Everybody’s going nuts lately trying to recreate Alinea‘s dry caramel shots and dehydrated flying bacon with nothing but a whisk and a well-worn silpat. So I took Julia and Emily’s advice and just went to the restaurant instead. 

Oh my.

This was my first return visit since the place opened in 2005, and despite the well-documented drama of the intervening years, the restaurant still does not miss a single beat. In fact, it seems to have really found its groove. I can’t begin to quantify some of my impressions, but I got the sense that, as Alinea has become less the new hot thing, and more an established stop on any special-occasion dining itinerary, the atmosphere in the dining room has become more relaxed, and less reverent. And that’s a good thing, because eating in church is no fun. Not to mention, tacky.

The menu has, as reported, been reworked to be slightly more accessible. Emphasis on the slightly, for sure, but there were definitely less menacing pieces of serviceware, and less moments of bossy stage management by the waiters (“now sit on your hands, shut one eye, and bob for this piece of rabbit on a wire . . . “). Considering the context that’s not saying a whole lot. But there was a notable breeziness to the three hours that happily took the piss out of it.

Of the 12-course tasting menu, two highlights linger:

Cauliflower (“five coatings, three gels, apple”)

Cubes of cauliflower custard rolled in different coatings (and hell if I can remember what they are), fried, plus various complementary bites in the form of gels, and some addtional dried, fried, crispy florets=one plate of pure, concentrated cauliflower flavor. (I can’t remember where the apple comes in. Was it soup?) In any case: a good expression of the culinary tactic of texture manipulation, which Achatz discusses in the book using the example of rhubarb. Meaning (deep breath): rhubarb juice, dehydrated rhubarb, vaccum-compressed rhubarb, whipped rhubarb, slow-cooked rhubarb, rhubarb sorbet, and rhubarb gel. All on one plate.

Wagyu beef (“matiake, smoked date, Blis elixir”)

I said there was less mind-fuckery, not that it was gone, right? Somewhere just after the cauliflower the waiter brought out three thin slices of pink something or other, each hanging from a pair of chopsticks set in a base and each giving off a light plume of vapor. “Don’t touch,” said the waiter. “It’s been liquid-nitrogenized to minus 300 degrees and it’ll burn your fingertips off.”* And he left, refusing to tell us exactly what “it” was. So, we went happily along through lobster (with “popcorn, butter, curry”–probably my least fave dish of the whole night, it played with butter and its different complements, but as a result was a lot of butter for one dish. Though I did like the buttered white toast that came with.), rabbit (a variant of the pheasant dish Julia and Emily tried to make), and turbot (“chamomile, shellfish, celery”), about which I remember absolutely nothing. All the while with these mysterious pink flaps of something slowly warming and wilting as our centerpiece.

Finally, shallow bowls of smoky date custard topped with sauteed mushrooms appeared. The pink slabs, now clearly meat, were draped over the top of the ‘shrooms, and the whole thing drizzled with a bit of sherry vinegar (the mysterious “Blis elixir,” which turns out to be made by Steve Stallard in Michigan, when he’s not busy harvesting trout roe.)

The heat from the mushrooms cooked the thin slice of rare wagyu–for that’s what the pink stuff was, if you hadn’t guessed by now — just the slightest breath. The flavors–buttery beef, smoky date, unctuous, earthy mushroom, concentrated sweet vinegar–didn’t so much complement each other as fuse into a rich, multidimensional whole that was . . . un-freakin-real. 

*I paraphrase.