Chicago is brain-warpingly hot. Today I drove a mini-van through the leafy green suburb of Naperville, settled in 1831, with the air-conditioning on high. Shiny children passed by on their bicycles, squinty men in shorts dragged brown paper bags full of trimmed branches to their garages, and my cat hid in the shadows under the deck, panting for what might well be, the first time in his life. My aunt's mini-van slid around the corners on invisible tracks, the drizzle steamed.
It's melt into the tarmac hot, and if you've seen An Inconvenient Truth and passed a cool June in San Francisco, this sort of heat might seem worrying. You know, the end of the world is nigh and it's basically all my fault, sort of thing--although ditching my twelve year old VW in Portland with my brother and becoming a pedestrian again is a step in the right direction, there's nothing like finding out about how wasteful and excessive you are, to make your life suddenly feel wasteful and excessive. This last part is especially true if you're unemployed and eating with the fortitude of a seasonally starved female penguin.
I wonder how to negotiate the pleasure and the guilt of consuming so much and in such luxury, when there are both the proverbial and actual starving children in (insert whichever place your parents used to say, India for me), when there are bigger things happening near and far. Around me, the polar ice-caps are melting, husbands are kissing their wives good bye and heading to front lines, and my greedy eyes are fixed on dinner. Alinea to be specific. That greystone in Chicago's swank Lincoln Park neighbourhood, so unassuming I drove past it twice before I noticed it, all shining glass and steel, all dark wood and red lilies, and I almost forgot about the horrifying, haunting image of a bare, snowless Mt. Kilimanjaro. Such is the power of a good dinner--takes the edge right off the end of the world, so to speak.
A tiny cocoa butter shell rolled out of the shot glass and broke in my mouth, spilling out a pear, celery, and Madras curry flavoured liquid--you know, the funny, yellow powder the British have been calling curry for over a century that my grandmother wouldn't touch with a ten foot pole. It was beautiful. A sassafras blob, the size of my pinky nail, numbed and chilled my tongue as is it melted, but didn't disappear before pricking it awake again with the sweet tang of a good Blis aged sherry vinegar. I nibbled a mildly fishy piece of lobster, processed and puffed like a shrimp crisp and dusted with fennel pollen. The stuff of childhood meals at cheap Chinese restaurants, the stuff of dreams.
Often, I've suffered the pain of being wooed by a Cyrano sort of Chef, whose panache is parroted unsuccessfully by the handsome, but culinarily unversed waiter. You know the kind, asks you to hold on a sec while he checks with the kitchen about something as basic as where their meat is from. Not so at Alinea. The servers tell you in the amount of detail they sense you wanting, exactly how the garnish on the agar jelly wheel on the tomato plate was made, how they managed to build a frozen chocolate cylinder filled with Bailey's spiked liquid, what country the fish is from. They know exactly to what degree the potato was tortured and humiliated, the angelica texturally transformed, the bison cut and pasted into delicious culinary pastiche. Some of them are, or were chefs, a few of them waiting, as any working cook who'd seen what the kitchen puts out would, for an in.
The peanut petit four was just about the funniest thing I've ever eaten about petit fours. A hilarious, tasty little joke about the tradition and the word suspended on wobbling acupuncture needles stuck into a round metal paperweight contraption. When I stopped giggling and came back to the table after my trip to the stylish loo, Glyn was chatting with Mr. Isadore "Issy" Sharp, who was seated next to us with his charming, chatty Mrs. and another couple. They could not believe we'd gone through twenty-eight courses without feeling anxious, fidgety or full. I could not believe that Mr. Sharp wanted to, as his wife explained to me, cut short their twelve course meal and get straight to dessert (their bill had kindly been adjusted accordingly). There are only two menus, the twelve and the twenty-eight--they had been expecting a la carte, I suppose.
I have almost never felt so happy on the way home after an expensive meal--the car was a speeding, buzzing cocoon down the 88 West towards the NorthWestern suburbs. When the menu changes with the seasons and I'm in another time zone further east, I'll be scheming squeezing in one more waddle around Chicago, one more twenty-eight courser at Alinea, before The End.
Alinea
1723 North Halsted (across from Ethan Allen)
Chicago Illinois 60614
312-867-0110
Dinner only, Wednesday through Sunday
Click here for an interesting QandA with Grant Achatz from ages ago
Click here for a bit from Achatz on typographical symbolism and whatnot
I really like this; it's just exactly the sort of piece about Alinea I haven't read before. Nice nice nice.
your blog makes me hungry.
Your blog makes me hungry. Let me know where you're working so I can stop by.
Amol, hi! I'm in New York actually, Lower East Side, Chicago was just for a week or so, where are you?
I enjoyed reading about your Alinea experience. You make me want to visit. Thank you!
hey pr, you should totally go next time you're in Chicago...