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Haute cuisine and extreme science collide at a Chicago restaurant:
A 20-course meal costs $240, but don’t expect lettuce in a Caesar salad.
“Please, eat this in one bite,” the server said.
It wasn’t tough to do. The bowl held a spoonful of green ice cream, with a solitary crouton on top and a dollop of dressing. Looking nervous, Dedes slipped the spoon into her mouth. The ice cream went down easily, coating her mouth with the fresh, crisp taste of romaine lettuce.
“That’s fantastic!” Dedes said. “What’s next?”
...Grant Achatz uses his Chicago kitchen-turned-laboratory at his restaurant Alinea to develop ways to capture concentrated flavors in gas form. For the virtual shrimp cocktail, diners at the recently opened restaurant are given a plastic atomizer and told to spritz their tongue to taste shrimp, horseradish and tomato-flavored air.
...In one corner, Cantu prepared a sauce for one of the evening’s desserts, a mixture of Mexican sweet potato and spiced chocolate.
Cantu gathered balloons to fill with the chocolate sauce. He inflated the balloons with nitrogen gas, then dropped them into the plastic foam container of liquid nitrogen. One by one, he carefully turned the balloons around and around in the liquid nitrogen, which froze the chocolate.
