EPICured

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.

He remembers every headline from every review, good or bad, that he's received over the last nine years in Phoenix. He has an enormous ego, which is as important a chef's tool as a stove and saucepans.

"You have to have a strong ego and strong beliefs," says restaurant consultant and former food critic Elin Jeffords. "Otherwise you're never going to make an impact. You'll always be a cook."

Todd Hall claims to be bipolar, what used to be called "manic-depressive," although his psychologist quipped that he is "manic-manic" because he so seldom quiets down.

He jokes that in the morning when his children ask him for breakfast, he responds, "Not yet, I'm not done pacing."

In the kitchen of a restaurant, where everyone wants everything right away and everyone is screaming orders, such barely contained energy can be put to good use.

But Hall has never been able to slow down out of the kitchen.
"I think his horsepower outweighs the chassis," says Robert Keyes, who owns the 8700 where Hall was chef--twice. "He's had difficulty containing his talent. That'll just catch up with him, and when it does, he will be a marvelous guy."

And indeed, like a car with too much horsepower, he has raced through his career, running red lights and running over innocent bystanders.

"I went a thousand miles an hour down the wrong road," he confesses.
And he hit the wall, hard.