The New Yorker on Achatz and Alinea
I’ll put on my foodie hat and recommend this week’s New Yorker piece about Grant Achatz by DT Max. Achatz is the chef at Alinea in Chicago, named best restaurant in the country by Gourmet magazine in 2006.
Achatz has been battling late-stage cancer of the tongue, and as Max notes, not only does he appear to have won the battle through a still-controversial therapy of radiation and chemo (as opposed to surgical removal of part of his tongue), his sense of taste is returning.
The most fascinating part of this piece is Max’s description of how Achatz’s sense of taste is returning - one taste at a time - sweet first, then salt, then bitter - and how Achatz is using his new discoveries about how these tastes relate to each other to inform what he creates in the kitchen.
Like any great New Yorker profile, you get deeper insight into the individual profiled, and you also run across many gems of knowledge along the path.
We went to Alinea in May 2007 with a couple of close friends, and the nearly six hour meal of 25 courses (and 23 wines) was one of the most amazing culinary experiences of my life. My boyfriend, Chuck thought about the meal for months before writing about the oxalis course on his blog. He has a photographic memory when it comes to food and wine.
You can watch Grant Achatz in action here - an episode from Gourmet’s Diary of a Foodie, the best culinary series on public TV or any TV (produced with WGBH).
AND… you can listen to Michael Nagrant’s in-depth podcast interview with Grant Achatz here.
