The first scene of the Netflix documentary, Love, Charlie—The Rise and Fall of Charlie Trotter—is some archival footage of the famous Chicago chef saying to an interviewer, “My philosophy is that if it weren't for the employees, and if it weren't for the customers, the restaurant business would be the greatest business in the world. And basically, I hate people, so …” Trotter made the quip facetiously, off the record, but it foreshadowed the arc of his life and career, which were inseparable.
Director Rebecca Halpern’s film tells the story of an enigmatic, brilliant, and finally, self-destructive chef. She illustrated that brilliance while also revealing that Trotter’s kitchen was often a cutthroat den of resentment, anger, and abuse that even the Miles Davis and Bob Dylan music on the kitchen speakers couldn't calm down. Halpern’s film is a balanced portrait of both its subject's darker side, and the talented and driven side that propelled him to fame at a young age.
Trotter’s restaurant—”Charlie Trotter’s”—at its peak in the 1990s was considered one of the best in the world, with Trotter achieving celebrity chef status alongside such other notables as Emeril LaGasse and Wolfgang Puck. The film chronicles his meteoric rise to the top, starting with the chef moving around the country and working at restaurants until there was nothing more to learn there. He’d sometimes come to work six hours early—off the clock—in order to meet his exacting standards.
Trotter was in a hurry. He returned to Chicago to open his own fancy restaurant in 1987 without ever running one before, at any level. The film explains that he was lucky to have the financial backing of his wealthy, newly-retired father, but doesn't address the mystery of how someone with his level of experience could open up a place at the highest end and have it booked for six months in advance right away. This is either a story-telling flaw by Halpern or a gap attributable to the unknowable.
Documentary film directors are limited in that they don't have actors with a script to tell their story. They're forced to use such techniques as reenactments and talking-head presentations. Halpern, who had archival footage to use, spares us the often-cheesy reenactments, but relies heavily on guests. As Trotter died in 2013, he couldn't be one of them, so the director had to find another way to recreate his presence. She was fortunate to have at her disposal a vast archive of Trotter-penned letters and postcards. In his younger years, before success overtook him, Trotter was a prodigious correspondent who dealt with his torrent of dreams and ambitions by putting them in words—often with illustrations—and sending them to a handful of friends, written on whatever was available, including candy wrappers. Halpern also uses photos and home movies to fill out her portrait. One of the home clips demonstrated that as a young man Trotter was a talented gymnast.
The backbone of the film's talking-heads presentation is Trotter’s first wife (of three), Lisa Ehrlich, who knew him for years as just a friend, married him, and worked with him. Without Ehrlich’s incisive, articulate participation, the director would be left with only a collection of impressions, with no one to put them together. Trotter, so obsessed with his restaurant that he’d often sleep on the floor, didn't have time for their relationship at that point. They divorced, and Trotter continued to thrive for a long time as an innovator. He went the tasting menu route—many small courses that the chef, not the customer, chooses—a model that continues to thrive at to this day. His vegetable dégustation (tasting menu) went beyond anything like it at the time, and his cooking style was marked by a lack of butter and cream, and delicate, beautiful presentations composed with lapidary precision. For the butter and cream, Trotter substituted vegetable and fruit reductions, which weren’t just lighter—they also added sparkling colors to his plates.
Perfectionist Charlie Trotter would soon gain the reputation as a tyrant in the kitchen, a problem his father tried to warn him about before he died. With that death, the chef lost the only authority figure with the potential to keep him in check. An employee lawsuit for back wages in 2003 cost Trotter $300,000, and left him bitter. Many of his cooks refused to accept their payout (which the court set at $700,000), but the ones who did he cut off completely. There's a disturbing clip in the film of Trotter repeatedly telling one of those cooks who was trying to enter his dining room, “Get the fuck outta here.” Trotter’s philanthropic endeavors, which this film gives short shrift to, were prodigious, but his mean side grew with his success.
Another clip gets to the essence of Trotter’s eventual failure. While interviewed on a TV show, the chef said, “The customer is rarely, if ever, right. That's why you have to seize control.” When a chef’s building an empire—Trotter opened restaurants in Cabo St. Lucas, the Middle East, Las Vegas, and elsewhere—this isn’t a winning philosophy in the long term. His former employee and one of this film's talking heads, Grant Achatz, opened up his own place, Alinea, and when Michelin finally came to town it earned three Michelin stars. Charlie Trotter’s only got two, a body blow to the Michelin-obsessed chef.
After over 20 years in business, what Trotter was doing wasn't new anymore. As his ex-wife says, he had to reimagine himself, but couldn't do it. Trotter announced on New Year's Eve 2012 that he’d close his restaurant on its 25th anniversary. As Grant Achatz put it in the film, “When Charlie's restaurant closed, Charlie closed.” That dream was over, and he'd allowed his health to deteriorate over time. Trotter’s behavior became erratic. He shut down an auction selling items from his restaurant because he wasn't getting the prices he wanted, and was sued for selling a fake $46,000 bottle of wine. Parents accused him of swearing at them and kicking them out of an after-school event he held. The chef was photographed and filmed looking unkempt and drunk. Charlie Trotter died of a stroke at 54 in 2013 after being found unconscious at home and rushed to the hospital. Other celebrated chefs at his level (like his buddy Emeril Lagasse) were, at that age, consolidating their empires—stepping back from the day-to-day while hiring top talent to execute their visions.
Talking-head Carrie Nahabedian, an old and dear friend of Trotter, made a cryptic comment at the end of Love, Charlie, saying of his death, “He saw a means to an end, and I think he took it.” The suggestion is that Trotter committed suicide in a slow way by doing things he knew, given his health concerns, could kill him. One of those was flying to a culinary conference in the Rocky Mountains after his doctor, who was treating him for an aneurism, had advised him not to fly.
As his former boss, Norman Van Aken, said, “Being Charlie Trotter, that was almost a sentence in some ways”—a death sentence as it turned out.