When Allen Hemberger dined at Grant Achatz's pioneering Alinea restaurant in Chicago in 2008, he had no idea it would set him off on a 5 year odyssey to the heart of modernist cuisine — a journey on which he would lose and then rediscover his creative confidence.
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00:00When I realized that I had 10 dishes left, there was something inside of me that was
00:25like, this is going to end.
00:27And I hadn't really realized that.
00:29It's such a huge book, and there's so much stuff to do that it never actually occurred
00:33to me that I would finish it.
00:35I got down to the last dish, and there was this sort of sense of suspense and excitement
00:40kind of building.
00:41Sarah and all of my friends were like, this is going to be great.
00:46But I was sad.
00:47I was sad that this was ending, and I kind of don't want it to.
00:51And then the last dish itself, it was fine.
00:55It wasn't my favorite dish of the whole project, and it wasn't my least favorite dish.
00:59It was just the way that it ended.
01:08In 2008, we went to a restaurant in Chicago that one of my friends had told me about.
01:12It was this crazy molecular gastronomy restaurant where they serve you plates of foams and gels
01:17and stuff like that.
01:18And I didn't really think of it as anything particularly different from anything else
01:22I'd ever eaten before until I got there and was like, what is this?
01:26Bellinia specializes in a type of cuisine most people call molecular gastronomy.
01:31And most people think of molecular gastronomy as like science-y cooking.
01:34A lot of powders and foams, gels, a lot of basically very heavily manipulated food.
01:42What they're doing is not really about foams and powders.
01:45It's incorporating emotion as an ingredient in their dishes.
01:48When you taste it, there's something familiar about it.
01:50The way my dad used to burn leaves in the backyard as a kid, or oh, this reminds me
01:54of the way bubblegum tastes from a parade.
01:57And I felt like I had Windex sprayed in my eyes or something.
02:00I was just like, oh my gosh, I've never seen anything like this.
02:03How are they doing this?
02:04How does this work?
02:05And I was obsessed enough about it that Sarah was like, yeah, let's get you this cookbook
02:08and you can figure out how they're doing all this.
02:10The whole thing is around 400 and some odd pages.
02:13There are 107 dishes and 400 and some odd components.
02:17Each dish is made up of these sort of little sub-recipes.
02:21It's just an object of beauty.
02:22It doesn't scale anything down.
02:23It doesn't really make it any easier for a home chef.
02:26But I was curious about it, so I thought I would try one.
02:29And then, ever since then, I've just kind of kept going.
02:32I don't remember ever making a decision, I'm going to make up everything.
02:36It was more that I'd never made the decision to stop.
02:40I've shot like 10,000, 12,000 photos over the course of it, and the whole thing lasted
02:45about five years, just to go start to finish through all 107 recipes in the book.
02:50On its face, it's me cooking every dish in this cookbook, but I guess in my head, it's
02:56quite a bit more than that.
03:05I've often wondered if he was like this before he started Alinea, or if Alinea sort of brought
03:09it out of him.
03:10And this tenacity, obsession, whatever you want to call it, like this determination that
03:15he's had with the whole project, he's just become more ferocious.
03:21I don't really know what the magnitude scale is, but it's 10, whatever that scale is.
03:25It's like all the way at the ridiculous end.
03:27It was a little bit addictive.
03:29Every time I'd finished one dish, I would just be excited to do the next one.
03:34I started spending months and months researching, like, this is where I get this fish, or this
03:38is where I get this seaweed.
03:40A couple of them involved service pieces that I couldn't get a hold of.
03:45And so I was like, alright, well, I'm going to just figure out how to make my own.
03:48So I started taking classes for, like, welding, or woodworking, or machining classes, all
03:53this other crazy stuff.
03:54And dishes were awesome.
03:55They were, you know, they were just as perfect as I could have made them.
03:59And that felt so satisfying, and really, like, this is great.
04:06You know, we had a dish like this the first time we ate at Alinea, and I was like, how
04:10did they do this?
04:16This stuff is crazy.
04:19Yeah, because you just don't expect it to be that thick.
04:22Well, you give it.
04:27It's all the way awesome.
04:28Yeah.
04:29It's so, so good.
04:30Is this, like, one of the favorites, you would say?
04:33Yeah.
04:34I always feel a little bad because, like, I express my emotions on a scale of, like,
04:39one to five, and Alan is, like, on a one to twenty.
04:42And so when I'm like, oh, that was great, like, I genuinely am, like, really excited
04:46about it.
04:47So I feel a little bit of, like, I've got to, like, put on a good show when I'm eating
04:50your dish.
04:51Even though it's, like, genuinely good, I'm always a little, like...
04:55You got to make your eyebrows go up a little higher than normal.
04:57Ah!
05:00So it's like, you know that I like it.
05:01Yeah.
05:02Thanks.
05:03I mean, I'm a pretty picky eater.
05:04I don't like sauces.
05:06I like some sauces.
05:08I've gotten a lot better since being with him.
05:10But yeah, the gels, like, that's just a texture that I just can't get on board with.
05:16There's a lot of sous vide meat.
05:17That's the water bath down there that he was cooking the bubblegum in.
05:21It's just, like, a little soft cube of meat.
05:23The monkfish thing I just flat out didn't try.
05:27Foie gras, nope.
05:30It's, yeah, it's challenging.
05:36It's a pretty overwhelming amount of time that he's put into this.
05:39So he'll, like, shop on a Thursday or Friday, and then he'll spend all day Saturday and
05:43almost all day Sunday.
05:44And then he'll shoot it, and then he'll put it on his blog, and that's, like, you know,
05:47that's the entire weekend.
05:48It's the Alinea project.
05:50I got to a point, you know, I don't know, two-thirds, three-quarters of the way through.
05:55It's just sort of turned into this obsession, and I was like, can I do them as excellently
05:59as they do it in the restaurant?
06:00And so I kind of got it in my head that I wasn't doing a good job.
06:04He's, yeah, he's very hard on himself, and that's just part of his wiring.
06:08It's hard to undo that wiring.
06:10And it got to be kind of a problem until, at one point, Sarah noticed that I was, like,
06:16bummed out about it a lot, and she was kind of like, why are you doing this?
06:20It was, you know, it was hard to see.
06:24It made me feel lonely, and seeing how much it was impacting her made me feel suddenly
06:29very unlonely.
06:30You know, like, we're kind of in this together.
06:32I had to sort of figure out what doing a good job meant.
06:37As the project evolved, I sort of took this detour.
06:41I was really concerned with the way the restaurant saw me, and I kind of wanted to get their
06:48attention.
06:49I kind of equated doing a good job with, like, getting some sort of positive feedback from
06:53the chef, from Akis itself, you know, and that became this, like, ferocious need.
06:59This is where I get disappointed.
07:02I'll cook it a little bit longer and see what happens.
07:07This could be very anti-climactic.
07:11Alinea itself is co-owned by Nick Kokonas and Grant Akis.
07:17Grant used to work with Thomas Keller at the French Laundry.
07:20He's an extremely talented chef.
07:22While I was working my way through the book, he was larger than life to me.
07:27He was just this mysterious figure in my head, like, this guy is a genius, and I kind of
07:31was like, I want to buddy up with you, but I don't know how to do it.
07:36Eventually, I sort of came into contact with him.
07:40He was very brief.
07:41Like, his emails were super terse.
07:43So, I took it to mean, like, yeah, he's not into me at all.
07:47You know, he's not into this.
07:48Anyway, at one point, about halfway into the project, there's a dish, this ridiculous dish
07:53involving the spiral of two gels, and so when I tried it, it fell apart.
07:58You know, I'd just get it to kind of flop over, and then it would just kind of collapse.
08:02And I made it and remade it and remade it and remade it, and I just couldn't get it working.
08:06So, I'm going to cheat.
08:07I'm going to add more gelatin, which made a firmer gel, and I was able to make the spiral that way,
08:12but I was like, I probably cheated.
08:14It doesn't taste the right way.
08:15I suck.
08:16And so, I wrote him an email.
08:17I was like, I can't get this thing to work.
08:19Can you give me just a couple tips?
08:21And I waited and waited and waited for several days and sort of thought, ah, he's not going to respond.
08:25And eventually, he did, and it was just one line.
08:28It said, can you come to Chicago?
08:29I'll do you a demo.
08:30I presumed that that meant he was going to, like, have pre-made some gels and would demonstrate,
08:35here's how you do this roll, and that the whole thing would last, like, five minutes.
08:39That's not what happened.
08:41So, I bought my ticket and flew to Chicago, and I made this decision up front.
08:46Like, I'm not going to take a camera.
08:48I'm not going to write about this.
08:49Photography affects a relationship between one person and another.
08:53So, I was like, all right, no cameras.
08:56I showed up on a rainy day one afternoon in Chicago and spent an afternoon with him.
09:06Do you want me to tell this story about this?
09:08Yes.
09:09Okay.
09:10You know, I had the back door of the restaurant there, 1723 North Halstead,
09:13and I was like, all right.
09:14So, I pulled my phone out and took one photo.
09:16It was the only photo I took for the date.
09:18I knocked on the back door.
09:19No one was there.
09:20And so, I sort of threw it open, and it empties directly into the Alinea kitchen.
09:27There's, like, 50 chefs and their whites there.
09:29He was like, hey, what's up?
09:30You know, welcome.
09:31Give me five minutes here.
09:32He said, we're right in the middle of finishing up some prep work.
09:34And then it was just, like, he and I hanging out in the kitchen together.
09:38And he pulls out some papers and throws them down on the countertop.
09:41And he's like, all right, come here.
09:42Tell me what went wrong.
09:44And I was like, oh, we're going to make this from scratch.
09:48Our little gels are not set yet.
09:51You know, there's still some time to kill.
09:52And so, the chef sort of, like, looks around, and he's like,
09:55well, it's not quite ready yet.
09:57Do you want to help us plate some stuff?
09:58And while the whole rest of the day was totally terrifying,
10:01like, that moment was maybe the most comfortable because I was like,
10:05well, I know how to do this.
10:07Then one of the front of the house guys comes over, and he's like,
10:10are these ready to go?
10:11And I was like, yep, takes them out.
10:13And I was like, I just did that.
10:15That's crazy.
10:16And then the chef was like, all right, let's see how these gels are doing.
10:19And he starts trying to roll them, and they did the same thing.
10:21They fell apart.
10:22And he said, hmm, well, I mean, that recipe could be wrong.
10:26It could just be wrong.
10:28And I was like, I spent the past two and a half years trusting that
10:33everything was right.
10:35I sort of treated it like a Bible.
10:36So for him to sort of casually be like, oh, yeah, it could be wrong.
10:39And I was like, so how do you fix it then?
10:40He said, yeah, you just add some more gelatin,
10:43which is the thing that I had done.
10:45And I was like, I was right.
10:48And it was this kind of amazing moment where I just felt like, I don't know,
10:54I felt so wound up about this project and about, like,
10:56feeling like I wasn't good enough and that I was kind of just a hack.
10:59And to realize that I had made a decision on my own
11:02and it had been the right one, even as insignificant as that is,
11:05like, it just made me feel so validating.
11:13I had always assumed up to that point that when things went wrong,
11:18it was because I was messing up.
11:20It made me approach the book in a very different way,
11:22where I sort of learned how to trust myself.
11:25So that shaped all of the rest of the recipes.
11:36I had sort of regarded creativity as this, like, you go to sleep at night,
11:49you get struck by inspiration.
11:51And I was like, well, maybe it's willingness to keep doing something
11:55until you get it honed.
11:57And just accepting that it was going to take me a while to work up to that
12:00and being okay with it and being ready for it
12:02is, I guess, something that I learned and I would want to impart on myself years ago.
12:07Just be like, hang in there, dude.
12:09You'll get better at this.