It takes about five hours to make your way through the 25-course Tour menu at Alinea. Item 11 arrives at hour three, stuck on the end of a foot-long wire. Your black-clad, impeccably polite server suddenly turns stern. “This is applewood,” he says. “Please eat it without using your hands.” The golf ball-sized morsel looms at mouth level; there’s not a fork in sight. Hey, only 14 more rounds of culinary razzle-dazzle left to go. The Tour is Alinea’s extravaganza, a bacchanal remarkable not only for how the food tastes but also for how it’s made and presented. The kitchen – spotless, sparkling stainless steel – looks like a chemistry lab. Dominating an entire counter, with a smooth steel top and an industrial frame, sits the antigriddle. Built by lab supplier PolyScience, it can chill food to minus-30 degrees Fahrenheit in an instant. Another station features an infuser, more often found in head shops and Amsterdam coffeehouses, which pumps mace-scented air into cotton pillows that cushion a duck-and-foie gras dish. And in the spice rack alongside the cinnamon and paprika are carrageenan and sodium alginate – chemicals used to thicken and stabilize foods. The whole place bubbles and pops with dehydrators, vacuum sealers, immersion circulators, and induction burners.
The genius at the heart of the lab is Grant Achatz (rhymes with rackets). A veteran of famous kitchens, the 31-year-old chef opened Alinea on the north side of Chicago a year ago. “When we started putting this thing together I told everybody, ‘This is going to be the next best restaurant in the country,’” Achatz says, “‘and we’re going to do it the way I want to do it.’” Achatz is a California cuisine alum: He spent four years in Napa Valley working for freshness fanatic Thomas Keller at the French Laundry, possibly the best restaurant in the US. For Achatz, though, the new frontier is preparation. He has turned to lab equipment and industrial food additives, pursuing quirky juxtapositions of flavor and texture. The result: otherworldly effects that return a sense of play and joy to the table.
[Continue reading Mark McClusky's great Wired writeup]
Mix Cooking with innovation and a Napa Valley Chef and you get something I wouldn’t mind trying.
Edit: When someone tries to create something new in an area that has been around forever, You’ll find they fail. Either its something very old, or something not liked. Grant Achatz has in this instance created a twist on some old ideas, that make it seem new. Defiantly a well written article that makes you want to try some very interesting takes on cuisine.
Tags: Food, Food and Drinking, Interesting, Napa, Technology, Wine
