when you want, where you want.
Alinea Comes to New York, at Last
Photo: Lanna Apisukh
Rain came down in sheets on the opening night of the month-long residency of Alinea at Olmsted. Grant Achatz’s high-caliber, hypertechnical Chicago restaurant Alinea turned 20 years old this year, and since Greg Baxtrom, chef of Brooklyn’s Olmsted, had been there at the very beginning, Achatz was visiting his mentee to celebrate. “I began thinking how many people have come through the restaurant and gone on to do amazing things,” Achatz explains. “I wanted to involve the alumni. Greg was on my shortlist.”
Baxtrom was a cooking-obsessed 19-year-old Eagle Scout looking to interview the then-unknown Achatz when he walked into the restaurant in 2005. He ended up working in the kitchen for three and a half years, leaving after he’d risen to become a sous-chef. When, nearly a decade later, he opened Olmsted, Alinea’s influence was felt in the playful preparations like a Christo-orange carrot crêpe and a sweet-pea falafel. “The best compliment I got early on,” Baxtrom says, “was it felt like if Alinea and Blue Hill Stone Barns had a casual baby.”
The demand for seats at the collaboration has been extraordinary. As soon as the residency was announced in February, tickets, which cost $455 for one person, sold out. (More will be released gradually through the restaurant’s run.) Alinea’s residency in New York goes far beyond the usual pop-up M.O.; the whole space has been reimagined. The private dining room has been turned into an old-timey library. The covered backyard is transformed into a greenhouse. And the main dining room has become some kind of futuristic vessel. “We did this all in two days,” says Baxtrom, with equal measures of exhaustion and pride. “Short runway,” agrees Achatz.
Alinea is known for a certain vision of maximalist modernist cooking. The collaboration keeps the mondo aesthetic going. The dinner unfolds over five locations and offers nearly 20 courses. It has many layers, no small amount of theatricality, and a soundtrack that includes both the Kronos Quartet’s “Requiem for a Dream” and the Beastie Boys’ “No Sleep Till Brooklyn.” Jaywalking is involved. So are quatrains, black lights, truffles, caviar, and charred Arctic char. There are four seatings each night, from 5:30 to 9:15, with between 20 and 24 guests per turn. Almost the entire Alinea staff has relocated for the month, many doubled up in Airbnbs around the city.
Every meal starts in the library. On an antique desk, an Underwood typewriter has a single sheet of paper in its maw. “Take What Is Yours.” An open guest book sits on an armchair, fountain pen uncapped. From a record player next to a sepia-toned globe, lit by long tapered candles, Leoš Janáček’s “Sinfonietta” crackles and pops. The first course is had by the window where a contraption made of multiple antennae sits. At the tip of each rod, like the inflorescence of a cattail, is a tiny square of everything bagel topped with lox, pickled red onion, a fried caper, whipped cream cheese, and dill.
On the bookshelves, beside the Escoffiers and Phaidons, sit multiple novels by Haruki Murakami. They are large with bright-red spines and bold white letters. A suited server instructs guests to pluck the book from the shelf. Achatz says he was inspired by a particular scene in Murakami’s 2002 novel Kafka on the Shore. “It’s about time and reflection and projection, so we wanted to have elements of the past, the present, and future,” he told me after the meal. These are not books at all but booklike boxes. Inside the hollow cavity is a small flashlight, a teensy-weensy pizza box, and a card on which is written a pair of rhyming couplets. “You’ll need the flashlight later,” instructs a server.
Inside the pizza box is the second course: a small triangle of rice paper (very thin crust!) on which the flavors of pizza — dehydrated ground pizza crust, mozzarella powder, tomato powder, and a bunch of other powders — are affixed. “Let it dissolve on your tongue,” says another server. (There are many servers.) The final course in the library, melding future and past, is a “Chicago dog”: two discs of translucent hot-dog water — made of charred hot-dog stock run through a rotary evaporator — topped with a tiny brunoise of tomato, compressed onion, a slice of sport pepper, and a neon-green relish fluid gel. Each sits atop a monocle, which itself rests upon a postcard of Chicago.
Hot dog slurped, we are bidden to examine the poetry written on the card found inside the faux Murakami: “Mushrooms sprout where shadows creep / The path is dark, the roots run deep. / Take your flashlight, hold it tight — You’ll need its glow to guide the night.” With that, we’re led through a moss-lined hallway into the back garden. Along the walls, in custom-made glass vessels, are puffed porcini-mushroom crisps with pine-nut mushroom butter. We pluck and eat, deposit our flashlights, and continue into the backyard.
This sets off an unceasing procession of courses; five courses are served in the back garden. Few involve a traditional knife and fork. “The monotony of fork, knife, and spoon that we do our whole lives,” says Achatz, “it becomes second nature. We have to break that. It’s a little alarming, a little different.” Caviar, for instance, that sits atop a disk of pineapple gelée studded with vesicles of finger lime, arrives in a curved pebbled glass meant to tactilely mimic the experience of caviar itself. That vessel, alongside 3,000 pounds of other material, arrived in a shipping container and two vans from Chicago a few days before. A course called “explosion,” an Alinea mainstay, consists of a black truffle, Parmesan raviolo served on a single spoon with no plate at all. “Make sure you seal your lips around it,” says the server. Brown-butter fried frog legs are served beside potted Brooklyn evergreens doused in scented water. A nod to Chinese takeout, beef and broccoli (Australian Wagyu short rib, broccoli stem, broccoli purée, fried florets, razor-shaved broccoli cells) is served atop a hot slab of concrete and finished with a Brooklyn Brewery beer gelée “graffiti.”
After the concrete is cleared, the meal moves to the main dining room of Olmsted. The walls are lined with aluminum foil. It feels like being in a kid’s lunch sack. Between the tables, kept taut by hidden strings, are sheets of translucent fabric.
Everyone sits before large, opaque glass columns. “All rise,” calls a server. Dutifully, everyone shuffles to their feet. “Sometimes, you have to confront your fears,” he says, “before taking what is yours. So please punch the top of the cylinder and enjoy.” We punch open the top of the cylinder, where a solitary prawn, skewered by a vanilla bean, is our reward. Having confronted our fears, we eat the prawn and sit down again. Maple-syrup-cured charred Arctic char arrives on a toadstool-like pedestal. Flipped over, one sees secreted into the empty space char roe and carrot curry pearls held in a gelée. In another, cauliflower is served with goat-milk curds masquerading as floret. Then an Alinea classic — Hot Potato/Cold Potato — is presented in a complicated vessel, a bowl that needs directions that, when properly operated, plunges a sphere of hot potato into a cold potato soup. The final dish, one that Baxtrom used to prepare at Alinea, is squab accompanied by a realistic strawberry made of beeswax, strawberry purée, and lemon balm.
Then it’s time to go outside, where employees gamely hold umbrellas on the deserted street. (By this time, it is around midnight.) We cross the street into Amorina, whose owner is on a monthlong Alinea-sponsored vacation. The entire space is shrouded in white fabric. The tables are white; the staff wear white slippers, and the floor is photo-studio white too. A procession of chefs stream from the kitchen in single-line formation. Each holds a yellow chalice that they set upon the table. In it sits a baked Alaska made with barrel-stave-smoked ice cream. They torch the meringue. It’s all very The Menu meets Wild Wild Country. In front of each table, the chef swoops and swooshes ruby-red syrups and taupe puddles. This is the famous Paint dessert (known in the kitchen as the Mat Set). They shuffle away. Suddenly, the lights change to black light and the Beastie Boys’ “No Sleep Till Brooklyn” begins to blare. In the light, the antique glass goblets glow a psychedelic yellow. The cherry swirls emit an Upside Down glow, and the banana sauce radiates a faint uranium glimmer.
By the time the meal ends, it is well past midnight. The rain has stopped. It’s hard to know what to feel. Full? Yes. Satisfied? Maybe. Where’s the line between silly and spectacular, try-hard and transcendent? It has been washed away. The effort is heroic; nothing here is nonchalant, and though the experience is seamless, to think of the sheer amount of work — the glass polishers ceaselessly cleaning, the servers trotting back and forth across Vanderbilt in the rain, the chefs slipping in and out of their slippers, the combined kitchen staff, the mass of allusions made and gelées set — it’s impossible not to be awed. In the words of Murakami, “Once the storm is over, you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure, in fact, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm, you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s all about.”
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