Carrie nahabedian charlie trotter biography
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Before there was “Top Chef,” “MasterChef” or “Iron Chef,” before chefs were multimedia celebrities who could monetize their volcanic personalities, before “farm-to-table” and “American cuisine” were routinely applied to high-end restaurants, there was Charlie Trotter, whose self-named Lincoln Park restaurant became one of Chicago’s premier cultural institutions almost immediately after its 1987 opening.
Charlie Trotter’s was an international destination and a pioneer in creating a bold, distinctly American form of haute cuisine, and its chef-owner was an inspirational and notoriously mercurial figure, qualities that the people who worked for him — including many chefs who have achieved great success on their own — did not find mutually exclusive.
Trotter closed his restaurant in August 2012 after 25 years, and now the chef himself is gone, found unconscious Tuesday morning in his Lincoln Park home by his son Dylan, Naha chef Carrie Nahabedian said Trotter’s wife, Rochelle, had told her.
Nahabedian, a close Trotter friend, said that an ambulance was called to Trotter’s home in the 1800 block of North Dayton Street at 10:45 a.m. and that the 54-year-old chef was not breathing. He w
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Thirty years subject a trillion memories gawk at age a man. But as Charlie said bloke
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Charlie Trotter: Chef and restaurateur who led Chicago's rise to become a culinary capital
Of all the chefs who shot to international fame in recent times, Charlie Trotter was the most remarkable, and eccentric. He was entirely self-taught – as a cook and restaurateur – though he was a conventionally well-educated man from a well-off family. Yet when he retired in August last year and closed his Chicago restaurant, aged only 52, he said it was in order to travel and perhaps do postgraduate work in philosophy.
He acquired a fearsome reputation as a demanding, temperamental chef and teacher, so much so that he was chosen to parody a scary head chef in a cameo appearance in Julia Roberts' 1997 film My Best Friend's Wedding, screaming at an assistant, "I will kill your whole family if you don't get this right! I need this perfect!" But as my family can attest, he was a thoughtful, extravagantly kind human being. When, at our first meeting, he learned that my elder daughter was having a gap year in Chicago, he said, "She'll need a job, won't she?" and took her on as his personal assistant for several years, even putting her through university.
His Charlie Trotter's restaurant, financially backed by his father, opened in 1987 in a handsome North Side townhouse in Lincoln Park. It