You may have had a chuckle reading the news recently if you saw MSNBC’s story about the best restaurant in the world being a British one; Radley wrote about it here. The chefs The Fat Duck take a new approach to cooking called molecular gastronomy. Begun by a French researcher named Hervé This, its practitioners use imagination and a strictly empirical approach to test the limits of what can be done with food. The results are startling and, reportedly, delicious.
London’s a bit far away. Fortunately, there’s a new restaurant in the U.S. that’s taking a similarly innovative approach. Chicago’s Alinea, named after a typographical sign indicating the beginning of a new train of thought or paragraph, really pushes the envelope. Food and Wine magazine gives it a very intriguing review, beginning with this:
Your waiter will appear bearing a small steel contraption. Wires radiate up and out, like the skeleton of an upside-down umbrella. Snuggled into those spokes will be a small bunch of grapes, but the grapes are gone—all but two, which still cling to their denuded branch, partly visible through a lacy, paper-thin wrapping of toast. It won’t look like food, exactly, but you’re in a restaurant and this seems to be your first course and you’re hungry, so you will pick up the whole weird mess by the stem, dangle it over your mouth, Roman emperor-style, and bite. The outside will be crisp; inside will be something juicy. A grape, of course. But there will be something else, something sticky and totally, utterly familiar. You’ve known this taste since before you could tie your own shoes. A peanut butter and jelly sandwich! And you will wonder: Just what kind of restaurant is this, anyway?
The e-Gullet forums have a photo gallery from a twenty-eight course meal served on opening day, including the PB&J sandwich [h/t Newmark's Door]. It’s stunning.
Dinner at Alinea comes in three options: twelve courses for $110, eight for $75, and the full twenty-eight course Tour for $175. Twenty-eight glasses of paired wines are available for an addition $125 and the full experience on opening day took over seven hours to complete.
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Jacob Grier is a freelance writer, barista, mixologist, and magician in Portland, OR. He writes, eats, and drinks a lot. His articles have appeared in The Washington Post, Reason Online, The Oregonian, and other publications.
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