By Day, An Elite Scientist; By Night, A Gourmet Chef Biochemist Goes Stir Crazy, Opens Pullman Restaurant

A typical 15 minutes in the life of Lin Randall, dancer, restaurateur, cook and nationally recognized biochemist:

Order up more truffles for the evening’s dinner guests, rearrange the tables and silverware in her Main Street restaurant, phone her Washington State University lab for word on the afternoon’s experiment.

Good news. The experiment - a complicated test of how different proteins pass through the membrane of a cell wall - worked.

“I love doing more than one thing,” she said, hanging up the phone, “so if one thing is down, the other one is up.”

Then, with the smell of roasted bell peppers and pastry dough wafting in from the kitchen, it was on to more details: an employee’s check needed cutting, the staff dinner was looming, and she needed to take her insulin.

This is nearly normal for Randall, a 50-year-old woman with girlish bangs and a no-nonsense marathoner’s drive.

“As soon as I’m idle or sit still or relax, I get depressed,” she said. “And it’s much better to be terrified than depressed.”

Throwing fuel on her fire is her diabetes, a daily reminder to make the most of her time.

“It’s probably why I feel I need to live three lives simultaneously,” she said, “because from very early on I realized I could be dead tomorrow morning. I was 18 when I got diabetes, and I had to take injections every day. I became really aware you should get your value out of every day.”

Lately, her drive has paid off handsomely.

In April, she was elected to the National Academy of Sciences, one of the highest scientific achievements short of the Nobel Prize.

Two weeks ago, after months of renovations, she opened Combray, a high-end restaurant that hopes to bring fine dining to the Palouse.

The daughter of a colleague of rocketry pioneer Robert Goddard, Randall distinguished herself in the late 1970s and early ‘80s by establishing the field of bacterial protein export.

The work is fundamental science, peering into the heart of the cell and teasing out a key feature going on 4,000 times at any given moment.

Coincidentally, it also has implications for the production of insulin, a protein secreted by the pancreas.

Randall’s research has led to scores of major articles, including five in the leading American journal Science.

But she also has described her work through dance, as she did on the stage of WSU’s Beasley Coliseum for her Distinguished Faculty Address in 1990.

Dressed in black tights with a colored amino acid sequence across the arms, she played the role of a protein inside a bacteria cell. The protein wanted to take on a folded shape that would have kept it trapped inside the cell.

But in the presence of a chaperone protein - in this case a woman dressed in an Icelandic fur vest - the Randall protein kept a chainlike shape that could be transported through the cell’s membrane.

Randall, who sits on the board of the Festival Dance Performing Arts Association, took an interest in dance in the early ‘70s while living in Paris and working as a post-doctoral fellow at the Pasteur Institute.

She started dancing herself in Sweden while doing research at Uppsala University.

A longtime lover of fine food, she started working in friends’ restaurants “as soon as I had friends with restaurants.”

Five years ago, she began taking classes at the New England Culinary Institute in Montpelier, Vt., working in the nearby Inn at Montpelier.

She also put in time making pastries at the Combine bakery and coffeehouse in downtown Pullman.

This winter, when owner Pat Askham closed the Combine, Randall seized on the chance to convert its uneven floors, mismatched chairs and listing tables into her dream.

For a chef, she lured James Bressi, an instructor from the New England Culinary Institute.

For a business partner, she called on Hector DeLuca, a biochemist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and fellow National Academy of Sciences member.

“Her enthusiasm catches on,” DeLuca said. “I’d bet on her in any horse race and I’d certainly bet on her in a restaurant.”

Randall speculates that she may have the only restaurant owned by two members of the national academy.

“It’s certainly the only restaurant with a National Academy of Sciences member as a waitress,” she said.

For the restaurant’s name, Randall picked a village mentioned in the first book of Marcel Proust’s “Remembrance of Things Past,” which sits in her lab.

“No connection,” Randall said. “I needed a name and it’s been in my head for years.”

“And you only have to change a couple letters from Combine,” teased Jerry Hazelbauer, WSU’s biochemistry chair and Randall’s husband.

“Jerry, it has nothing to do with that,” Randall said.

“I know,” he said mischievously.

The restaurant’s food is good enough to challenge a reporter’s objectivity.

Among the menu’s three courses are delicately prepared offerings, such as seared duck breast with Pinot Noir sauce, dungeness crab and cappuccino bisque and a layered vegetable mousaka with roasted red and yellow pepper sauces.

Tim Steury, editor of WSU’s research magazine, Universe, and also a cook, called the food “the best stuff I ever tasted.”

“I was really impressed,” he said. “I went trying to stay really receptive and at the same time thinking, Pullman?”

The building cost $150,000. Since rebuilding began in February, Randall figures she has spent nearly twice that in renovations.

She works for free and has cut her paid lab time back to 80 percent. The staff gets health benefits and profit sharing.

Tips are included in the price of the meals, which range from $18 to $26.

Money is clearly not the object. Lin Randall having a restaurant is.

“Money by itself is of no value,” she said. “You just have money. Now I have a place where I can come and work, and I don’t have to fly to Vermont to work in a restaurant. I could have flown to Vermont many times for what I did here.”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color Photo