Alinea (* – Chicago)

My expectations of Alinea weren’t very high. I saw some negative reviews of it here, but I thought it would still be worth visiting when I was coming to Chicago. Maybe the food would be interesting and the theatrics would be fun and entertaining. By the end I was disappointed by it all.

Alinea has three levels of seating – the salon, the gallery, and a kitchen table that is set in a glass room in the kitchen. My dinner was in the gallery, which is in the first floor room next to the kitchen. There’s some performance aspects here, so you may want to skip the rest of this review if you’re planning on visiting soon and want everything to be as much of a surprise as it can be. That’s how I approached this meal.

This visit was towards the end of September. Stepping through the meal via the photos:

1. Gallery – a communal table is set up for about 12-14 guests. The table was decorated with lit medieval candelabras and unlit fire cauldrons were hanging over the table. The table is essentially set up as a medieval feast. Strangely there is a prominent painting of Thomas Keller dressed as a king. There’s another large painting of Daniel Boulud and three smaller paintings of Alice Waters, Julia Child, and Gordon Ramsay as if they are medieval European royalty. The people working there don’t know why the latter four people are pictured here with Thomas Keller. There was also a centerpiece of two big pheasants fighting and a plate is already waiting for you, it has a pheasant on it and there is some sort of tart with a glass dome over it. So, there’s definitely going to be pheasant in the first course.
2. Gallery #2  – Suddenly, the lights dim and what I can only describe as jungle-inspired music starts to play. There’s a small cooking station set up in front of King Keller where people from the kitchen have been bringing various ingredients for the chef to use in a sauce. A flame erupts from the sauce pan and two people light torches from the flame and then light the cauldrons above the table. 
3. Communal – Pheasant; Fig & Pistachio – After the cauldrons above the table are lit, people come by with tiny pheasant sausage pieces and stick them in the fire cauldrons for about 1 second and then place the pheasant sausage on the plate. The sauce from the previously flaming sauce pan is poured around the sausage. It just tasted like a random sausage you may get from a grocery store. Kind of disappointing after all of the pheasant stuff. You’re also asked to remove the glass dome over the fig & pistachio tart. It was OK.
4. Communal – Mincemeat, Sweet Corn – This bowl was already waiting on ice for the guests in the middle of the table. The ingredients like the corn seemed like it came from Trader Joe’s. Just didn’t seem like especially high quality here.
5. Mussel – You’re then asked to continue the dinner in the kitchen. It was fun to see it. There are some tubes set up in a row. Guests are lined up and a small dish is sitting on top of a tube for you. It was a mussel with fava, dill, mango, and a green curry. It was a nice bite.
6. Fear Factor – this is a lobster tempura with mango and vanilla. It was an OK bite. You’re supposed to poke a hole in the top of the tube where the mussel was placed. I suppose there was supposed to be a smell of vanilla since the lobster tempura was skewered by a vanilla bean? I didn’t really smell much, and you reach in and pull the lobster tempura out by grabbing the vanilla bean stick. 
7. Aquavit – dill,  mango, green chili gin, winter melon. This cocktail is made for the guests while in the kitchen. I think this was the best thing that I had for dinner. It was a very good cocktail, the type that you’d be happy to get at a very good cocktail bar if you’re OK with the style. You then return from the kitchen to the dining room and find that it has been transformed. Gone is the medieval themed room, the communal table has been switched out for five separate stainless steel top tables, and the paintings of medieval chef royalty have been switched out for some other art that looks like giant sea urchins.
8. Osetra – roasted soybean, sake lees – a speech is made how this bowl is cold so you should hold the bowl and it gives you the sensation of the ocean or something before you eat the caviar. I guess so. Also, the sound of the mother of pearl spoon against the bumps of the bowl were supposed to evoke some sort of feeling about ocean waves. The caviar didn’t have any taste or saltiness. Maybe they somehow managed to remove any taste. The roasted soybean taste was the dominant flavor and it was alright.
9. Chicago-Style Hot Dog – this comes with the post card that has a message and is signed by the chef Grant Achatz. It’s a tiny bite and does taste like a Chicago style hot dog to me. You can take the postcard home!
10. Peeled Grapes – concord, roasted peanut, asin tibuck – probably the least visually appealing dish I’ve had in a while or really ever. It’s supposed to mimic peanut butter and jelly, and I think it does. The questionable brown part is a result of taking peanuts through a press to remove the oils etc., then taking the leftovers that comes out of the press and piping the oils and butter or whatever back into the brown tube-like part. I’m not sure why they do that or what it adds. The grapes have all been peeled. This dish was kind of bad. The brown tube part wasn’t very good. Over the previous few courses there is some sort of dinosaur egg looking ball on your table, and it was apparently a Filipino salt where they put a bit of the salt on this dish.
11. Charred – arctic char, bus maple syrup, smoke – This comes to the table on a big stick or whatever they used to put this into the fire or oven. They ask you to pick it up off of the stick and go eat. This was a good bite. The crispy skin with caramelized maple syrup was nice. Apparently the maple syrup is from a producer that the chef has always worked with. I think this was one of or possibly the only ingredient where they talked about the source of the ingredient a bit. 
12. Hot Potato Cold Potato – black truffle, parmesan, chive – it’s a hot and cold potato. The hot part is on a needle or skewer that you pull out of the bowl and drop it into the cold potato soup and then quickly eat it. It tastes like a potato soup you might get at the deli section of a grocery store.
13. Fossilized Tamale Bone – You’re now an archaeologist in Patagonia and are given a set of tools. The idea is to brush the blue masa to reveal a flattened prawn head that is kind of stuck to the rock. You use another tool to pry it off. The prawn head chip has almost no taste, somehow it doesn’t even have a prawn taste. You can then use a hot sauce that isn’t spicy, a flavorless chimichurri sauce, or some bone marrow. To the right pictured here is an empanada that didn’t have much flavor and there was also a tamale that didn’t have much flavor. A weird looking dish at least, but not good tasting. Worst empanada and tamale of my life.
14. Explosion – black truffle, romaine, parmesan – a signature dish, it’s pure truffle flavor here. It’s good if you like truffle. 
15. Squab & Waxed Strawberry – Thai long peppercorn, endive – Two dishes here. Squab with some dehydrated vegetables. Not very memorable. The waxed strawberry with this dish was bees wax molded to look like a strawberry and had strawberry flavors. It was interesting.
16. Ocean & Earth – two dishes for this course, too. The first dish was Australian wagyu short rib with matsutake, pine nuts, and a Japanese eggplant. There’s also soy and yuzu, and all of this is under a braised kombu. Not a very good dish at all. But at least it looked weird. The second dish was some sort of seafood soup that you’re supposed to drink from the end of the bowl.
17. Paint – Time for the two signature desserts. First it’s Paint (blueberry snow, candied oats, dark chocolate) Suddenly, the lights turn dark and techno music starts playing, and fog starts coming from the floor. A chef wheels a cauldron or pot into the middle of the room and more fog is coming out of it. You see black squares descending down a staircase – these are the mats they place on your table for the painted dessert. Now, a series of chefs from the kitchen come by and throw various ingredients onto the mat. The nitro frozen ice cream flies all over the place and onto you a bit. Various sauces are poured around. It looks like a galaxy. It’s a huge dessert. Unfortunately, it didn’t really taste like anything special. The cake seems like it came from the bakery section of a Safeway grocery store.
18. Balloon – helium, green apple, taffy. Everything is edible from the string to the balloon itself. Inside is helium so you can have some fun when you bite into it. Not the tastiest dessert, but I think that’s OK if you’re eating an edible helium filled balloon. 

And that was it. I do want to say that I found the people who worked here to be wonderful. But I don’t think I’ve ever been to a Michelin tasting menu where I thought the food was bad and ingredients themselves of poor quality until this meal. A lot of times I think the tasting menu spots I’ve visited are at least decent or sometimes I feel the food is high quality but the style isn’t my preference. I felt like this was just a bad meal. I didn’t even find the theatrics to be that great. 

I suppose I was expecting this meal to be more surprising and interesting, but instead it seemed very dated. Even with tempered expectations, Alinea managed to disappoint. But, hey, at least I experienced it once, and it must have been amazing a long time ago.