A Man of Taste.(Grant Achatz, Alinea Restaurant)(Brief biography)

The entrance to Alinea, a restaurant in the Lincoln Park neighborhood of Chicago, is unmarked. Visitors pass through gray metal doors, go down a narrowing corridor, and arrive at a set of doors that slide open automatically. The diner walks into Alinea just to the side of the kitchen, which lacks a big oven or hanging pots. Instead, there are gleaming low stainless-steel tables, ceiling lighting of the type found in a conference room, and gray area rugs. On the wall are large sheets of poster board covered with sketches, in black ink, of dishes that Alinea's chef, Grant Achatz, is thinking about adding to the menu. When I visited on a Tuesday evening in April, there was a drawing of what looked like a flag; in fact, it was a slice of Wagyu beef attached to a pair of chopsticks held up by a base. Another sketch depicted "edible string," made from corn silk or herb stems. In a third image, a sphere had been divided into three concentric layers: a core of strawberry, a middle of Nicoise olives, and a crust of white chocolate flavored with violet. Alinea is closed on Tuesdays, but Achatz, who is thirty-four, was working on new dishes--he tries to change his menu every season. He likes to come up with new culinary ideas late at night, when the restaurant is empty, sketching various "prototypes" on pads of paper. He later transfers these drawings to the large posters on the kitchen wall, so that his staff can look at them. That evening, one bore the words "Capture spring. What is it? New, Fresh, Ice, Sprouts, delicate, gradual."

Three sous-chefs had joined Achatz, who is a lean five feet nine--"Five feet ten, if you ask me," he says--and has a handsome face with red hair razored short. After the four men had changed into their long white chef's coats, they gathered around a table. They were focussing tonight on the dessert involving strawberries, Nicoise olives, and essence of violet. Achatz (his name rhymes with "rackets") had thought up the dish in March and, at first, wasn't sure how to combine the three ingredients, which, he explained in an e-mail, captured "the idea that, in certain red wines, people often smell strawberries with 'purple flowers' (a.k.a. violets) and olives." He had simply scrawled "Composed dessert?" near the exhortation to "Capture spring." Over the next few weeks, he came up with various approaches: a broth, a capsule, an aromatic bath. He works in the tradition of molecular gastronomy, which aims to take familiar foods and, using scientific techniques, give them new tastes and textures. Molecular gastronomists talk of "manipulating" ingredients rather than "cooking" them. For the dessert, Achatz finally settled on a ball the size of a jawbreaker: the three ingredients would be wrapped around one another. Achatz said in the e-mail, "The flavors are put together on the assumption that if they smell good together they will taste good together."

As the men talked, Achatz sometimes paused--his voice was hoarse--and opened a container that he kept with him, coated the heel of his hand with a white chalky liquid, cocked his head, and rubbed his hand along the inside of his mouth. The liquid was Lidocaine, a pain reliever.

Ten months ago, Achatz was given a diagnosis of tongue cancer. He was informed that if he did not start treatment immediately he would die. "You have Stage IV cancer," he remembers being told by a doctor at the University of Chicago Medical Center. "There is no Stage V." Doctors removed lymph nodes from his neck; a pink scar now extends from an inch below Achatz's left earlobe to an inch above the collarbone. He was also given twelve weeks of chemotherapy treatment, which made his hair fall out, and six weeks of radiation, which nearly swelled his throat shut, and caused the skin inside his mouth and on his face to peel. "They burned me so bad I had to wear a burn mask," he recalls. The therapy also destroyed his sense of taste. Although it is slowly returning--the process can take a year or more--he is in the precarious position of having to create and serve food that he cannot really taste.

That night, Achatz and his team wanted to figure out the balance of ingredients for the white-chocolate-and-violet outer layer of the new dessert. The filling was another puzzle: too much strawberry would overwhelm the salt in the olives; too much olive would mask the strawberry. The violet had to serve as a link between these two strong flavors--as a reverberation of spring.

After the white chocolate had been melted, Achatz stepped back and let his sous-chefs take over. One used a medicine dropper to add lavender into the beige liquid, while another stirred the drops in. Achatz was using lavender as a proxy that night, because the restaurant had not yet received its shipment of violet oil.

"How's it taste?" Achatz asked the three chefs.