When I realized that I had 10 dishes left,
there was something inside of me that was like ‘this is going to end’ and I hadn’t really realized that.
You know, it’s such a huge book and there’s so much stuff to do that it never actually occurred to me that I would finish it.
I got down to the last dish and there was this sort of sense of suspense and excitement building.
Sarah and all of my friends are like ‘this is going to be great’ but I was sad, you know. Sad this was ending.
And I kind of don’t want it to. And then the last dish itself, it was fine.
It wasn’t my favorite dish of the whole project, and it wasn’t my least favorite dish. It was just the way that it ended.
In 2008, we went to a restaurant in Chicago that one of my friends had told me about.
It was this crazy molecular gastronomy restaurant where they serve you plates of foams and, you know, gels and stuff like that
and I didn’t really think of it as anything particularly different from anything else I had ever eaten before until I got there
and was like, “What is this?”
Alinea specializes in a type of cuisine most people call molecular gastronomy
and most people think of molecular gastronomy as like sciency cooking.
A lot of powders and foams. Gels. A lot of, basically, very heavily manipulated food.
What they’re doing is not really about foams and powders.
It’s incorporating emotion as an ingredient in their dishes.
When you taste it, there’s something familiar about it. The way my dad used to burn leaves in the backyard as a kid.
Or, oh this reminds me of the way bubblegum tastes from a parade.
And I felt like I had Windex© sprayed in my eyes or something.
I was just like, ”Oh my God. I’ve never seen anything like this. How are they doing this? How does this work?”
And I was obsessed enough about it that Sarah was like, ”Yeah, let’s get you this cookbook and you can figure out how they’re doing all this.”
The whole thing is around 400 and some odd pages. There are 107 dishes.
And 400 and some odd components — each dish is made up of these sort of little sub-recipes.
It”s just an object of beauty.
It doesn’t scale anything down. It doesn’t really make it any easier for a home chef.
But I was curious about it, so I thought I would try one. And then ever since then I have just kept going.
I don’t remember ever making the decision: “I’m going to make everything.” It was more that I never made the decision to stop.
So I’ve shot 10,000 or 12,000 photos over the course of it and the whole thing lasted about 5 years.
To go start to finish through all 107 recipes in the book.
On it’s face, it’s me cooking every dish in this cookbook but I guess in my head, it’s quite a bit more than that.
I’ve often wondered if he was like this before he started Alinea or if Alinea sort of brought it out of him
and this tenacity, obsession, whatever you want to call it — like this determination that he’s had with the whole project.
He’s just become more ferocious.
I don’t really know what the magnitude scale is but it’s ten. Whatever that scale is, it’s like all the way at the ridiculous end.
It was a little bit addictive. Every time I’d finished one dish I would just be excited to do the next one.
I started spending months and months researching: this is where I get this fish or this is where I get this seaweed.
A couple of them involve service pieces that I couldn’t get a hold of...
and so was like, ”Ok, I”m just going to figure out how to make my own.”
So I started taking classes for like welding or woodworking or machining classes. All this other crazy stuff.
The dishes were awesome. They were just as perfect as I could have made them. And that felt so satisfying.
And really like, this is great.
You know we had a dish like this the first time we ate at Alinea and I was like, “How did they do this?”
This stuff is crazy.
The taffy?
Yeah, cause you just don’t expect it to be that thick.
What do you give it?
It’s all the way awsome.
It’s so, so good.
Is this one of the favorites you would say?
Yeah.
I always feel a little bad because I express my emotions on a scale of 1 to 5 and Allen is like on a 1 to 20
and so when I’m like, ”Oh, that was great” like I genuinely am really excited about it
though I feel a little bit that I have to put on a good show when I’m eating your dish.
because even though it’s genuinely good I’m always a little, like...
You’ve got to make your eyebrows go up a little higher than normal?
So that you know that Iike it.
Yeah, thanks.
I mean I’m a pretty picky eater. I don’t like sauces.
I like some sauces. I’ve gotten a lot better since being with him.
But yeah, the gels. Like that’s just a texture that I just can’t get on board with.
There’s a lot of sous-vide meat. That’s the water bath down there that he was cooking the bubblegum in.
It’s just like little soft cube of meat.
The monkfish thing I just flat out didn’t try.
Foie gras, nope.
Yeah, it’s challenging.
It’s a pretty overwhelming amount of time that he’s put in to this.
So he’ll shop on a Thursday or Friday then spend all day Saturday and
almost all day Sunday and then he’ll shoot it and then he’ll put it on his blog and that’s like you know that’s the entire weekend.
It’s the Alinea Project.
I got to a point you know I don’t know two-thirds, three-quarters of the way through it just sort of turned into this obsession.
And I was like ‘can I do them as excellently as they do it in the restaurant?’
And so I kind of got it in my head that I wasn’t doing a good job.
Yeah, he’s very hard on himself and that’s just part of his wiring. It’s hard to undo that wiring.
And it got to be kind of a problem.
Until at one point, Sarah noticed that I was like bummed out about it a lot and she was kind of like ‘why are you doing this?’
It was hard to see.
It made me feel lonely and seeing how much it was impacting her made me feel suddenly un-lonely.
You know, like we’re kind of in this together.
I had to sort of figure out what doing a good job meant.
As the project evolved, I sort of took this detour.
I was really concerned with the way the restaurant saw me and I kind of wanted to get their attention.
I kind of equated doing a good job with getting some sort of positive feedback from the chef, from Achatz himself.
You know, that became just like ferocious need.
This is where I get disappointed.
I’ll cook it a little bit longer and see what happens.
It’s going to be very anticlimactic.
Alinea itself is co-owned by Nick Kokonas and Grant Achatz.
Grant used to work with Thomas Keller at the French Laundry. He’s extremely talented chef.
While I was working my way through the book, he was larger than life to me.
He was just mysterious, bigger in my head like ‘this guy is a genius.’
And I kind of was like ‘I want to buddy up with you but I don’t know how to do it.’
Eventually, I sort of came into contact with him.
He was very brief. Like his emails were super terse.
So I took it to mean like ‘yeah, he’s not into me at all. He’s not into this.’
Anyway at one point about half way into the project, there’s a dish.
This ridiculous dish involving the spiral of two gels and so when I tried it, it fell apart.
I’d just get it to kind of flop over and then it would just kind of collapse.
And I made it, remade it and remade it and remade it and I just couldn’t get it working.
So I’m going to cheat. I’m going to add more gelatin which made a firmer gel and I was able to make the spiral that way.
But I was like, ‘I probably cheated.’ It doesn’t taste the right way. I suck.
And so I wrote him an email and I was like ‘I can’t get this thing to work. Can you give me just a couple of tips?’
And I waited and waited and waited for several days and I sort thought ‘oh, he’s not going to respond.’ Eventually, he did and it was just one line.
It said ‘can you come to Chicago and I’ll do you a demo.’
I presumed that that meant he was going to like
have premade some gels and would demonstrate ‘here’s how you do this roll’
and the whole thing would last five minutes.
That’s not what happened.
So, I bought my ticket and flew to Chicago.
And I’ve made this decision up front, I’m not going to take a camera,
I’m not going to write about this. Photography affects a relationship between one person and another.
So I was like alright ‘no cameras.’
I showed up on a rainy day one afternoon in Chicago and spent an afternoon with him.
Do you want me to tell the story about this?... Ok.
You know, I had the back door of the there, 1723 North Halsted
and I was like ‘all right,’ pulled my phone out took one photo. It’s the only photo that I took for the day.
I knocked on the back door, no one was there and so I sort of threw it open and it empties directly into the Alinea kitchen
There were like 50 chefs in their whites there.
And he was just like ‘hey, what’s up? Welcome. Give me 5 minutes here. We’re right in the middle of finishing up some prep work’
and then it was just like he and I hanging out in the kitchen together
and he pulls out some papers and throws them down on the countertop and he’s like ‘all right. Come here. Tell me what went wrong.’
And I was like ‘oh, we’re going to make this from scratch.’
Our little gels are not set yet. There’s still some time to kill.
So chef’s like looks around and he’s like ‘well, it’s not quite ready yet. Do you want to help us plate some stuff?’
And while the whole rest of the day was totally terrifying like that moment was maybe the most comfortable because I was like ‘well, I know how to do this.’
Then one of the front of the house guys comes over and he was like ‘these ready to go?’ I was like ‘yep’ and he takes them out.
I was like ‘I just did that. That’s crazy.’
And then chef was like ‘let’s see how these gels are doing.’ And he starts trying to roll them and they did the same thing. They fell apart.
And he said ‘well, that recipe could be wrong. It could just be wrong.’
And I was like ‘I spent the past two and a half years trusting that everything was right.’
I sort of treated it like a bible so for him to sort of casually be like ‘yeah, it could be wrong.’
And I was like ‘so how do you fix it then?’ and he said ‘yeah, you add – just add some more gelatin.’
Which is the thing that I had done and I was like ‘I was right.’
And this was this kind of amazing moment where I just felt like – I don’t know –
I felt so would up about this project and about feeling like I wasn’t good enough and I was kind of just a hack.
And to realize that I had made a decision on my own that had been the right one.
Even as insignificant as that is, it just made me feel so — it was so validating.
I had always assumed up to that point that when things went wrong it was because I was messing up.
Like it made me approach the book in a very different way where I sort of learned how to trust myself.
So that shaped all of the rest of the recipes.
I sort of regarded creativity as this like ‘you go to sleep at night, you get struck by inspiration.’
And I was like maybe it’s willingness to keep doing something until you get it honed
and just accepting that it was going to take me a while to work up to that and being ok with it and being ready for it
is I guess something that I learned and I would want to impart on myself years ago.
I just feel like ‘hang in there, dude. You’ll get better at this.’