netzooid

Alinea is the crème de la crème of molecular gastronomy. It’s a restaurant based in Chicago, which by some counts is the #1 restaurant in the US. Grant Achatz, the chef, is a food whiz whom likes to deconstruct your food. Think of it as post modern food taken to the extreme. With the tour menu at 24 courses (many bite sized), it is the height of food art, experimentation, and excess.

I’ve been wanting to go here for a year or two, and finally made it down there last night with my good friend Andrea. The summary of the night is: it was amazing, fun, overwhelming and disappointing at the same time. I would definitely recommend it if you’re a foodie, but I’m not sure that I would recommend the longer tour (24 courses) as opposed to the tasting (13 courses). If you’re not a foodie, well, buy yourself a really really good steak and bottle wine instead.

My highlights/lows/wine notes are below. 

Highlights

• One of my favorite things that Alinea did was integrating aromas which were not part of the dish with the food. There were ~4 times that they did this, and each one was a great success:
  • Oyster, yuzu, and seasame on a stick of lemongrass
  • Sweet Potato with bourbon and brown sugar, deep fried on a burning cinnamon stick. That was delicious. Seems there is this thing called sweet potato pie which I’ve never had which it imitates to some degree. I need to remedy this in the future…
  • Cobia presented on a spoon, in a covered bown, which had burning cedar and tabacoo leaf in it. When they brought it to you, they opened up the bowl giving the smoky aromas while you at your single bite of deconstructed fish.
  • For one of the desert courses, they had spice cake with caramelized ice cream (or something like that). What was interesting about it was that they presented on top of a pillow full of air. The weight of the dish slowly pushed out the air, giving an aroma of “brown spices” while you ate your dish. I really liked this one!
• Every dish was absolutely visually stunning. I’m working on getting pictures up, but they’re on my friend’s camera.
• Wagyu Beef. This is the Japanese beef where they massage the cows daily. It just melted in your mouth. (This also goes to show a lot of things are better off not deconstructed!)
• Hot potato/cold potato. You ate this one in such a way where you pulled out a pin and the hot potato dropped in cold potato soup, swallowed it all, and enjoyed the hot and cold inside your mouth.
• The service was probably the most impeccable service that I had anywhere. I never had to ask for anything, except for where the bathroom was.
• The wine overall was excellent. My notes are below.

Lows

There was one nearly overwhelming low theme of the whole night for me: the lack of range of texture of the dishes. Let me explain. Part of the fun of the dishes is to turn something into something else. The lamb dish had a lemon, but you would never know that it’s a lemon, because it was turned into a gelatinous ball. But, nearly everything was turned into a gelatinous or creamy something, which texturally was overwhelming. As we started reaching the halfway point of the night, I started thinking, “not more cream! Give me something solid!”  I think that might around the point of the butter themed dish. It actually had a ball of butter that you were supposed to break open and eat with a bunch of other already rich cream, a few bits of corn and some crab.

A couple other lows:

• There were also a couple dodgy wine pairings. Most notably the Crozes Hermitage.
• It’s excessive. It was simply too much food to consume. Maybe that is the point?

Wine

Here are a few of my thoughts about a few of their wines.

• NV Henriot “Souverain”, Champagne: This was an easy drinking 50% Chardonnay, 50% Pinot Noir Champagne. It was a bit thin, but the second course really brought out some nice flavors of honey and citrus for me in it. It would not have been my choice to start off the night, but hey, I don’t own a swanky restaurant. 
• 2007 Michael Chapoutier, Crozes Hermitages, France. A beautiful, lean, floral wine, with great minerality. I will probably be tracking this down, but we both thought it was a horrible pairing with what we were eating
• 2002 La Sirena, Syrah, Napa Valley. Oh this was an amazing, amazing wine. This is a dark, concentrated, but still incredibly elegant Syrah. The woman who made this wine used to be a wine maker at Screaming Eagle from what I understand. Their bottles sell for like $2000-3000. Oi. Luckily, this bottle sells for $60 (in the newer vingates), so I could theoretically get some.
• 2007 Brick House Gamay Noir, Willamette Valley, Oregon. A lighter wine with good fruit but also good earth from what I recall. It had an odd color and cloudy character – maybe it didn’t have sulfur dioxide added to it? That’s the only other time I’ve seen a similar color.
• 2001 Hans Nittnaus “Premium” Trockenbeerenauslese, Burgenland, Austria – I thought this was a very delicious desert wine. Lots of apricot flavor and not overly sweet.
• 2004 Olivares Dulce Monastrell, Jumilla, Spain. I had no idea they made wine like this from Monastrell. They leave the grapes on extra like so they dry up a little, then they make a very high alcohol, almost port-like, wine from it. I would like to try this one again, as I was a little fuzzy and overly full at this point, but it was delicious at the time.