Author: Nick Bergus

Alinea, chef Grant Achatz’s Chicago restaurant, relies heavily on subverting its diner’s expectations. And in his latest post on The Atlanic’s food channel, Achatz hints at what might be the restaurant’s next trick: a dish that changes in some fundamental way halfway through its eating.

Imagine a salad-like composition of raw vegetables with supporting garnishes including starch based crunchy components that act as croutons, encapsulated herb juices exploding with vinaigrette freshness, and pudding-like condiments of liquefied cheese being transformed by the application of a rich, extremely hot, dairy-based broth, being poured over the course at the midway point of consumption. The former light, crunchy, and cold characteristics of the salad turn into a rich, hot soup. In a moment, everything has changed, even the utensil required to eat moves from fork to spoon.

The crouton elements turning into dumpling-like textures while they take on liquid, the vegetables yield from the tableside cooking process, and the spherified herb juices become floating raviolis of much needed brightness in the rich, chowder-like soup.

I’ve put off writing about my most recent meal at Alinea, eaten during a trip to Chicago in January — after all, what could I add about a restaurant that Gourmet called the best restaurant in America? (I wrote about the first time I ate there a couple of years ago.) So my discovery of Achatz’s recent piece will have to do for motivation.

It’s hard to explain what it means to eat at a restaurant of Alinea’s caliber. It means impeccable service (when my father knocked over one dish, which promptly exploded on his pant leg, he was gingerly whisked off and the staff proceeded to mop, carpet vacuum and switch out his chair like a seasoned pit crew). It means eating for five hours and it being fun and relaxing and, afterwards, feeling only moderately gluttonous. It means eating course after course after course — the menu listed 24 in all — prepared by cooks who aren’t satisfied with the status quo and are always exploring new ideas.

Expectations are a huge part of a meal like this, at least for me. Take, for example, the first time I ate Achatz’s food. It was at a the now-defunct Trio in Evanston, Ill.

Achatz had just struck out on his own after working at The French Laundry for Thomas Keller, the only American-born chef with two three-Michelin-star restaurants. I was just starting to exit my picky-eater phase, which had lasted through most of my teens (and the vestiges of which continues to crop up occasionally).

No one in my party really knew what to expect except a nice meal for my mother’s 50th birthday. Caviar, which I didn’t care for but have learned to love, was followed by foie gras, which I only get to eat rarely. Beef short ribs that tasted like root beer. Beautifully sous-vide-cooked lamb with four different flavors. A truffle milk shake for dessert. It was easily the best meal of my life.

Or was it just the most memorable? Or favorite?

Achatz has become, as common sense suggests and by all accounts, a better chef since that meal. So why haven’t my meals at Alinea — more elegant, more refined — supplanted the earlier meal at Trio?

Mostly because my meals at Alinea proceeded with such loftier expectations, it would be nearly impossible for the accomplished chef to exceed them. The expectations and the hype and my own previous experience sapped Alinea of one of its key weapons in the efforts to wow diners: surprise.

This isn’t to say that Alinea left me disappointed; this meal was exceptional, but it will never be seared into my memory like Trio.

While this time around I saw some of Achatz’s old tricks, such as the gelled-sheets-of-sauce trick and the smoldering-and-smoking-aromatics-on-the-plate trick and the cocoa-butter-encapsulated-yogurt-in-a-shot-glass-of-pomegranate-juice trick, he had new ones.

Such as the bubble-gum-flavored-goop-you-suck-from-a-tube trick and things-that-go-well-with-(self-encapsulated)-butter trick. So, yes, it was amazing.

It still couldn’t supplant the lesser meal at Trio.

But that problem, created by his own success, is what Achatz is trying to solve by developing new preparations and dishes. And that’s why people will go back. And someday, I hope, someone will surprise me with a meal that will, if not supplant, join my memories of Trio.

Update
Apparently, today is Alinea’s fourth anniversary. It’s survived enormous expectations and the chef and owner’s cancer whose treatment cost him his sense of taste. Congratulations.

That is all.

Alex swears — SWEARS! — Pagano’s is the place to go for a cheese steak in Philadelphia. Or at least North Philly.

I wasn’t going to argue. I was just happy for two things: first, to eat a real cheese steak for the first time in years, and, second, to not have to deal with the schlock of Geno’s and Pat’s.

 I’ve given up even trying to approximate the cheese steak at home. Steak-ums create the wrong kind of greasy mess and I just don’t have a pan with enough cooked-in tallow to get the right beef flavor in the steaks. And furthermore, it is impossible to the get the appropriate rolls outside of Philadelphia.

(During my Summer in Tampa, I tried Frankies version of a cheese steak, lured by the “best cheese steak south of Philly” proclamation on their sign and was surprised disappointed disgusted at what I was presented with.)

We can debate (and we will) whether Cheese Whiz is appropriate on a steak or not. I say no, Alex says yes. Look, who’s the native Philadelphian here?

So, yes, Pagano’s. South of the projects of the 1950s and 70s, north of the projects of this century. The inside is small, the walls covered with grease and photos of the owner and his employees. A simple menu, as any real steak shop should have (I was surprised disappointed disgusted to see a chicken cheese steak at the bottom, as if this was Applebee’s, but I digress), one price listed for each. None of this half-sandwich bullshit.

We were handed a huge stack of napkins along with our sandwiches. This could only be a good sign indicating the full greasiness we were about to consume.

I won’t bore you with the gory details, but yes, they were good. Very good. Greasy. Overflowing with meat and fried onions. The kind of cheese steak that forces you to take a nap and then skip the next couple of meals. Not that I will. I do, after all, have to get some scrapple for breakfast.

 Matt Steigerwald knows what to do with a pig. That’s obvious to anyone who has eaten the house-made charcuterie at Lincoln Cafe, his restaurant in Mount Vernon.

And when faced with an entire hog (a rare mulefoot in this case) and a competition, he knew how to make that pig sing.

So at Sticks, an elegant art studio surrounded by woodlands and corporate office sprawl, Steigerwald and his Lincoln Cafe crew set up shop in a place that wasn’t built for cooking. He faced off, 140 miles from his kitchen, against some of the best Des Moines, an increasingly hip and food-savvy town, had to offer: Bill Overdyke of Centro, Andrew Meek of Sage, Tag Grandgeorge of Le Jardin (who teamed with caterer Cyd Mull) and Jammie Monaghan of the Embassy Club.

He hauled his entire pig, in various states of completion, along with as much kitchen equipment as he could possibly need, the 140 miles.

And, when the votes were counted, he’d won.

I voted as a judge at Cochon 555 in Des Moines. I tried every single dish the chefs put in front of me — brains on rye, heart wrapped in pureed liver, lard ice cream with cracklings, truffled pork loin, liver mortadella, a couple barbecue-on-a-biscuit sandwiches. We were asked to rank the five chefs in three categories: presentation, flavor and utilization (their ability to use as much of the pig as possible). Picking a “winner” was difficult.

It didn’t help that by the time we got to the balloting, I’d been consuming wine and swine for some three and a half or four hours (one tends to lose track of time under such conditions). And, even though I knew I would be eating pork from about 5:00 on, how could I turn down La Quercia proscuitto and a mountain of cheese beginning at 3:30 that afternoon?

We got fed by Sage’s Meeks first. The favorite was a lovely piece of pork belly from a hereford hog, marinaded in orange and something else and sprinkled with sea salt (I am a sucker for large crunchy pieces of salt as a garnish).

Next came Le Jardin and a gorgeous set of dishes from a duroc. The standouts were a simple, salty pork-consomme bloody mary and smoked pork shoulder (a popular preparation that night) served on a cracker spoon with a strawberry sauce.

The Embassy Club’s Monaghan went Southern with a tamworth. Barbecue on a biscuit. Dirty rice. A pork loin in a bourbon sauce. Perhaps owing to Monaghan’s background as the Embassy Club’s banquet chef, he avoided temperature problems that hurt the earlier cooks. And perhaps owing to the amount of wine (and the bottles that Scott Bush, president of Templeton Rye, brought to the table), my notes became less descriptive and more terse. “Really, really good” these read.

Steigerwald offered a very nice selection of garde manger, a head cheese and liver mortadella, especially. Another version of North Carolina barbeque that was impossible to not compare with Monaghan’s (Steigerwald’s was better). A pozole, a traditional Mexican pork-and-hominy soup.

We were stuffed beyond the breaking point. Then came Centro’s Overdyke and his Guinea hog. More rillets and a fantastic rolata di coteccino (Centro’s spelling, not mine) that I am totally unable to describe. My notes are absolutely no help at this point. The page says Centro and then — nothing.

Then we voted.

While we waited for the votes to be tallied, we were plied with even more food (all bacon-infused desserts). I declined.

When Steigerwald won (and was handed a trophy, a bottle of Templeton Rye and, I’m not making this up, a painting of a pig leaping into a pond) it felt like an upset. The Des Moines crowd had picked an out-of-towner. People had been coming up all night, he told me: “They would taste something and say, ‘Where the hell are you guys located?'”

What put Steigerwald over the top, as I told Cecelia Hanley of The Gazette, was his pozole. It was such a delicious, porky soup. And it offered a surprise: with a bit of cheese submerged just out of sight below the surface.

Ben Gordon, who blogs at Food Tour of Iowa, has a nice set of photos from the event.

 More about snout-to-tail eating at tonight’s Cochon 555 later. Tonight you’ll have to be satisfied with two photos that illustrate what I didn’t get to witness while I was sequestered, eating and judging the porcine handy work of five talented cooks.

To demonstrate the skill it takes to break down an entire pig — complete with head and skin — why not have someone break down an entire pig?

 So there was Aaron King, of Garden Market in Des Moines, going at a roughly 75-pound duroc with only the aid of a hacksaw and his knives, while everyone around him ate pork.

He was out of practice since the last time he had taken apart a whole hog was five years ago, and that made him nervous. It took him about an hour and a half, and he ended with all the bits laid out and a tidy, cleaned ribcage.

Oh, how I would have loved to stand and stare as Aaron dismantled that animal. But I only caught the beginning and the end.