What I Didn’t Know About Alinea

With all the countless digital photos, food board testimony, blog screeds, and traditional media swoon, I entered Alinea thinking I may have already seen it all, worried that all that was left to do was taste, affirm, and move on to the virtual food movement or whatever Homaro Cantu, Alton Brown, and Bill Nye huddle up and come out with next.

I knew that I would be eating powders, drinking from test tubes, sniffing scented air from pillows, testing the rules of no silverware.

I knew that the chef would be serving unlikely combinations using unlikely kitchen tools like the anti-hot plate and paint stripping heat guns.

I knew that the entryway of Alinea was an illusion, that the doorway popped up at your side and opened via sensor. I thought I knew it all.

Then once the sensor clicked, the doorway slid open, revealing the surgical theatre that is the Alinea kitchen at my right, and the two story floating staircase above, I walked away from everything I didn’t know. More »