Authors: Molly Birnbaum
At Alinea, which Achatz opened in 2005, at age thirty-one, he plays off the traditional. Here, he reinvents the familiar, reversing the role of the visual on the plate, manipulating expectation and distorting with suggestion. Within a year of serving its first meal, Alinea had earned four stars from the
Chicago Tribune
and
Chicago
magazine. Ruth Reichl of
Gourmet
magazine called it the “Best Restaurant in America.”
Achatz’s work had long intrigued me. My interest had increased exponentially in the years since the accident, however, as Achatz, I had read, was a master of the senses. Like all good chefs, he understood the importance of color, texture, temperature, and smell in his food. But he used aroma in new, entrancing ways. He used odor in his cooking to evoke emotion and memory, to trick and to tease, to intensify and satisfy both.
In the
Alinea
cookbook, which was published in 2008, Achatz devotes pages to the role smell plays in his food. Aroma, he writes, offers two possibilities for the chef. “The opportunity to flavor a dish by way of smell, and to add a layer of complexity to a concept by triggering an emotional response to a familiar smell.” These techniques “became so important in our cooking that the idea of aroma itself became a creative avenue,” he wrote.
I wasn’t alone in my fascination. Achatz’s use of smell has been gaining momentum and praise since before he opened Alinea. He began with lobster. As the executive chef at the Chicago restaurant Trio, a job he began at age twenty-six, he placed a small bowl within a larger one—the first holding the crustacean, simply prepared, and the second, fresh sprigs of rosemary plant. Tableside, a server would pour hot water over the herb to create a vapor, vividly scented and inhaled by the diner over each bite. In 2005, Pete Wells wrote in
Food and Wine
magazine: “Any good chef understands that smell plays a large role in taste, but Achatz is talking about something more: manipulating and exploiting the olfactory sense to deliberate effect.”
When I interviewed Achatz, who looked craggy and thin under a mop of bright red hair, I asked him about his use of smell. He told me about another dish, one that he was known for at Trio using the same technique: pheasant with autumnal fragrance. For this, he used hay, ground cinnamon, orchard apples, dead leaves, and pumpkin seeds in the larger bowl. When the server poured the hot water within and the diner breathed in the resulting vapor, “it was fall in a bowl,” Achatz said.
“People freaked out.” He laughed. “We have people cry at the table—I mean, in a good way. It’s a very emotionally charged thing. We are tapping into memories.
“We’re trying to engage you on many different sensory levels: emotionally, cerebrally. We want it to be theatrical. We want it to be participatory. We want you to interact. A very important part of that is smell.”
So there it was. I was at Alinea because Achatz knew the power of smell. But not only that. Achatz also knew the power of absence. He knew what it was like to operate without a sense. After all, he had lost one, too.
In 2007, he was diagnosed with late-stage tongue cancer.
His doctors proposed a cure. Remove part of the tongue. Replace it with tissue from his arm. With this, however, Achatz’s mouth would be rendered virtually useless. D. T. Max wrote about the chef in a
New Yorker
profile in 2008. He quoted Nick Kokonas, Achatz’s business partner, as saying: “You’re going to be the tongueless chef who’s still a genius!”
And Achatz replied: “I’ll just die.”
In the end, he refused surgery. Instead, he sought alternative therapies that eventually brought him to enroll in a clinical trial at the University of Chicago, where he began treatment with radiation chemotherapy. He was lucky. The tumor shrank. Achatz, eventually, became cancer free. And still he cooked.
“It was incredibly important to me to remain as engaged as possible at Alinea while receiving treatment, and during that time I only missed fourteen services,” he wrote in a press release after the news of his recovery rocked the food media world. “Through the use of a new and rigorous chemotherapy and radiation protocol, they were able to achieve a full remission while ensuring that the use of invasive surgery on my tongue was not needed . . . Onward.”
Achatz’s tongue, however, was not left unscathed. His sense of taste, like my sense of smell, had melted away, his taste buds incapable of detecting anything. Doctors told him this would last for at least a year. The tastes—salty, sweet, bitter, and sour—disappeared one by one. “Week one of radiation was fine,” he told me. “Week two my mouth was starting to get sore, but it didn’t affect my taste. And then during week three, on my way to the hospital, I opened a can of soda. It was Dr Pepper. I took a drink, and thought,
Wow, this Coca-Cola tastes funny
.” Achatz couldn’t discern between Coke and Dr Pepper. For the chef, this was unheard of. As he spoke, he gave a wan smile, and then a shrug. “I looked at the can and thought,
Oh shit, here we go
.” Achatz could do nothing but to keep moving, to stand by and cook as flavor vanished, leaving him a world-famous chef with a disease-free but nonworking tongue. In two weeks, his sense of taste was gone. “It became an exercise of relying mostly on smell and sight,” he said.
Achatz relied, too, on his sous-chefs, many of whom had worked with him for years—“for so long it’s like I brainwashed their palates to be like mine,” he told me—to gauge the levels of sweet, salty, bitter, and sour in the food. Achatz, after all, could spoon salt onto his tongue and leave it there as it slowly dissolved without tasting a thing. As a result, he had little interest in eating. He gravitated toward things with very powerful aromas, like milk blended with ice cream and the fragrant innards of two whole vanilla beans. He would later write of the experience in
The Atlantic
magazine: “The skin covering my tongue and throat peeled off like sheets of wrapping paper, taking with it my taste buds. Of all of the side effects of treatment, this is what I feared the most. If I could not taste, could I really be a chef?”
I was there to find out. I had heard much about the pillows of scented air, burning brush, smoke and fire and smoldering sticks of cinnamon. I wanted to smell for myself. I wondered if I could.
There in Alinea’s dining room, which had neutral walls with sparse modern oil paintings and thick black mahogany tables, I felt giddy with anticipation. But nervous, too. I had never been so nervous to eat.
“What if I can’t smell everything?” I asked Becca.
“We’ll find out,” she said.
Over the next four hours, we were presented with a parade of small courses that lay on plates and in bowls, hung on wires or balanced on forks. They were placed in front of Becca and me with ceremony, ferried away with grace by a phalanx of servers—mainly male, mainly handsome, often sporting a striking hipster haircut. The plates came one at a time. A bite here, a slurp there, a constant curiosity, studying each mouthful like I would food served to me on Mars. I felt as though I were watching a performance, one that challenged all of my senses, highlighting the connection—and the dissociation—between texture and color and taste and smell. I wondered what Matt would think.
Some of the courses were just a nibble, like the single green almond wrapped in a square of juniper berry gelée, which I could taste strongly as I kept it balanced lightly in my mouth and exhaled gently through my nose. I could feel the salt, a touch of acidic lime on the tip of my tongue. I closed my eyes and imagined the backyard of my childhood home, where a juniper bush laden with berries grew. I used to crush them between my fingers to release their aroma.
Others were considerable, like the course that arrived on a long and narrow dish, studded with dips and valleys like a miniature landscape, and was meant, as our server explained, “to highlight things that go well with butter.” A long line of pureed popcorn ran the length of the plate, which was dotted with corn kernels that were cooked in a way to make them crumble in the mouth. There was a self-encapsulated butterball, which we popped with our forks and drew the length of the dish, like a stream. There were tiny, delicate mushrooms, a cheese crisp, dabs of curry, tiny tarragon leaves, and a square of mango gelée with a minuscule stick of red pepper poking out like a flag. There were purees and rings, honey and chives. I couldn’t recognize half of what I was putting in my mouth. I often wasn’t even sure how. But I didn’t care. It felt like a visit to the Museum of Modern Art. There, I could stand in front of splotchy, monochromatic paintings for hours, flummoxed but entranced. The meal was unintelligible but beautiful, and I didn’t want it to end. “This is wild,” said Becca, as she puzzled over the taste of tarragon, inhaling the ether of curry.
We ate squab tarts and lemon foam, bacon brittle and creamy lilac pillows. We ate a small round of savory sorbet: half mustard, half passion fruit and laced with a thin line of nutmeg and a dot of soy. It was served on a pin and eaten in one bite. “Dissonance,” I scribbled in the notebook I had balanced next to me on the seat. I had never tasted such a combination of bitter and sweet. It was at once uncomfortable and engaging. “It’s like the mustard and the passion fruit are duking it out in your mouth,” said Becca.
“I think the mustard won.” I grimaced, unable to mediate the wild tastes.
There was “Hot Potato, Cold Potato,” an Achatz classic. A small wax bowl of cold potato soup arrived at the table with a long metal pin skewering a ball of steaming Yukon gold potato topped with a slice of truffle on top. Also on the pin were a small cube of Parmesan, some chive, and a square of butter. After instructions from the server, we slid out the pin to let its holdings slide into the soup. We downed it in one bite. The temperatures contrasted shockingly, magnificently.
But it was Achatz’s use of scent that left me fighting to find words.
Toward the middle of this parade of courses, an orb of sweet potato tempura, flavored with brown sugar and bourbon, was placed in front of each of us. It came on a long stick of smoldering cinnamon and sent its smoky, spicy scent directly toward my nose. I ate it in one explosive bite. It was sweet and gooey, playful as I held it on its warm mount, reminiscent of a treat at a State Fair. Its fragrance lingered, hinting of campfires, of Christmas, of drinking mulled wine in Germany with Matt on vacation the winter before. In one bite, I had used all of my senses. “Holy shit,” I said, too loud, and then looked around the dining room to see if anyone heard. When the server came to the table to pick up our used utensils, a small pile of ash remained.
For dessert—one of many, when I feared my stomach could hold no more—a server placed a small cloth pillow on the table in front of me. Becca got one, too. We looked at each other, confused. I wasn’t sure what to do and moved my arms awkwardly over my lap. On top of the pillow, though, the server placed a large white plate covered in food and as I inhaled and exhaled, I understood why. The weight of the plate slowly sank the pillow, letting out its air, which, I realized, had a scent. A familiar, billowy scent. It smelled herby, like a garden in Provence. Lavender. The plate held a strange mixture of texture and temperature in bites of cotton candy, rhubarb ice cream, crisps, and meringue. There was goat’s milk cheesecake and small slivers of sweet onion. I had to challenge myself to try every element of the dish. We ate over the perfumed air.
Achatz would tell me that there were days he came into work and found it incredibly rewarding to cook without the sense of taste. “Because I was always impressed,” he said. “Not impressed with myself. But just generally impressed with how much you could discern by using your other senses. By touching the food, by smelling it, by looking at it, by listening to it while it’s cooking. It’s pretty amazing.”
For one of the final courses, Achatz served a glass tube laying on a napkin in a bowl in front of both Becca and I. Inside was a layer of bubblegum tapioca, then crème de fraiche, and then a hibiscus jam.
Bubble gum? I thought of the lab at Citromax. In some ways, Achatz’s work mirrored Grosinger’s. He constructed complex, nuanced flavors out of dissonant parts, only able to place them side by side with success through his training, through creative thought.
“We were walking around back there a couple weeks ago,” Achatz would tell me. “And we were asking ourselves, what is in bubble gum? What the hell is bubble gum? And when you say, oh it tastes like bubble gum, what is that? I mean, literally, what is bubble gum? So then we laid out a packet of bubble gum and we smelled it. And somebody would be, like, I smell strawberry. I smell vanilla.” He used the deconstructed scents of bubble gum to manufacture his new whole.
Becca and I were instructed to suck the sweet bubblegum mixture out of the tube like a straw in one mouthful. When we did, the other end, which was coated in gelatin, made a loud sucking sound, a farting sound, a sound completely incongruous to the atmosphere. It was surprising and playful, a little bit obscene.
Slurrrrrrrp
. Becca began to laugh, and then so did I. I laughed so hard that tears came to my eyes. We sucked on the tubes again, another wave of laughter with its juicy sound. A group of four sat next to us, on roughly the same schedule of courses. They ate their bubblegum squeegees soon after. Becca and I watched as they lapsed into giggle fits of their own. It was close to 1:00
A.M.
on a Saturday night, and it felt as though the entire city was laughing.
Chapter 8
Opoponax and Cedarwood
IN WHICH I RETURN TO MY SENSES
IN THE BEGINNING OF MATT’S DEPLOYMENT,
before he was transferred to a less-equipped military base close to the Pakistan border, we were often able to speak on the phone. In each conversation we strove for normalcy: I asked him about his day, and he about mine. I tried to stay positive, but my skin tingled when he reported the foot patrols, the Afghan children and their skin ripped by shrapnel, the flat, lifeless eyes of the old men he passed on the street. I didn’t know how to tell him about the worries in my own life, the ones that paled in comparison to his. The ones about my sense of smell.