It came about, he remembers, for the restaurant’s first anniversary. The second was a vegetarian tasting menu.Īnd he was, perhaps, one of the first to have a table in the kitchen. If you believe in this wine, then let’s just buy it.” Very soon Trotter had to buy the neighboring house in order to have somewhere to put the wine.Ĭharlie Trotter’s was the first restaurant in America to offer a prix fixe tasting menu, Stone says, actually two.
It was about the total experience.”Īs for the wine, whatever Stone bought, Trotter would say, “you have the palate. And he would take into account what wine you were drinking as well as the season and the food he was creating. It should be improvisational based on materials you had at hand on that particular day or time. Charlie thought cuisine should be like jazz. Every important chef came into the restaurant. Says Stone, “The time I was working with Charlie was an amazing period of growth for the restaurant in terms of national and international recognition. “His real coup and biggest investment was in bringing on Larry Stone to manage the cellar in 1989.” “From the beginning, even when it was a humble list of 80 or so items, Trotter always attracted top winemakers and winery owners from California and the rest of the world because of the culinary excellence in the restaurant. “He was always very proud of the wine program, which was essential to his concept of what a restaurant should be,” Spellman said. “And he had an incredible customer base of wine collectors who would spend like there was no tomorrow.” “The guy loved wine and was a big collector,” says Meeske. PHOTOS: Acclaimed chef Charlie Trotter dead at 54Ĭhris Meeske, now proprietor of Mission Wines in South Pasadena, was a sommelier at Charlie Trotter’s in the early 1990s. I’ve taken great pride in selecting and caring for these wines over the years, and I am confident their next owners will enjoy them just as much as I have.” The Christie’s auction literature quotes the chef as commenting: “Seeing some of the rare gems from my cellar at auction today felt a bit like parting with old friends at times, but it was gratifying to see so much collector interest and demand from around the world. And the successive sommeliers, some of the best in the world, who worked with him over the 25 years he owned Charlie Trotter’s had amassed a phenomenal cellar. Trotter, who was found dead Tuesday morning in Chicago at age 54, loved wine. When Christie’s auctioned off “The Magnificent Cellar of Charlie Trotter’s” last December, the 357 lots, much of it fabled Burgundies and Rhones, fetched close to a million dollars, $918,027 to be exact.
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