Cancer steals a super chef’s sense of taste

updated 11:27 a.m. ET June 8, 2008

CHICAGO - The dining room at Alinea is a rare and special place where dark-suited waiters glide past tables, carrying trays laden with fantastical creations.

Steelhead roe in coconut suspended from vanilla pods. Granola encrusted bison with oatmeal foam. Jelled apple cider floating in walnut milk and vegetable ash. Sweet potato and bourbon tempura pierced by a smoking cinnamon stick.

Some plates arrive floating on pillows of lavender air, or suspended on bouncing antennas — one-bite explosions of flavor at times so startling diners cry out in delight.

Dining as performance art.

It is one reason people flock to this 3-year-old restaurant named the best in the country by Gourmet Magazine and considered by many to be among the best in the world.

They come for the food, and for the sheer joy of sampling what the genius young chef with the magical touch has dreamed up next.

Alinea means new train of thought and that is precisely what 34-year-old Grant Achatz is all about. He wants diners to be dazzled by his daring, to chuckle at his whimsy and even to weep at the memories some dishes evoke.

Charles Rex Arbogast / ASSOCIATED PRESS Chef Grant Achatz considered his cancer an unpleasant interruption, not a death sentence.

After spending four to six hours tasting up to 24 courses, Achatz says, "I want guests to feel like they have just experienced the performance of a lifetime."

But the most startling aspect of that performance is not the food. It is that the man who spends 17-hours-a-day orchestrating it, has never tasted some of his creations.

Last summer Achatz was diagnosed with advanced tongue cancer.

His latest dishes were conceived at a local chemotherapy clinic as poison dripped into his body, killing not just his malignant cells but also his sense of taste.

Moved by food
Taste, Achatz says, is more than what happens on the tongue. "It is about emotion, translating a feeling, a memory, an experience."

Achatz is thoughtful and soft-spoken, his thin, freckled face radiating youth and vigor, though he acknowledges the toll cancer has taken. Gone is the once ever-present can of Diet Coke. These days he downs protein drinks, trying to build back some of the weight he lost. He carries a little bottle of lidocaine, which he sips to numb the pain.

But illness is not something he focuses on at Alinea, where everything is about creativity and emotion.

"We want to reset your mind," Achatz says, grinning.

Achatz has been doing this since he was a boy cooking omelets at his parents restaurant in St. Clair, Mich. His father recalls how, even then, Achatz thrived on the intensity, the teamwork, the drama of the kitchen.

After graduating from the Culinary Institute of America, Achatz landed a job at Thomas Keller's renowned Napa Valley restaurant, The French Laundry, when he was just 23.

Under Keller, Achatz learned how to prepare classics like "Oysters and Pearls" — Malpeque oysters nestled on a bed of tapioca topped with a mound of caviar. But he also learned the sheer force of will it takes to work in a top kitchen where pressure is absolute and dishes must be perfect every time.

Achatz reveres Keller; his youngest son is named for him. But he was restless to find his own culinary voice. In 2000 he spent a week in Spain with chef Ferran Adria at the El Bulli restaurant in Catalonia. Achatz was mesmerized.

'It was Mars!'
Adria is at the forefront of a cuisine called molecular gastronomy — a kind of fusion of kitchen and science lab. Ingredients like agar agar and carrageenan are used to thicken and mold food in unconventional ways. Foams and warm jellies and liquid nitrogen all play their parts.

Achatz returned to California with a new sense of inventiveness — one that would find expression the following year when he tried out for top chef at Trio in Chicago.

"His food wasn't just out there," owner Henry Adaniya said. "It was from Mars!"

It was also the best Adaniya had ever tasted. The black truffle explosion — a single ravioli that burst with warm truffle broth when Adaniya bit into it — eventually became a signature dish.

Trio became a sensation under Achatz. When Achatz won the James Beard Foundation's rising star award in 2003 Adaniya was as proud as if the chef was his own son.

Yet he couldn't help but wonder about the toll on Achatz's health. Even by the grueling industry standards, Achatz worked harder and with more intensity than anyone Adaniya had ever seen.

But Achatz had a vision and he was unstoppable. Especially after he met the man who would become his great friend and champion.

Nick Kokonas, a derivatives trader who retired in his 30s, had been a regular at Trio for years. But Achatz's food amazed him.

In January 2004 Kokonas asked Achatz to create a special meal for his wife's birthday. "She's ethnically Latvian, speaks Japanese and loves Thai food," Kokonas said.

The 25-course extravaganza — Latvian sorrel with smoked ham hocks, frozen Willakenzie verjus with thyme, liquid cake of kaffir lime and banana — became the meal that launched Alinea.

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