<http://schema.org/articleBody>
"FacebookPinterest\n\nSomething is happening in Chicago, where most of us believe nothing unexpected ever takes place. It's revelatory and special, a likely new direction for American food.\n\nWe've been awaiting our next generation of chefs, the post-Wolfgang, post-Daniel, post-Charlie, post-Jean-Georges, post-Alice, post-Thomas trendsetters. These restaurateurs, great as they have been and relevant as they still are, have held on far too long, perhaps not by the values of France, where culinary masters are supposed to die at their stoves, but certainly by the standards of America, which discourages longevity (except in the case of rock stars). In fact, with American food so inuential, the entire world is waiting to see what we'll do next. Our icons have dictated tastes for decades, one of the reasons diners reexively opt for high-toned franchise fare\u2014a Wolfgang Puck Grand Caf\u00E9 (there are seven) or a Wolfgang Puck Gourmet Express (twenty-nine)\u2014instead of the handcrafted cuisine of an eager young chef.\n\nAn orderly succession, or even a revolution, is greatly overdue, and it's nally happening in a doughy midwestern metropolis long recognized as home to steak houses without memorable meat and to deep-dish, cornmeal-laced pizzas that evoke the American South more than southern Italy. Chicago does have virtues, primarily rst-rate architecture and comedy, but its best restaurants have often been derivative. Some other city was always doing the same cuisine, only a little better.\n\nInnovation is supposed to be integral to America, yet our last truly trans-American food trend was grilling, the backbone of California cuisine, and before that came the rediscovery of blackened redsh and our brief pre-Emeril obsession with the food of New Orleans. At best, we've been semioriginal, encouraging half-American, half-foreign fusion concepts such as Floribbean and Nuevo Latino. Anyway, fusion isn't a cuisine; it's a thought process.\n\nAmerican restaurants are no different from American treasury bonds. They're both propped up by foreign investment. Name a dominant trend and it's from somewhere else. Bistro: France. Sushi: Japan. We've found ourselves loving but not particularly understanding tapas, Tuscan, Mediterranean, and Chinese. This nation has no lack of fascinating eating establishments, but most are other countries' ideas.\n\nIf we're going to be a great dining society, as we were on and off in the late twentieth century, we are going to require great chefs. Their food will have to be plentiful, colorful, imaginative, entertaining, and focused\u2014clearly reecting what we represent. I know of only one locale in the United States doing such food successfully, the archetypal American city of Chicago.\n\n\n\n\"We're the three amigos,\" says Graham Elliot Bowles, chef of the restaurant Avenues in the Peninsula hotel. The other two are Homaro Cantu of Moto and Grant Achatz of Alinea. All are about 30 years old. They are often grouped together stylistically, which isn't quite right, and as culinary innovators, which is. They are redening taste, appearance, and even the denition of ingredients, and their cuisine integrates everything from the frigidity of outer space to the fecundity of the forest oor. Everybody in Chicago knows who they are, and one man's fame feeds off the others'.\n\nAll worked in the kitchen of Charlie Trotter, the Chicago cooking legend, who manages to express admiration, fondness, and bemusement when the three are mentioned. Their inventiveness is so extensive it extends even to their names. Trotter says Homaro was \"Omar\" when he worked for him, and Graham Elliot was merely \"Elliot.\" Achatz was in Trotter's kitchen so briey that the chef doesn't even recall seeing him there, let alone knowing what he preferred to be called. Achatz refers to what's going on in Chicago as \"the power of three.\" Provided that nobody maintains that their food is identical, all are comfortable being grouped as one.\n\nCantu says that if his food is the same as anybody else's, \"I'm wasting my time.\" Collectively, they are different from almost all other chefs except a few like-minded eccentrics scattered around New York, London, and Spain, and they owe their existence to the supreme architect of twenty-rst-century cuisine, Ferran Adri\u00E0. He is proof that intelligent design exists in the universe. This daring, self-taught Spaniard brought forth the foam fad, transmogried comfort foods into sorbets, and liqueed virtually anything that crossed his path. His restaurant, El Bulli, became a shrine, and since his emergence culinary pilgrims have been congregating in nearby Barcelona, now the mecca of innovative cooking.\n\nThe three Chicago chefs, despite their spiritual connections to the revered Adri\u00E0, do not receive nearly the same adulation. When I mentioned my plans to visit their establishments to a New York chef who remains true to conventional French technique, he said, \"You mean those ----- clowns. What's wrong with you? Are you out of your mind or what?\" It is true that their food, supercially, can appear silly. Much of the formality of their restaurants is uncalled for and even uncomfortable. Yet I'm convinced the chefs make far more sense than their detractors would have us believe.\n\nMoto is located in the meatpacking district, a restaurant-destination concept that ourished in New York before it moved westward\u2014that's the direction inspiration used to travel in the American-restaurant community. The area is still dark, grim, and daunting at night, but it was explained to me that in Chicago, whenever you think you're nowhere, you're never more than two blocks from somewhere. Cantu likes to joke that his rent is so low, \"we pay more for linens than we do for our lease.\" (I ate at all three restaurants anonymously and spoke to the chefs on the telephone.) He said he opened without fanfare and that many of his early customers had no idea what they were about to experience. \"They thought, &#145;Oh, a new restaurant in the meatpacking district. Let's order steak and eggs and wasabi.' A few of them saw our menu and just stood up and walked out.\"\n\nCantu is so secretive that other Chicago chefs call his food-preparation area the \"Al Qaeda kitchen,\" and all who enter must sign a nondisclosure form. Apparently, it is stacked high with all manner of scientic equipment, including tanks of liquid nitrogen and carbon dioxide. (Possibly there is also nitrous oxide, for sniffing during recipe development.) What he does is generally and wonderfully called molecular gastronomy. The night I dined there, Cantu wasn't on premises. Our waitress said with absolute sincerity that he was attending a NASA conference and that he had taken his pastry chef, Ben Roche, with him. My guess is that Roche planned to demonstrate the practicality of feeding liquid doughnuts\u2014one of our courses\u2014to astronauts.\n\nI walked into Moto and smiled at a bit of deliberate incongruity: Just inside the door stands a huge old-fashioned gilt-framed mirror. The remaining 99 percent of the furnishings do not amuse. They are very muted, very neutral, very austere. Votive candles burning high on a shelf are spooky. Tables are woodgrain. The chairs aren't comfortable, but banquette seating is ne. The place is about as homey as a uranium-enrichment facility. You will feel chilly when you sit down. You might feel chillier when you are presented with food that has been ash-frozen with liquid nitrogen, which has a temperature of minus 321 degrees Fahrenheit. If there were a restaurant in orbit, this would be it.\n\nI ordered the twenty-course \"gtm\"\u2014I assumed that stood for Grand Tasting Menu but later saw it meant Grand Tour Moto. Tasting menus are a vital component of the new Chicago cuisine, and to me they should arouse more debate than the cooking. They take up to ve hours, can cost several hundred dollars per person, and include more tutoring sessions than anybody going out to dinner wants to endure.\n\nThe length of the meal is not entirely the restaurant's fault. You'll keep asking questions, possibly the same question over and over again: \"How does he do that?\" Hawaiian sea bass (course number 8) arrives in an odd little oven, a polymer box that is ceremonially set atop your table with a pronouncement seldom heard in a restaurant setting: \"Patent pending,\" the waiter says. The heat from the box is unbearable, the taste of the sh exquisite. Cantu carbonates his fruits, adding CO2 under pressure. The fruits are irresistible. The vanilla-scented tempura-battered scallops (number 2) come with a carbonated fruit salsa, the buttersh (number 5) with half a carbonated clementine. If you enjoy soda pop, you'll love these. He serves so many frozen dishes, he could operate Moto out of a Good Humor truck.\n\n\"We don't look at our food as food,\" he said. (Does that mean we don't have to look at his check as a check?) I asked him what food meant to him, and he replied, \"Well, for your birthday, we serve a picture of you, avored. Is that a birthday cake? It's an edible substratum.\" I tried two versions of edible paper and disliked both. Edible paper isn't much tastier than the other kind.\n\nCourse number 16 was apjacks, which came to the table in pre-apjack form. That meant as a bowl of batter. There is nothing daring about eating a well-moistened uncooked our mixture; if there were, we would all have been hospitalized after licking cake pans. With the batter was real Canadian maple syrup, described in hushed, respectful tones. Moto isn't the rst restaurant to treat guests to real Canadian maple syrup, only the rst to make so much of it.\n\nKey to the apjack extravaganza was a at-top, Erector-set-like handheld gizmo that had been cooled with liquid nitrogen. When the batter was syringed on top, it instantly froze into tiny rock-hard discs. The reason for that, my robotic waitress announced, was that the temperature of the metal had reached zero degrees Kelvin. I nearly stood to applaud, for this guaranteed Cantu the highest honor mankind can bestow on an individual. No, not a wussy cooking prize. I'm talking about the Nobel Prize in physics. Zero degrees Kelvin, or absolute zero, has never been achieved. Not in nature. Not in a laboratory. And here it was, in the meatpacking district of Chicago, with real Canadian maple syrup on the side.\n\nAs for the apjacks? Sure they tasted more like Popsicles than pancakes, but they were one of the dessert courses, three before the doughnut soup (which indeed tasted like doughnuts). Eating them made me smile. The apjacks were sweet, cool, and refreshing, and they melted on the tongue. Cantu, whatever his rst name, really can cook, or freeze, or whatever it is that he does.\n\n\n\nYoung chefs today talk about personal vision and chef-driven menus, but they tend to confuse complications with creativity. They add more ingredients to the same old recipes, or they add a couple more items to the same old plates. Sushi rolls have become as overdone as three-scoop sundaes. Pasta dishes look like they've been loaded up at all-you-can-eat buffet lines. Food has become muddled\u2014overwrought, overmanipulated, and over-the-top.\n\nThe three Chicago chefs have been criticized\u2014not always unfairly\u2014for occasionally producing unrecognizable food. Terms such as presumptuous, newfangled, mindless, overblown, and off their rocker are routinely used. Their food has been called shock cuisine, mock cuisine, and theater of the absurd. That New York chef who so disapproves of them said, \"They think like editors of fashion magazines. They don't care if it is good. They only care if it is new.\" To me, the chefs are cautious. They don't overcomplicate. Their Hypermodern American Cuisine might not consist of a protein, a potato, and a vegetable, but generally each of their creations has no more than three or four components.\n\nThere are exceptions. My favorite dish at Alinea was a puree labeled \"chestnut\u2014too many garnishes to list.\" I counted eight: bay-leaf foam, deep-fried celery root, parsnip butter, grated bacon, chocolate-covered brown sugar, clove-avored cr\u00E8me fra\u00EEche, Brussels-sprout leaf with black truffles, and a peppered egg yolk. Except for the rubbery egg, each added a pleasing accent to the intensely sensuous chestnut puree.\n\nAlinea, located in a building formerly occupied by Slicker Sam's, an Italian spot once patronized by Frank Sinatra and recognized for its scungilli in tomato sauce, is purposefully high-end. It takes itself seriously. Much has been made of the millions that were supposedly invested in it. To a casual observer, a bit too much might have gone into the kitchen, which looks about the right size to feed the crew of an aircraft carrier. Curbside, Alinea resembles a fancy after-hours club, lots of doorpeople better dressed than arriving patrons. The foyer is eerie and discombobulating, seemingly inspired by an amusement-park fun house.\n\nThe interior is comfortable and understated\u00EEgray walls, gray carpeting, black tables. That makes sense, if you want your food to be the primary attraction. Of course, such simplicity makes you wonder where all those millions went. The staff is more at ease than Moto's, perhaps because Achatz has hired waiters, while Cantu has professional chefs waiting tables in the belief that they'll be better at explaining the food. They are. They just don't wait tables with ease, a trade-off that doesn't seem sensible to me.\n\nI ordered the modest twelve-course tasting menu (and was generously given sixteen). Imagine eating twenty-four courses, the grander alternative. The cost: $175 per person. Each course will be brought out and explained in detail, for otherwise you will have no chance of understanding a dish described on the menu as \"hazelnut, carrot, raisin, melted butter.\" If you took pleasure in the lecture-hall portion of your scholastic career, you'll enjoy eating this way. Perhaps you'll opt for wine pairings with your twenty-four courses. If so, you will take delivery of about twenty of those. The wine guy will pour and explain, explain and pour. He will stop by again and again to see if you are enjoying his choices. More frequently than you might imagine, clearing of plates commences, although not without your permission. Should you be on a date, you will be exhausted from so much social intercourse that any other kind will be impossible.\n\nEverybody tells me Achatz has toned down his cooking. I have a feeling everybody is correct. Butter for the table\u00EEone scoop of cow's milk and one of goat's milk\u00EEhad been lightly torched to give it a sheen. Our amuse-bouche, described as a \"time-sensitive dish,\" was a tiny cup of cold potato soup with a tiny skewer of black truffle, hot potato, Parmesan cheese, and butter balanced on top. Pull the pin, the skewered stuff drops, and you slurp. I was amused. Pork was drizzled with honey from a comb that had been sitting unnoticed on the table, seemingly an innocuous bit of ornamentation.\n\n\"I think he's grown up,\" said the admiring Chicago native I brought to dinner, comparing the food with what she had tasted previously. Even Achatz admitted he was \"maturing, settling down, becoming less interested in shock value.\" The meal at Alinea was easily the most polished of the three I ate, but to me Achatz has backed off too far, which can happen when a huge investment is at stake.\n\nLast year he was hanging butterscotch-coated bacon from wire contraptions; before that, it was grapes encased in peanut butter. (Get it? PB&amp;amp;J.) Alinea is a rst-rate restaurant, one that any visitor to Chicago would enjoy, but I'm despondently wondering if it has become too accessible. Achatz told me that nobody had given his cuisine a name in the past because it was so difficult to characterize. I would call the meal I had delicious. It was also, I'm sorry to say, a little too safe.\n\n\n\nBowles is the artist among the three, his imagination a counterpoint to Cantu's inventiveness. His audacious plate decorations are wide, brilliant slashes, as colorful and appealing as the sash across the chest of a beauty-pageant contestant. Lipstick red pomegranate is everywhere. His saut\u00E9ed pork belly topped with lobster mousse is ornamented with a swirl of pink yogurt. \"Food as art, as a personal expression, is here to stay,\" he says. While thoughtful chefs have been known to take staff members to restaurants so they can taste ne food, he's the only one I know who takes them to museums to see how it should look. Our waiter said to me, \"The chef says that if food is beautiful, customers are half-sold before they eat it.\"\n\nBowles inherited Avenues, the premier dining room of the posh Peninsula hotel, and it's dusty mid-America at its worst, an unsightly beige-on-brown. \"It's leather chairs, smoking jackets, and Hugh Hefner,\" he concedes. A renovation is planned for this summer. Bowles works from an undersized kitchen with four other cooks, and on a night when seventy people dine, they might turn out 700 plates of food, most of them highly ornamented. \"I never tell these people with me how to plate things,\" he says. \"Nothing is written in stone. One day a dish might be in a bowl, the next day something else. I try to keep it fun.\"\n\nIt's obviously amusing for him, but count me among the simple folk who nd themselves panic-stricken in the presence of abstract art. At Avenues, even more than at Moto and Alinea, I worried whether I was sufficiently intellectual to satisfy the chef's expectations. These restaurants can be a little nerve-racking at times.\n\nHappily, the waitstaff at Avenues did nothing to make me feel dim-witted. No insinuations about my mental acuity. No pop quizzes. To my relief, I found Bowles's food decidedly noncerebral. Quite possibly, a hotel restaurant, which has a wide demographic to worry about, is required to be that way.\n\nOne of Bowles's core beliefs is that chefs no longer have to hand-make every component of their food\u2014he has been known to use crushed Altoids, although not the night I was there. He serves foie gras two ways: one version seared, the other a terrine. That's luxurious. It's also fairly routine, except in his case. Recognizing that duck fat isn't much different from butterfat or pastry cream, he gives the saut\u00E9ed foie gras a candy-cane crust and accents it with eggnog ice cream. His foie gras lollipop is made from terrine and coated with crushed Pop Rocks candy. Today, everything qualies as an ingredient.\n\n\n\nWhy Chicago? For one thing, it has a good airport. \"Where else are you going to nd the food that the three of us are doing?\" asks Achatz. \"People are ying here for the weekend. I'd say 50 percent of our customers are from out of state, and we get a lot from London, Spain, and Japan. We have become a destination city for food.\"\n\nCantu says his customers come from NASA, NYU, and MIT. He gets medical people, food-processing people, and of course Chicago people. \"Chicagoans in the 20-to-50-year-old range don't want to sit down to a forty-ounce steak anymore,\" he claims. Bowles points out that Chicago tends to embrace whatever it can call its own, and all three chefs are correctly branded as locals. \"Remember when Nomar Garciaparra came here from the Red Sox? Everybody immediately started wearing I NOMAR T-shirts. If we have it in Chicago, we support it. We want people to succeed. New York wants to crush you. Nobody has it easy in New York. There it's about kicking the oven door closed and slamming the lid down on the pot. It's all testosterone.\"\n\nTrotter, the cooking icon, doesn't go quite as far as these young chefs in anointing Chicago as the only place to eat, but when asked to name the best restaurant city in America, he replies, \"I think we can talk about New York and Chicago now. There's no reason to bring up any other city.\"\n\nManhattan has problems. New Yorkers seem unresponsive to innovation, local landlords are making spontaneity unaffordable, and too many successful new restaurants project an image that is the very opposite of inventive. New Yorkers, apparently in need of cuddling, are currently enamored of Home, Applewood, Hearth, Butter, Taste, and Salt. Wylie Dufresne, chef-owner of wd-50, who is not yet 40 but is already the godfather of similar creative cooking in New York, says, out of frustration, \"Why does it seem an easier road for the Chicago boys? I don't have an answer. Maybe my food sucks and theirs doesn't. I have to have an open mind to that possibility.\"\n\nDufresne works on the Lower East Side, \"ghting the good ght,\" as he puts it. He continues to do well with visiting Europeans and Asians but struggles to establish a solid New York clientele. New Yorkers have rigid lifestyles. They want to eat in a modest amount of time and be on their way. Dufresne must still rely on the \u00E0 la carte style of dining\u2014three or four large courses and the meal is done. He sends out plates containing fteen to twenty bites of unfamiliar food, and if the customer isn't caught up in the adventure, the risk of failure is extreme.\n\nWith a tasting menu, a series of plates holding four or ve bites, the chef has room for a op or two. If a Chicago diner doesn't appreciate Bowles's smoked-celery-root soup with pine-needle dust\u2014he should, by the way\u2014he can push it aside and await the rolled-out lamb chop coated with crushed dates and pistachios.\n\nMoto has three tasting menus of ve, ten, and twenty courses and no \u00E0 la carte. Alinea has the aforementioned twelve or twenty-four and no \u00E0 la carte. Avenues, being a hotel restaurant, has to be more exible, but the dining possibilities include four different six-course tasting menus and the twelve-course Chef's Palate. Tasting menus are not fast food. They aren't even reasonably quick. For the diner, they are an expression of faith in the chef. For the chef, they are an unparalleled opportunity to show off. They are a parade of plates, each one proclaiming the greatness of the man in the kitchen. They are hubris. They are exciting. They are expensive. They are prolonged. They require that you spend more time talking to the staff than to the person you brought to dinner. They are great for a lonely guy.\n\nThe three Chicago chefs have done everything conceivable to make their food entertaining, but I'm not certain they understand how to keep customers engaged. For sure, they are having a great time. Cantu thinks he's Captain Kirk. Bowles is playing the part of Jackson Pollock. Achatz can stand at the helm of his gleaming kitchen and pretend he's Chester Nimitz commanding the Pacic Fleet.\n\nNobody is thinking enough of the customer, trapped on a hard seat, seemingly for half his life. Perhaps two or three dishes offered at a bar with less formality would ease the pressure on customers, both nancially and psychologically. The staffs at all three restaurants are extraordinarily patient, although the waiters at Moto show the strain of working for a man who seems one step away from declaring world domination. When I expressed my aversion to a Cantu composition consisting of salmon resting on a bed of salted, unsweetened meringue, one waitress broke ranks and whispered, \"We all want to say, &#145;Chef, get rid of it,' but we don't know how to tell him.\"\n\nTrotter believes it will take two or three years to nd out if the food these chefs are producing is relevant or whether they ultimately will fade away. \"I'm rooting for them,\" he says, \"but this business isn't a hundred-yard dash. It's a marathon. An ultramarathon. You've got to make sure what you're doing inspires people to become repeat visitors to your establishment. It's dangerous if you only attract foodies, professionals, and the merely curious.\"\n\nHe's right, but I have jettisoned all doubts. I refuse to believe they will be unsuccessful. They are so adaptable I can't imagine them failing. Achatz has already changed, maybe too much. I heard rumors that Cantu is planning to suspend food in the air with laser beams, and how could anybody not appreciate that? Bowles will undoubtedly alter his cuisine to match his new furnishings, irresistible for an artist. Without question, they are making American food more interdisciplinary and more audacious.\n\nThey can't fall short, not when Chicago has nally found its calling. It's the Barcelona of North America."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.gq.com/story/chicago-second-city>