Chefs paid $20K/year at Trio in 2001
Before Alinea, Achatz ran the kitchen at Trio in Evanston with chefs earning just $20,000 a year in 2001 — a constraint he says pushed creativity.
Snapshot · Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Grant Achatz (award-winning chef)
Explore episode
Jul 15, 2026
Where this was said
El Bulli, Modernist Cuisine, and the Decision to Open Alinea
At 34:00 · chapter starts 33:30
When Thomas Keller recognized that Achatz's creative instincts pointed somewhere beyond French Laundry's cuisine, he arranged a visit to El Bulli near Barcelona — the restaurant where José Andrés had also experienced his awakening. For Achatz, the visit was transformative: not just a revelation about what food could be, but a feeling of being given full permission to invent. Back in the US, he ran a kitchen at Trio in Evanston with no budget and chefs paid just $20,000 a year in 2001. Rather than limiting him, the financial constraint pushed creative intensity. He describes those years as formative in a way that money could never have bought. The success at Trio — including national recognition and multiple awards — gave him the confidence, the pedigree, and the following to launch Alinea in 2005.
Alinea opened 2005, instant hit night one
Alinea opened in 2005 and was immediately reviewed by the New York Times on opening night — a huge deal since the NYT rarely left Manhattan at that time.
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