Life, on the Line by Grant Achatz (book club reads .txt) 📕

ingredients, new techniques, and new methods of serving the food. So in the midst of the business planning, the building design, the websites and logos, there was one thing that I really was fully responsible for: the food.

We looked for a professional kitchen that we could rent three or four days a week to serve as a place to test ideas and dishes, but were unable to find anything suitable. We ended up using Nick’s home kitchen. This was not an ideal situation for me or for his family, but it was all we could find. Online we spun it as our “food lab—somewhere in Chicago.” It sounded exotic and sexy. In reality, John, Curtis, and I would drive out to Nick’s house with boxes of ingredients, put on our chefʹs whites, and work until they kicked us out for the night.

It is impossible to try to innovate. You can’t decide to turn creativity on or off. All you can do is present yourself with interesting problems and try to find solutions. Then you refine those solutions again and again. That is what we did constantly while building Alinea, and what I do as I develop new dishes.

Everything that I see, hear, and feel, I relate to food. When I go to a movie and watch the cinematography, I ask myself why the director chose that lighting, those colors, that setting, and then I imagine scenarios where we light Alinea in a similar fashion, or dress a waiter in an unusual outfit to mirror the food, or create a mood with similar dialogue. Most of these ideas are never used, but occasionally they resurface months or even years later when I least expect them to.

Once when I was working on a seafood dish for the opening menu at Alinea I decided that I wanted to create a “sponge” of sauce with flavors of the sea. The seafood sponge has obvious origins, but the reference would be subtle to the diner. It wouldn’t look exactly like a sponge, it would only hint in that direction. We worked for a time on getting the flavors right, on figuring out how to make the stock set up properly to look like a sponge. That part was largely technical and simply required experimentation and time in the kitchen. What came next, however, was less linear and far more unexpected.

As I was plating the dish for the umpteenth time it occurred to me that we should include the scent of spring flowers to enhance the dish and reference to spring. Quickly, I settled on hyacinth as the flower that was needed. I had no idea why. I just knew that hyacinth flowers should surround the dish, and then we would have waiters pour hot water over them to release the scent as the diners ate. I sent John out to a florist to pick up some flowers that were as close to hyacinth as we could get this time of year, and we made the dish again, setting the bowl with food inside a larger bowl that held the flowers. Nick got a teakettle of hot water for me and I poured it over the flowers—instant spring in the middle of winter.

Everyone else looked at me quizzically. This didn’t make much sense to them. But as soon as I smelled the sweetness of the shellfish along with the musk and sweetness of the flowers I was transported back to my childhood. Until that moment I had no idea why I wanted to pair this fish with flowers. But once it was all together, I remembered a day when I was twelve years old, fishing for walleye with my dad in the late spring. We would tuck in along the shore and eat lunch among the wildflowers.

Fish and flowers made sense to me not for any culinary reason, but for a sentimental one. Scent is powerfully tied to memory.

As I explored using aroma to enhance a flavor, I began to veer off course and play with ideas of place—rabbit “in the field” or frogs legs “in the woods”; and of childhood—burning oak leaves, fireside Christmas morning. I recognized that even when a diner did not have an awareness of why these pairings worked, they still stirred their emotions and enhanced their experience.

E-mail from Grant and Nick to the Alinea Investor Group:

Alinea Investor Update

January 17, 2005

FRENCH ONION SOUP

As you might expect, things are moving at a more rapid pace now that the holidays are behind us. I apologize for the delay in this update, but we have been waiting for weeks to get the final bids in from the contractors fabricating the stairway. We had redesigned some of the tectonic elements in order to reduce the costs. Now that we have those numbers, I can more accurately gauge the final costs associated with the entire development project. Bluntly put, we are behind schedule and over budget. That aside, everything else is great! And despite the sarcasm we remain confident that our design, building, and marketing efforts are succeeding beyond our expectations.

FOOD LAB—CRUCIAL DETAIL

SOUS CHEF CURTIS DUFFY

Grant, Curtis, and John have continued to refine and develop new dishes and techniques for Alinea. In addition, four kitchen days were spent creating and making dishes to be photographed for the website. The opening menus will include something similar to this:

THE 12 COURSE OR “MENU 2”

THE 30 COURSE—OR “MENU 3”

THIS IS THE WAY THE MENUS WILL BE PRESENTED ON OUR WEBSITE.

The size of the circles, or “flavor markers,” indicate the size of the course, and their left-to-right orientation corresponds to how sweet or savory the course is. The menus in the restaurant look as they do above, but each element is printed on a separate piece of vellum. So, for example, the flavor circles are on the first piece of vellum, on the next page is the basic item “Bacon” and