The arrival to Alinea is a little unusual. Beyond the garage door exterior, which N1 walked past insistent it couldn’t be the entrance, a glowing red tunnel curves slightly out of sight. Stepping in, one has the feeling of entering an Anish Kapoor sculpture; and this theatrical introduction underlines the fact that one has indeed arrived somewhere beyond the bounds of usual experience. Alinea is Chicago’s primary contribution to the world gastronomic scene.
As seems to be increasingly the case in restaurants of this category, there is no à la carte anymore, only a tasting menu; quite understandably, these high-fliers do not wish to let anything get in the way of their display of maximum virtuosity. In the spirit of pre-dinner drinks, our tasting menu begins with a series of frozen cocktails as palate cleansers, in the form of variegated dollops of coloured ice. The first, Girolamo, is the best; amaro and grapefruit, a bitter outside, a sweet central icy nugget. Jack Rose is very alcoholic, a blend of calvados and grenadine with a small piece of apple that has soaked in the calvados. The anonymous third is a burnt-tasting blend of butternut squash and buffalo trace bourbon.
Steelhead roe comes as a lovely mix of temperature, texture, and taste; modernist cooking at its very best, where innovation does not trump sheer mouth pleasure. Pearls and roe burst against seeds, and the flavours of liquorice, butter, grapefruit and mustard are brought into relief by the fact that some come warm and some come cold. Top marks.
Yuba is tofu skin; this dish seems to be a cheese stick wearing a coat of fried soy skin and chicken, with miso paste acting as a dollop of glue, and a daikon tentacle to throw in a dash of heat to offset the soy umami. Truly out there, I say; N1 dissects it down to being a luxury crisp, but no less spectacular for that.
Sea urchin – on its way to becoming as much a staple of these restaurants as foie gras - comes in a vanilla gel; it is a shock for the palate to have it beside such an intensely bitter watercress soup. It is difficult to pin down these bitters; we grope for descriptions, such as non-alcoholic amaro. The waiter does tell us that some of the bitter comes from oil of orange peel.
Halibut is one of the star dishes in an evening of star dishes. Everything on the plate is white, and yet the flavours contrast so much; vanilla grass, coffee pearls, lemon. Mouth feel is lovely; a crumble breaks up, like halva, against a star anise gel.
By now I’m thinking we haven’t had a “so what” dish yet; and this sort of menu does tend to sneak in a dish or two that feel as if they are there to act as a backdrop to better things, to properly bulk out a long tasting menu.
Rabbit comes as a trilogy, triform, in a curious ovoid receptacle we have to take apart bit-by-bit to consume the dish in stages. The parfait is served in a nest of dry squash, with the flavours of bacon and calvados permeating. Underneath, the rillete tastes more of sage than rabbit, with trinkets of black pudding and golden sultanas to accompany. The conclusion is a consummé whose excess of cinnamon leads to a taste that reminds me of Yogi Tea.
Mushrooms: morel, beech and maitake come flavouring a snow of pine nut crumble.
Hot potato, we are warned (we like to linger) is a time-sensitive dish; it comes in a cold, salty, truffled soup and the temperature contrast is part of the dish’s mouth-shocking attraction.
Beef ravioli comes with a tobacco emulsion, blackberries, niçoise olive and fermented black garlic; is there no end to the startling and delicious combinations here?
Hamachi (Yellowtail, a classic Pacific sushi fish) comes as a semi-sweet dish, wrapped up with ginger and banana on a cinnamon stick. The stick serving is starting to look like an Alinea signature flourish.
The Escoffier dish is a rather shameless – if delightful – plug for chef Grant Achatz’s new restaurant, Next, which aims to creatively recreate key moments in the history of cooking. Canard à la Cussy, a vol-au-vent filled with duck breast, coxcomb, foie gras and chestnut purée, wrenches us out of molecular gastronomy and into the Paris of 1906; the current theme at Next.
Back to modernism with venison, served with eucalyptus leaves and cocoa nibs, followed by another form of ravioli as a carrier for a thick, truffly liquid.
The dessert servings follow. A yuzu snow cone gives us a sweet, citric slurp; then - a marvel - comes the sweet potato as a deconstructed American dessert. Hot chilli cotton candy accompanies the Bourbon-flavoured sweet potato, with cedar smoke wafting out of the wooden serving feature. Back to the lab for the next dessert: a test-tube plugged at each end with lime gel and filled with a sweet, herby distillation of lemongrass has to be drunk in one gulp. A lychee transparency tastes to me very like the discontinued British sweet Spangles. A white chocolate truffle tastes like nutella with banana and crunches like a breakfast cereal. Bacon and butterscotch thyme is one of those delicious sweet-savoury hybrids.
The very last dessert is a play-with-your-food concession to theatre. The table is cleared, and covered with a rubberized cloth. Then chef attacks it with white chocolate mousse, honey crème brûlée, and berries in red wine vinegar. Delicious, but too much – it is tempting to fold up the tablecloth and take it home.
Spectacular, delicious, fascinating, surprising and utterly enjoyable, frankly a mile ahead of the Fat Duck, and with much more natural service than at Per Se, Alinea is a restaurant at the very top of its game.
