The Chicago-based chef Grant Achatz, whom most of the culinary world is in awe of, seems to have earned a reputation as a mad scientist. Which mystifies him, frankly. "I think people's misconception is that we're back here growing things in petri dishes and test tubes," he says.
The 33-year-old chef and owner of Alinea, arguably the nation's most-talked-about restaurant in more than a decade (Rod Stewart is coming in tonight; Yo-Yo Ma has a reservation for tomorrow), uses his powers for good rather than evil, and still he gets saddled with terms that imply he values science over the senses. Molecular gastronomy? Gastrolab?
"This is very much a kitchen," Achatz says, standing cross-armed and calm in the buzzing nerve center of his sleek restaurant a few hours before opening for dinner. He is boyish and slightly reticent, and it's hard to imagine him losing his cool.
Although no one is growing food in petri dishes, his phalanx of young chefs, nearly all of them men, are doing things just as mysterious to most mortals: crafting spheres of cocoa butter (which break open in the mouth to release an intense celery tonic), preparing place-mat-size pillows of lavender vapor (to be set under a duck dish), dangling bacon from mini Cirque du Soleil — style swings, transforming Guinness stout into edible Saran Wrap (to be draped across beef short ribs).
His kitchen produces concoctions so witty and breathtaking and delicious that they have stunned food critics into almost complete submission. One year after Alinea opened in 2005, Gourmet named it the best restaurant in America and suggested that Achatz, like Alice Waters and Danny Meyer before him, is redefining American cooking. This May, Achatz won a James Beard Award for Best Chef. And if all goes according to his plan, he just might save American cooking from the perils of monotony.
Achatz's Eureka moment came when he spent four days in Spain at chef Ferran Adriá's mecca of ultramodern cooking, El Bulli. Adriá himself has said that Achatz, of all his acolytes, is the one who "gets it," and Achatz certainly thinks of El Bulli as an inspiration. "But we're not doing what they do," he says. "It's totally different."
"We're trying to control the experience," says Achatz of the precisely choreographed, down-the-rabbit-hole atmosphere Alinea is famous for, beginning the moment you pass through its electronic sliding metal door into the coolly modern (floating stairway, stark ebony tables, computer-operated lighting) but inviting (silk pillows, exotic flowers, pale flowing curtains) interior. Achatz and his creative sidekick, the designer Martin Kastner, invent custom utensils and dishes so integral to each course that the chef is downright bossy about how they should be used. ("No hands!" a waiter orders a pair of elegantly dressed diners when serving them what looks like a supersize thistle; they obediently lean forward like cows and bite off the top. They like it.)
