EPICured

On the morning that Todd Hall realized his life was falling apart, he was lying on the couch watching cartoons with his two younger children, Todd Cody, who was 17 months old, and John, who was 4. His two older children were off playing with friends, and Hall was about to get ready to go to work at the swanky 8700 restaurant in Scottsdale.

Hall was the self-proclaimed bad boy of good food, at age 30 a talented young chef with a couple of prestigious national awards under his toque. He'd been at a half-dozen upscale Phoenix restaurants in as many years, not unusual for a chef on the fast track. But Hall had burned every bridge he'd ever crossed, and his career and personal life were about to jump completely off the track at midbridge.

Cody was a big, beautiful, dark-haired boy, just starting to speak. His father put him down from his lap, said, "Gotta be a working man," and headed for the bathroom for a shower. Hall's wife, Stacey, went to another room to iron her husband's chef's coat.

When Stacey brought the newly pressed coat to the bedroom, she saw John, the 4-year-old, cowering beneath the covers of the bed with a peculiar look on his face. She noticed the open door and knew something was wrong.

Stacey raced out to the backyard and her heart fluttered when she saw Cody at the bottom of the pool. He had followed his big brother outside, watched him climb the pool fence and unlatch the gate, and then tottered over to the pool and fell in.

Stacey jumped in and, panic-stricken, tried to thrash her way to the bottom.
"I finally came to the top and screamed my heart out," she recalls.
Hall was stepping out of the shower when he heard the scream. It curdled his stomach, and he ran naked to the backyard. And when he saw Stacey in the pool, fully clothed, he knew immediately what had happened.

He had been an EMT with the volunteer fire department in Sedona and he knew what to do: cleared the water from his son's airways and breathed a father's breath into him to keep the son alive.

John kneeled silently on the other side of the pool watching his father and his brother.

Hall remembers standing, still naked, as the med-evac helicopter fwop-fwopped out of his Scottsdale backyard, a surreal scene from real life, thinking, "You have fucked up. You have committed the worst a parent can do."

That night, Todd and Stacey gave the doctors permission to turn off life support, and Cody died.

Hall ran away from life in every way he could. He never went back to the house where his son drowned. He got himself fired from 8700. He got up to his nostrils in cocaine, and when he ran out of money, he took his family and fled first to Salt Lake City and then to California, leaving behind a reputation for drug use and erratic, temperamental behavior.

"I went into a big-time state of denial," he says now. "We kept running and running and running."

And when things seemed to be heading back on track, he derailed again. Hall was shot almost to death, the victim in an attempted robbery in a seedy Fresno neighborhood.

Now, a year and a half later, after extensive psychotherapy, Todd Hall is back in Phoenix to start over.

"I can go to L.A., I can go to Vegas. I can get--tomorrow!--big bucks!" he says. "I'm coming back to clean up the mess I left."

He's not sure he'll even find a job, not sure that the high-spirited celebrity chefs at the high-end Valley restaurants will welcome him back into the culinary fraternity, not sure they'll even return his phone calls.

"I want to see if they're going to forgive me," he says.
But regardless of how badly he behaved in the past (and may behave tomorrow), none of them will criticize Todd Hall's cooking.

"They can't touch my food," he says proudly. "It comes out on time, it's hot, and it tastes fucking good."

"Life I know very little about," Todd Hall says in his usual confessional tone. But he knows everything about food.

"In cooking you learn to understand not the formulation of ingredients or procedures," he says. "You learn to understand butter. Everything that can go wrong with butter, I have personally done wrong with butter.

"It takes years to understand an egg. . . . What happens when you put a potato in 300-degree oil? What happens when you put it in a roasting pan? What happens when you cut it lengthwise?"

On a recent afternoon, he is philosophizing over three cups of soup at a trendy Spanish restaurant just off Camelback. The seafood soup he decides to save for last. He pushes the gazpacho aside, mumbling that gazpacho is supposed to be chilled and this cup is close to room temperature. The third cup holds a steaming green-brown garlic soup, and he raises a spoonful to his lips.

"It touches all four parts of your palate: salt, sweet, sour, bitter," he says in a rapid-fire drone. "When you eat that soup, which part of your palate is standing out stronger, longer?"

He swishes the soup over his overdeveloped taste buds. Curiously, the tongue can only perceive those four tastes; everything else we know about flavor comes from our sense of smell.

"It's been about ten seconds since I swallowed it," he continues, "and I still taste the roastedness of the garlic. So if I were making this soup, I'd put a little more salt in it, I'd put a little bit of balsamic vinegar in it and possibly a little bit of sugar so that you would taste sweet, sour and salt just as much as you taste the bitter [of the roasting]."

Then he digs his fork around a lovely lamb kebab dish and stabs a mushroom.
"Mushrooms and tequila and things that come from the earth taste like the earth," he says.

He pops the mushroom in his mouth, then goes on another riff. "I close my eyes and taste and see what happens. Texture is very important. It was a grilled mushroom, so the outside was very leathery, but it also enclosed it in a little case, and it's juicy. The juices just shot, an orgasm of flavor, wonderfully pleasant."

Like an orchestra conductor who can read a musical score and hear every note from every instrument in his head, similarly, Todd Hall can probe a mouthful of food and taste every nuance of heat and seasoning, and he expects his diners to share his joy of food.

People eat for many reasons, he explains, some out of compulsion or nervousness, some just out of hunger. He doesn't want to feed those people, nor does he want to feed people who kill their taste buds by getting drunk or high during dinner.

Todd Hall wants people who come to dine, that is, who eat to taste the good food he prepares and are willing to pay for it.

It's a business of excesses.
"When the market's up ten points, your dining room is full and they're buying Martha's Vineyard, which is a $200 bottle of wine, and they've got 12 people with them," he says. "When it crashes, you can't feed anyone. Things are good right now. It's a good time to be selling food."

Hall is just 34; by the time he was 29, the prestigious James Beard Foundation had already named him one of the 12 best chefs under 30 and one of the best hotel chefs, and he'd been a finalist in the equally prestigious Bocuse d'Or culinary competition, in which chefs are pitted against one another in a race against the dinner bell.

He's a handsome man, with dark Beatle bangs on his forehead, but there's a changeling nature to his face; from different angles, he looks like a different person. He's of average height, but there's a largeness to him that seems to inflate and deflate with his mood.

Chefs, he says, are "very artistic, crazy people, very emotional. We're all the same: Get four in a room, that's about three more than you need."

And sometimes being alone with Todd Hall is like being in a room crowded with chefs.

He is reactive and volatile, quick to laugh, quick to anger, at once likable, amusing, exuberant--and exhausting. He speaks a mile a minute, alternately joking, charming, challenging. He controls the conversation. He wants to know everything that everyone says about him, then play it back for them just to let them know he knows. He picks up the phone as soon as a thought crosses his mind, shoots from the lip, then calls again to talk his foot out of his mouth.

"I tend to be someone's best friend or worst enemy, instantly," he says. And sometimes he can be both alternately over the course of a week.