CHICAGO — The dining room at Alinea is a special place where 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.
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.
Alinea means a new train of thought, and that is precisely what 34-year-old chef 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.
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.
Chef: Taste goes beyond the tongue
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.
Achatz first noticed the little white spot on his tongue in the hectic months leading up to the opening of Alinea. A dentist fitted him for a night guard and told him not to worry.
Achatz was too busy to worry. Achatz and partner Nick Kokonas had found a two-story office building in tony Lincoln Park that they planned to demolish and rebuild into a 20-table restaurant with one of the most exotic menus in the world.
The buzz just grew after the restaurant opened May 4, 2005. It exploded after Gourmet named Alinea the best restaurant in America in October 2006.
In early July 2007, his tongue exploded overnight into a throbbing, swollen mass that left him barely able to swallow. Nothing prepared Achatz for the news. Stage 4 squamous cell cancer. Doctors needed to operate immediately — to cut out three-quarters of his tongue in order to save his life.
“That’s not gonna happen,” Achatz muttered.
Doctor offers another choice
The headlines were stark: Cancer Strikes Top Chef in His Prime.
At the University of Chicago Medical Center, oncologist Everett Vokes read the paper and wondered whether he would see the stricken chef. Achatz walked into his office a few days later.
Even doctors were struck by the irony of Achatz’s case. He didn’t fit the profile for a tongue- cancer patient: He had never smoked, he drank moderately, and he was fit and healthy and young.
“It was just this enormous human tragedy,” said Vokes, who heads a team that specializes in trying to save organs rather than remove them.
Instead of the standard therapy — removing the tumor surgically, followed by radiation and chemotherapy — they would reverse the order. Aggressive chemotherapy, using promising new drugs, followed by radiation to shrink and kill the tumor. Surgery might still be necessary later, but it would be less radical.
By now, three top cancer specialists had told Achatz that it was necessary to remove his tongue. Vokes offered another choice and said there was a 70 percent chance he would be cured.
“Where do I sign?” he asked.
Flavor memory remains
From the start, Achatz made it clear that he considered cancer an unpleasant interruption, that it would not affect his standards or his creativity.
His understanding of ingredients didn’t die with chemo, Achatz pointed out. Nor did his flavor memory. And though he no longer trusted his own palate, he did trust that of his sous-chef who had worked with him for years.
But all the mental fortitude in the world couldn’t conceal the horror of being strapped onto a gurney, a huge, black radiation machine gunning deadly rays into his tongue. Achatz’s face burned. He couldn’t swallow. His mouth became a raging mass of pain and he spent nights throwing up pieces of burnt skin.
It was torture for Achatz to stay away from his restaurant. Though he often drove straight to work after treatment, there were days he simply couldn’t let staff or clients see how sick he was.
In mid-December, Achatz returned to the hospital for a final checkup. He still couldn’t taste, and his immune system was spent.
He needed physical therapy, speech therapy, swallowing therapy, and it would probably be a year before he would feel normal again.
But the scans were clear. The cancer was gone.
