The Miracle Worker: Chicago Chef Grant Achatz

No matter how finely crafted a meal is, you always feel a little bit like an animal when you’re eating it. Even in an elegant Paris bistro or an austere Kyoto sushi palace, you still know that you’re greedily packing food into your stomach. But not when you eat Grant Achatz’s food. In fact, at his Chicago restaurant Alinea, you almost don’t feel as if you’re eating. Until about the 16th course, when you start to get full, it seems as if you’re merely thinking about food. A bite of fried pheasant breast, for example, arrives kebabed on a branch of burning oak leaves, the smell of which is meant to evoke the Michigan fall of Achatz’s youth. The aroma, he is fond of noting, can conjure up such powerful memories that it makes some diners cry.

If most chefs are musicians — soul, rock-‘n’-roll or punk — Achatz is a poet. Nearly all his dishes are so precise and delicate, they are plated with tweezers. Although the food is delicious, it’s also embarrassing, like someone’s revealing too much to a stranger. It forces you to think about every bite. It’s anti — comfort food. It’s also the kind of food that pisses people off. Even though it can take months to get a reservation, even though the basic prix fixe meal is $195 before drinks, tax and tip, and even though Alinea has won every conceivable award (Gourmet magazine’s best restaurant in America, the continent’s highest entry on S. Pellegrino’s list of best restaurants in the world and, most recently, three stars from Michelin), some people still walk out midmeal. “It’s so hypocritical,” says Achatz (whose name rhymes with rackets). “People will be carrying around iPhones, but they won’t accept change in other mediums like food and art and music.”

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Though almost every dish starts with an immaculate, classic base like a veal stock, the Alinea kitchen is really more of a Willy Wonka factory. One cook fills plastic bags with puffs of Earl Grey tea from a vaporizer, a machine otherwise used only by hard-core pot smokers, and then wraps a linen pillowcase around each bag, which will be punctured with a needle and put under a diner’s plate to release aroma. Someone else is testing a superchiller that cools liquid so slowly, it can get below its freezing point without the molecules ever moving enough to attach to one another and form crystals, but as soon as you stir or shake the liquid — bam! — it instantly forms shards of ice. Strange things are being done to pieces of Bubble Yum.

Each of the kitchen’s experiments is meticulously documented by a full-time videographer, with a researcher writing down descriptions and taping vials of food to the corresponding pages. Similar care goes into the front of the house, where the reservation system includes notes about repeat customers, like “Wife and daughter are left-handed,” so servers know where to put utensils. The whole place feels like a Pynchon novel in which a bunch of lunatics are employed by a military contractor with a really fine palate.

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Achatz, 36, is a slight, serious, goateed redhead who wears a scarf and says things at his staff meetings about how today is the day he can smell the season changing. He is not, despite all the artiness and calm, lacking in ambition or confidence. At a November staff meeting upstairs in his modern-looking restaurant (which is so minimalist, there’s no sign outside alerting passersby to its presence), he toasted his staff with bottles of Krug Champagne to celebrate winning three stars in Michelin’s first Chicago guide — a goal he wrote down when he opened Alinea in 2005, even though Michelin had yet to come out with any restaurant guides in the U.S. Alinea is one of just 93 restaurants in the world to hold three stars. It’s an elite ranking, and after Achatz’s toast, one of his sous-chefs, Andrew Graves, lifted his glass and confided, “I just want to say that I’m relieved.”

“Imagine if we got two stars? Ouch,” said Achatz. “Did we really think we wouldn’t get three? No. We all knew. Because we care. We really, really care.” Then they went to work. It was like watching the Yankees celebrate getting into the playoffs.

Achatz is so confident in his cooking methods that he let me work in his kitchen for a night. Crazier still, I mostly made risotto, upon which white truffles were shaved for an additional $75 — a cost, I firmly believe, for which TIME should reimburse all diners who ate the night I cooked. I worked for seven hours, and in that time — even though there are 23 courses to serve each table — not one dish was scrapped, not one utensil dropped. When one of my eyelashes fell onto a plate, a chef several feet away stepped in to remove it before I even noticed. The dozens of cooks work on carpet because so little is spilled. There is no yelling, no music and almost no talking. It is also the only kitchen I’ve ever seen where — thanks to the amount of precooking and high-tech gadgetry — not only are the fans above the stove often turned off, but also the building’s heater is turned on.

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For all of Alinea’s precision and weirdness, though, Achatz lacks pretension. He started cooking at his father’s diner in Michigan at age 12 and, after graduating from the Culinary Institute of America in 1994, sent his résumé to Napa Valley’s acclaimed French Laundry every week until it hired him as a line cook. He’s still just as driven. Even after he was named the James Beard Best Chef in America in 2008, he would stay up after dinner service, from 1 to 5 in the morning, plotting new dishes by writing lists of flavors and then drawing diagrams to figure out which of them might go together.

In addition to being methodical, he’s Midwestern earnest, open about everything from his restaurant’s profits (about $1 million in a good year) to his troubled relationship with his dad (they didn’t speak for several years). He’s also open about his cancer.

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Cooking with Tongue Cancer

Achatz has the most poetic cancer possible. Just as Beethoven composed when he was deaf and Milton wrote masterpieces after losing his sight, Achatz cooked with tongue cancer. In July 2007, at age 33, the chef who had never smoked a cigarette was diagnosed — after years of being told by oral surgeons and dentists that his pain stemmed from grinding his teeth — with Stage IV tongue cancer. There is no Stage V. The only cure, doctors said, was to cut out his tongue, which was covered in tumors, and replace it with muscle from his leg, which would mean he could never taste again. If he didn’t cut out his tongue, he was told, he’d be dead in a month. He refused to get the surgery.

“People said this was shallow of me, but it was going to strip me of who I was,” Achatz says at 1 a.m. in his office, which is strewn with awards, cookbooks and college chemistry gadgets. “It wouldn’t have been about the physical deformity or not being able to talk or taste. This is the path I’ve been on since I was 17. They were going to derail me from that one thing. That’s who I am. I sacrificed. I got divorced. If I wanted to stay with my wife, she wouldn’t have let me do this restaurant.”

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In other words, this is not the cancer story in which the disease makes the guy realize he needs to stop focusing on his work and finally spend time with his two young sons, see his parents more and reconnect with his former sweetheart. No, this is the cancer story that makes a man realize that his screaming ambition was right the whole time and that if he had only a month to live, he’d better get some stuff done. He found an experimental program at the University of Chicago that let him keep his tongue. Every morning, he chopped food at Alinea, took a midday break for chemo and radiation and often barfed in a cup as he drove back for the night shift at the restaurant. He lost his sense of taste completely and learned to cook by aroma, relying on other chefs to detect salt, sugar and anything else he couldn’t smell. He also wrote and self-published the Alinea cookbook, which has sold more than 50,000 copies.

The cancer, which is now in remission, has made Achatz an even better cook. After the skin of his tongue peeled off in strips from the radiation — leaving it thin, dark and oversensitive to temperature — his sense of taste returned slowly. First came sweetness and then salt, so he was able to understand and improve the balance between them. Now his cooking is more extreme, with weirder flavor juxtapositions, putting things like olives, white chocolate and strawberries together.

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“Today the modern chef is not about classical cuisine,” says French Laundry’s head chef, Thomas Keller, after whom Achatz named his youngest son Keller. “It’s about personality cuisine. It’s about an interpretation of something that has been impactful on an individual.” Thomas Keller describes Achatz’s food as “a tightrope walk between what would be considered intellectual cuisine and food with an emotional connection to it.”

Calling the New Place Next

Alinea is the name of that strange symbol copy editors use to mark the start of a new paragraph, and Achatz chose it to signal new ideas in cooking. Like a lot of artists, he responds to criticism with creations. His dishes are too small? The 23-course Alinea meal now ends with a chef throwing a silicone mat over your table and smearing it with an obscene amount of chocolate concoctions. His style is too weird? The course in the middle of your meal is straight-up French haute cuisine, taken right from Auguste Escoffier’s 1903 cookbook and served on antique plates. This is the kind of meal you’re likely to get at his second restaurant, set to open Feb. 1 in Chicago. But only if you go there soon.

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The new place, which he’s calling Next, will have a different menu every three months, pegged to a particular place and time. He’s starting with Paris in 1906 and then moving on to such pairings as Sicily in 1949, Thailand in the future and so on. It’s ridiculously ambitious, but since Alinea scraps 80% of its menu every quarter, he says this venture won’t be that much harder. Achatz also hopes to sell the idea as a TV show, for which he would travel the world and explore the history of food. He says that he needs a new challenge and that chopping vegetables for 10 hours a day doesn’t do it for him anymore.

But the food at Next — and the equally big, equally odd cocktail bar alongside it that will serve high-tech drinks like a powderized gin and tonic — isn’t nearly as gutsy as the venture’s business plan. Instead of making a reservation, you’ll have to go online and buy nonrefundable tickets, as if dinner were a concert. Co-owner Nick Kokonas, a former Wall Street currency trader who spotted Achatz’s talent early on and raised the money to start Alinea, has had the ticket idea for a while. “Two tables of four cancel at Alinea, we don’t make any money that night,” says Kokonas, who likens the new system to the way NFL tickets are sold. “If your wife pukes in the backseat on the way to a Bears game, you don’t call the Bears and say, ‘Take your ticket back.'”

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Achatz co-wrote his memoirs with Kokonas as a series of alternating first-person stories. The book, Life, on the Line, comes out in March and has already been optioned as a movie. (It’s supposed to be directed by Wedding Crashers’ David Dobkin, who imagines it as part artist biopic, part buddy movie.) Kokonas is one of Achatz’s closest friends, but he’s also a hard-charging businessman who insists that Next won’t make adjustments for diners’ dietary restrictions or allergies — since that would require a couple of chefs to stop work and cook a separate meal with separate ingredients, driving up costs. “We’re going to do four-star food at three-star prices, so there’s going to be some changes in customer service,” Kokonas says. “We can’t accommodate every whim.”

Achatz looks unconvinced. Especially considering the way he came up with the idea for Next. The day he was diagnosed with cancer, he called to tell Kokonas, who immediately left a golf tournament in Michigan to drive to Chicago. He walked into Alinea at 10 p.m., and Achatz surprised him by making him duck breast with morels and veal jus, an old-school, very un-Alinea dish that Kokonas loved. “I still don’t know why he did it,” Kokonas says.

When I ask Achatz why he did it, he looks at me as if I’m an idiot. “Because he drove all the way in from Michigan,” he says. So maybe, after all, this is a story about a guy who gets cancer and learns that what he really loves to do is connect with people. He just wanted to do it his way.

Back to the Future

See what Achatz is cooking up for his Next menu.

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