Eugene David
...The One-Minute Pundit

Wednesday, May 11, 2005


We hope the LALATimes won't mind our cutting and pasting so much of this, but it IS interesting:

CHICAGO — Deep in the basement of Moto restaurant, owner and executive chef Homaro Cantu is methodically filling medical syringes with 50 cc of chocolate sauce and shooting the mixture into colorful balloons.

Across the way, a sous-chef grabs a plastic foam box filled with liquid nitrogen, the white smoke billowing out. Nearby, another chef carefully feeds sheets of soybean paper into a Canon i560 inkjet printer, printing out pictures of maki rolls.

Cantu's kitchen has more gear and chemicals than some high school science labs because his goal is to create meals that are so cutting edge they challenge the definition of food.

Cantu's sushi platter routinely has no fish — instead it holds squares of tuna-and-rice-flavored paper. The Caesar salad has no lettuce — only a single spoonful of romaine-flavored ice cream. The menu sometimes is edible and can be crumbled into a bowl of gazpacho — turning it into an alphabet soup.

All this is included in one of the nation's most expensive tasting menus: With paired wine, the 20-course meal costs $240 per person.

That's not counting the tip.

At a time when competition for diners is fierce, a small but growing number of chefs are blazing a strange new trail: creating a dining experience that mixes haute cuisine with extreme science.

In part, the trend comes as a result of the industry's hypercompetitive nature: About 75% of restaurants close within a year of their debut, the National Restaurant Assn. says.


Or to put it in RENDELLSPEAK, "By printing food we get to employ more of the WAITERS and JANITORS and DISHWASHERS and COOKS this city needs to grow in the 21ST-CENTURY ECONOMY!"

Home
Site Meter eXTReMe Tracker