Pittsburgh is called the city of bridges. They’re everywhere, spanning the three rivers in steel. It’s easy to see how this place gave birth to someone like Andy Warhol, someone obsessed with the power of reinvention. Just cross the water and you’re somewhere new. In that way, it’s a fitting place for Brandon Baltzley, transient chef and all-around enfant terrible who left Chicago two years ago after a spectacular fall from grace. It’s late April, and Baltzley has been living in Pittsburgh for just under a year now, making it the closest thing he’s had to a home in a while. In a week, he’ll leave Pittsburgh and eventually settle on a small farm in Indiana to open a restaurant he plans to call TMIP.
So why did Brandon Baltzley get a book deal out of it?
He’s seated at a table, drumming his fingers, one of his constant tics. Spread out on the shelves behind him is a spectrum of culinary celebrity: Mario Batali, the Barefoot Contessa, Giada De Laurentiis, Paula Deen. Chefs who have transcended their craft to become personalities with a capital P. Copies of Baltzley’s book are stacked next to him on the table. He has signed each of them and inscribed them with a quote: “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” On the book’s cover, Baltzley is photographed in profile, tattooed from fingers to shoulder, and appears to be arm wrestling a fish.
“Why did you call the book Nine Lives?” asks a woman named Kathy, a Barnes & Noble employee who has been moderating the Q&A and seems to have taken a kind of maternal liking to Baltzley.
He resigned his position in New York, packed up his things, said good-bye to his girlfriend, and moved into a rented room in Wrigleyville. He began working at Alinea in the middle of August and lasted just into September. Two weeks into the job, Baltzley had to return home to Jacksonville after his mother’s house was shot up in a drive-by. In the book, he writes that once in Jacksonville, he fell back into drinking and drugs. He was too ashamed to return to Alinea, perhaps for having forsaken the strict discipline of recovery. So he quit, and returned to Chicago jobless and broke. His girlfriend in New York dumped him. His Wrigleyville roommate changed the locks. He took up with an old acquaintance, Leigh Hansen, who was pursuing her PhD at the University of Chicago. They became a couple; Baltzley moved in. Then he got a job at Schwa, working under the famously unpredictable chef Michael Carlson. Less than a month later, Baltzley was fired.
But perhaps not entirely.
