The video below is of two young kids (5 and 9) cooking up a recipe from the Alinea Cookbook. Co-owner of Alinea and also co-author of the cookbook, Nick Kokonas, puts his two children to work on the Pheasant with Shallots, Cider and Burning Oak Leaves recipe. It’s pretty fun to watch, and you get to see the kids making a cider gel, plucking oak tree branches, and ultimately eating the hot skewered pheasant balls. I like when one boy says that the dish they are preparing is only medium-ish in difficulty. Sure it is, kid.

If you aren’t familiar with the restaurant Alinea (pronounced uh-lin-ee-uh), it is one of the best restaurants in the United States, and its owner and head chef, Grant Achatz, is one of the most celebrated chefs in America. The food is – to say the least – fabulously creative but also not that easy to prepare. I’ve never tried making one of his recipes myself, but I did eat at the restaurant a year ago and loved it. You can read about my experience here. While there, I also had the oak branch pheasant balls that the kids are preparing in the video.

The pheasant dish is one of Chef Achatz’ most well known, and it was even featured on Martha Stewart recently. It’s not the most difficult of his dishes to make, but it is a memorable one. Chef Achatz likes to integrate meaningful aromas into his food, and for the oak skewers, the leaves are ignited to give off the smell of burning Autumn leaves while you eat your bite of pheasant. It’s quite creative and pleasing.

If you or your kids are interested in learning how to cook from the Alinea cookbook, there are websites dedicated to preparing Chef Achatz’ recipes. Alinea at Home is a good one, and on that site there is a step-by-step tutorial on the pheasant skewer recipe. Alineaphile is another good site for guidance.

And if you are ever inspired to go to the actual restaurant in Chicago, just be aware that it is very very good and also extremely pricey. The cookbook, however, will cost you about $40.

I just arrived back from the International Housewares Association (IHA) expo in Chicago. It was a fun show to go to, and a great place for those who love kitchen equipment. There were over 2,000 exhibitors showing kitchen and housewares, and I only visited a fraction of them. This time I was mostly focusing on glassware as I am trying to launch a glassware business in the fall sometime, but it was hard to keep away from all the new and unique products.

It was also interesting to attend the cooking theater where several celebrity chefs were giving demonstrations. All in all, I saw Cat Cora, Mario Batali, Paula Deen, Rick Bayless, Todd English, Michael Symon, Ming Tsai, and Stephanie Izard (Top Chef Champion 2008). Richard Blais from the 2008 Top Chef season was also working the SousVide Supreme booth right next to the theater. I also got to see Emeril Lagasse when he made a stop at the All-Clad exhibit. There were also a few other Top Chef contestants hanging around.

On Monday I also attended a benefit dinner at The Publican restaurant sponsored by the Grammy-award winning chamber music ensemble, Eighth Blackbird. You can read about the benefit here. It was a fantastic time with great food and music. Eighth Blackbird performed a concert before the meal and then we walked over to The Publican restaurant where Mario Batali and chef of The Publican, Paul Kahan, prepared a wonderful meal. It was a really good time.

Anyhow, after I finish sorting through all the information that I collected during my visit, I will be featuring some interesting products from the IHA show.

A few nights ago, I dined at a fabulous restaurant in Chicago called Alinea. I am not going to review the restaurant as it is well known as a great place to eat, and in 2006 Gourmet magazine named it the best restaurant in the country. It is good; very very very good, and I am not going to be able to contribute to that discussion.

What I will say is that the eating experience at Alinea under Chef Grant Achatz was a singularly amazing experience. And even though Chef Achatz’s style is often termed molecular gastronomy, I didn’t feel that to be the defining style. If I were to describe it I would say it is the foodie equivalent of Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory. It was haute cuisine, molecular gastronomy, a gourmet theme park, and a food fantasy land — it was essentially food cabaret at its finest.

Even when you enter the restaurant, it is whimsical and amusingly confusing. The entrance is angular and narrows and the ceiling height also drops as you progress down the hallway. You are part of an illusion. In fact, it is very much like the part in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory when they approach the tiny door entrance to Wonka’s factory. But here, as you walk towards the illusory small entrance, a motion sensor opens the real door to reveal a bustling restaurant full of food, diners, and wait staff. You have entered culinary Wonkaland.

But before describing the food, I have to say something about the service. It is impossible to compare the food service at Alinea to that of a regular restaurant; it is a different breed altogether. They take care of you in micro dining rooms within the restaurant, and their every move contributes to the wonder of your meal. At one point, a waiter asked, “I see you are drinking your wine with your left hand. Would you prefer to have your glass on the other side?” And that sounds absurd and made me chuckle at first, but once you eat there it makes sense. The staff setting the table were more akin to an architect drawing up plans or an artist constructing a mosaic. The placement of every dish was important and precise, so the placing of a wine glass was no less important. In other words — it made sense.

So now for the food. As opposed to most American restaurants, you cannot order off a menu. There is only a choice between a smaller ‘tasting’ menu and a larger ‘tour’ menu, and the menu changes about four times a year. The price and courses are set, and frankly the cost is not for the faint of heart, but save up and go at least once in your life if you take food seriously; the experience won’t disappoint. You can order wine from a wine list, but they also have a wine pairing menu that is amazing. It comes at a pretty steep price though, so be prepared to budget for it.

With that said, here are some of the wonder food highlights:

• A lightly breaded pheasant ball pierced with a small oak leaf twig and the leaves were smoldering to give a burning leaf aroma. You eat it like a twig skewer.
• A passion fruit injected with ingredients to make it taste like the famous New Orleans drink: a hurricane. The waiter uses a scissors to open the passion fruit top and you scoop out the fruit as it sits on a glass tube.
• A plate comes out on a pillow that is filled with nutmeg-air that slowly deflates and spreads the aroma of nutmeg as you eat.
• A gulp of potato soup in a small waxen dish comes with an acupuncture needle piercing the wax and suspending some butter, Parmesan, a potato ball and truffle shaving above the soup. You pull out the pin to drop the garnish into the soup and gulp it down. (This dish is pictured above.)

But I think the most amazing dish came at the end. A waiter came over and said, “Can I please remove your water glasses; it will be better that way.” So they clean off the table completely, and you are left to wonder what will come next. Then they place in the center of the table a silicon tablecloth, and two staff unfurl it to leave you with a rubberized table top. Yes, a rubber table. And you just sit there waiting expectantly for the next food wonder to arrive.

Next a young attendant comes out and organizes a set of dishes with zen-like precision on the far end of the table so we can’t see inside. Again, food and wonder are key. Then a chef comes out and proceeds to construct a desert that is placed directly on the rubber table top. He takes broad utensil strokes with a sauce here and there; dribbles tiny droplets; and describes each stroke in the process. It is more like a painting than a dessert. Then they deposit some chocolate that was chilled with liquid nitrogen right in the middle along with other ingredients in piles. That is dessert, and you eat it directly off the table.

At this point we were the first in the room to have dessert, and all eyes were looking at our table. People laughed, stared, and wondered and then did it some more. We were part of the entertainment, and it was an amazing dessert.

So that is Alinea: it is food and entertainment in the best of unimaginable ways, and you are part of it. Chef Achatz will almost literally bring out the snozberries and everlasting gobstoppers and you play your part and eat with amusing surprise. And though the staff aren’t Oompa Loompas, they provide just as much whimsy and wonder as they convey the food to your table. To this day it has been the most amazing eating experience of my life.

For those interested, there are a several online resources focused on Alinea. Two sites: Alineaphile and Alinea at Home are dedicated to all things related to the restaurant’s food and reproducing the dishes at home. They are great resources if you want to experiment with this style of food.

You can also visit the the official sister sites to Alinea such as Alinea Mosaic and Alinea Oenophilia. These sites will give recipes and information about the wines and equipment that accompany the restaurant’s food. You can even subscribe to a wine club where they will send you the wine-pairing bottles for each quarterly menu.

Lastly, if you want to know more about Chef Grant Achatz and his recent battle with tongue cancer that left him temporarily without the sense of taste, there is a good NPR story on him. It is very interesting.