Ever since, it has won rave reviews, prestigious awards, and a stream of powerful patrons. Now he's gunning for the U.S. government's Malcolm Baldrige quality award, which no independent restaurant has ever won. His recipe for success holds lessons for everyone who's wrestling with how to stand out in an environment in which competition is tougher than ever, expectations are higher than ever, and the sacrifices required for success are bigger than ever. The problem was that very little of what these budding chefs turned out even remotely resembled art. Doing things differently is hard in the restaurant business, where new raw materials are tough to come by.
Chefs achieve artistry through relentless creativity, tastefully and consistently executed.
It's no accident that many restaurants fail. Even good restaurants eventually bore their customers if they don't continue to innovate. Trotter, who earned a political-science degree from the University of Wisconsin in 1982 but never graduated from cooking school, declared from the outset that no matter what happened, eating in his restaurant was never going to be boring. Despite the various ethnic origins of his dishes, Trotter's style of preparation tends to be evocative of France, though he resists the temptation to lard everything up with butter and cream. Instead, he flavors his dishes mostly with vegetable purees, stocks like consomme, or oils infused with herbs and other flavoring agents.