Culture November 11, 2020

I am not the sort of person who would ordinarily elect to dine at Grant Achatz’s radical Chicago restaurant Alinea, which features “mischievous science-project cooking,” as New York Times restaurant critic Sam Sifton recently described it. I am generally put off by meals that are as much pyrotechnics as pleasure. I am not interested in dried crème brûlée, which appeared on Achatz’s first menu, and I find his description of angelica branches filled with apple puree—one element of the twenty-six-course dinner he prepared for a former Chicago Tribune food writer and his friend—more obnoxious, not to mention exhausting, than enticing: