Thursday, August 5, 2010

A couple Alinea pics

While we didn't take pictures of most of the meal, we did manage to grab a couple of snap shots...they aren't great, but I might as well post them. A shot of Alinea's impeccably clean, calm, quite kitchen. It seems like more of a lab than a kitchen.

Here is a picture of the English Pea dish that I liked so much. The dark spheres are "sherry caviar" that explode in your mouth when you eat them. Very cool.
And here are some shots capturing the process for the chocolate dish that they finish with. They start by laying out a rubber or latex table cloth, painting it with white chocolate sauce and arranging chunks of meringue, some type of coconut pudding or mousse, and chocolate disks (in the cups)
Then they spread chocolate cookie crumbs around the table and place these big, freeze dried chunks of chocolate mousse in the center
They smash the mousse into smaller pieces and then add chunks of menthol that are very, very intense....like Altoids on steroids.
And here is the finished product. Quite a complicated dish for something that the menu calls "Chocolate, coconut, menthol, hyssop."

3 comments:

Unknown said...

How awesome! this is on my list of restaurants i must go to in chicago. i'm glad to hear it exceeded all lofty expectations :)

Jen said...

i am so jealous. I've been wanting to go here! when you say prohibitively expensive, what ballpark are we talking?

Sam said...

If you get the wine pairing, it comes out to around $400 per person.