful young restaurants around town,” he says. “It’s fantastic. Bravo. You’ve been doing this for two years, three years. You want to do this for a long time? Let’s see if you have the wherewithal to really be avant-garde for 20 years.”

But despite his defensiveness, he is still a force to be reckoned with. And he may not admit it, but the fact that these restaurants have challenged his place at the top—and the fact that last year Gourmet called Alinea the best restaurant in the country—seems to have energized him.

“I love faltering,” Trotter says. “I love, in a sense, coming up short. Because you learn nothing from success. You learn so much from failing.”

So, with the same determination to succeed he showed when he faltered in college, Trotter has put all his energy into opening two new full-service restaurants. The first is a seafood restaurant in Las Vegas set to open in December. And in late 2008, his second Chicago restaurant will open in the Elysian Hotel, which is set to open in the Gold Coast in the fall of 2008.

He promises that the Elysian restaurant will be big; he expects to see it on food magazines’ best-of lists of 2008. But when I ask if he has ever thought about closing Charlie Trotter’s to focus on the new projects, he laughs—even though it’s clear he doesn’t find the question funny.

“That seems fairly outrageous. Why would I close?” His smile deflates; he shoots me a look of dead seriousness.

This isn’t just a race,” he says. “It’s not even just a marathon. It’s an Ironman competition.”