Agape at Alinea (long)

AGAPE AT ALINEA

A dinner at Alinea is to be reminded of how Charlie Trotter has, like Alice Waters and Rick Bayless, transformed American cuisine. The impact of a chef is, like a teacher, not only in his/her creations, but in influence. As little Waters spread over the American landscape preaching the doctrine of the local and the pure, as little Baylesses covered the landscape reminding us that ethnic ingredients can be as haute as any, Trotter's students - whether directly trained by him or not - proclaim that gastronomy is, after all, a branch of philosophy. A chef as Cu.D., doctor of cuisine. Unlike the great French chefs, often working class men trained through harsh apprenticeship, creating amazing robust explosions of flavor, the new American chef is an aspiring intellectual. While we do not (yet) require cooks to receive a Masters of Culinary Arts (a fearsome and faux MFA), can that be far away? Our new chefs wish to amaze us with the idea of dining: robust hunks of meat are out, deconstruction is in.

This trend, if trend it be, is all to the good, until it becomes old. The more ideas of how to cook, serve, and eat, the better is a diners lot. And for a cuisine of amazement - Cuisine Agape - Chicago is Ground Zero. With Homero Cantu's science experiments at Moto, and Graham Bowles subversively straining at the constraints of hotel dining at Avenues, Chicago is what San Francisco, New Orleans, and New York once were. (As on contemporary Broadway, most of the important restaurants are imports from beyond the Hudson). In what is the most widely awaited, significant restaurant opening of the year, Grant Achatz has given us Alinea. Bowles, Cantu, and Achatz were all influenced by Trotter, directly or indirectly, and it shows. Even if some of the impulse derives from Ferran Adria at El Bulli (I haven't eaten there, so cannot speculate), much of the inspiration comes from Lincoln Park. These chefs confront the modern diner's ennui and attempt to shake, rattle, and roll. Dishes, unlike any other, breaking conventions, destroying paradigms are the order of the night.

The place of the chef is evident in the centrality of the pre fixe menu. The control that diners once held over the kitchen in selected those dishes that appealed to them as clients (even asking that chefs, like portrait painters, fix the imagined errors) is transformed so that now the chef is in charge. At Alinea, this is evident from the moment of arrival in which supplicants at the alter of cuisine find no signage (not even a cross of knife and fork) as if to suggest that this restaurant will either sell itself or sell itself out. The entrance to Alinea ("Yellow Truffle" has provide astonishing photos on eGullet) is a remarkable, if somewhat frightening space, in which the scalloped gray passage seems ever narrowing and the ceiling apparently lowering, ending, it seemed, in an impossible walkway: the door can only be seen as one reaches it. The customer is put in his place at the outset.

After inquiring about food allergies, the customer becomes the chef's audience, not the chef's master. At Alinea, one is provided only that flatware that Chef Achatz feels is required. (One of my strongest responses to my first meal at Moto was similarly how Chef Cantu controlled my experience of dining by doling out only those utensils that he wished for me to use). The serving pieces, too, reveal the chef's control over the experience. The crisp prosciutto sandwiches with passion fruit cream is served on a bed of mint - a "plate" in which the micromint is still growing. One imagines a wearhouse of mint in the outer reaches of the Gold Coast. The little pedestals on which Chef Achatz placed his Hearts of Palm in Five Sections, with no forks allowed, meant that, unlike Burger King, he had it his way.

While Alinea began with a twenty-eight course menu, the grand tasting menu, after three weeks, it has been trimmed to a comparatively svelte twenty-five (twenty-four listed and one extra). And in 330 minutes, we never felt full, just filled.

Those chefs who prepare two dozen dishes expect to fail occasionally, and should wish to. Diners are experimental subjects. At each of temples of agape, I have been served dishes that I would not wish to have again (such as a foolish foie gras sucker at Avenues or a nasty oatmeal stout with chocolate at Moto). At Alinea, the Hazelnut Puree with a capsule of savory granola was the memorable failure. Aside from the wit of breaking open a baked capsule (a trick of Cantu as well), seeing curried granola tumble down, one was treated to a somewhat sodden, if exotic, breakfast. I'll stick with Trader Joe's. Yet, these failures revealing the workings of the chef's mind. I also wasn't very fond of the too, too precious deconstructed beef with A-1 on a potato carpet - my wife pronounced it excellent - or the impossible to eat strawberries with lemon verbena and argan (a type of nut). The strawberries, successful as to taste, were inserted in a glass tube that required more suction than I was capable of providing at that time of night.

This, of course, still leaves us with nearly two dozen other dishes. Each had its measure of amazement as we were constantly reminded of the possibilities of food. Food at Alinea depends on four of the senses (sound is left to Moto). Achatz is more attuned to the variations of subtle tastes than either Bowles or Cantu, but very much reminiscent of a dinner at Trotters. Outstanding examples included the seasonal and woodsy frog legs with morels and paprika and a spectacularly indulgent Dungeness crab with parsnip, young coconut, and cashews. Each bite (and, of course, there were only a few of them) promised something different and produced it. The melon with gelled rose water and horseradish was another triumph in which quite unexpected tastes, from different corners of the taste pyramid, combined with an unexpected synergy.

Where Achatz was perhaps most successful was in playing with smell. The single strongest and most memorable dish of the evening was his stunning turbot with geoduck clams, dried water chestnuts in an eggless custard. In its own terms it would have been a spectacular dish of textures and flavors. The bowl in which the turbot was served was placed in a larger bowl filled with hyacinth flowers. The server poured steaming water on the buds and the aroma of spring was gloriously overpowering; we were close to sensory overload. The dish, otherwise first-rate, became transcendent as taste, sight, texture (the water chestnuts), and a distinct and external smell merged into a Platonic experience. Something similar might be said of the finger limes in a eucalyptus tea or the one-bite burnt orange, olive, and avocado, this latter one of the most agressively flavored dishes of the evening. The broccoli stem with grapefruit (!) and caviar was similarly a remarkable combination of sensory experiences as was the bison with beet salad with a "smoking cinnamon" bowl. The smell of the cinnamon transformed the bison to the strongest of Achatz's meat dishes.

No discussion of Achatz's cuisine would be complete with mention of the culinary references of several dishes - this is a referential cuisine. The signature dish (although not in itself the most outstanding) is the opening amuse bouche: PB&J. Achatz (well, his staff) peels a grape, nestles it in peanut butter, surrounds it in a brioche pastry, and places it in a metal holder. The dinner picks up the amuse from the grape stem and in a jiffy mouths it, grinning with astonishment. What is amazing is not so much the taste of the dish, but the way that our humble memories of childhood afternoons have been transformed and made haute. Similarly Achatz's "hanging bacon" takes another humble food of childhood memories (Who eats bacon today?), and creates it anew with butterscotch, apple and thyme, hanging it out to dry. It is another one-bite triumph. Finally there is a homage to Escoffier, the subtly fried artichoke heart, "fonds d'artichauts cussy #3970" (the number refers to Escoffier's recipe). It was a brilliant tribute, made more clever in that it was served in what our waiter described as an "anti-plate" - a ceramic ring on which the spoon which held the artichoke was placed, again reminding us of the chef's control of our experience.

I could continue praising many of the dishes (at least twenty were very successful), but by the end I was slightly troubled. A diner who wants to be smothered with wonder will find much in which to wrap one's memory. And, yet many great meals have a logic to them. When one goes to Charlie Trotters and order his degustation menu, one is not merely served a collection of astonishing dishes, but one is served a meal - a set of dishes with a "culinary logic," a totality. After two dozen dishes, I struggled to make sense of the evening. Perhaps dining, like much rock music, should stop making sense, but I admit some philosophical pretenses. Take evening lying in bed (and after two dozen courses and a dozen glasses of wine how could one sleep?) I hoped to find the chef's hidden theme. Perhaps an Agape Cuisine should suffice by providing Barnum-like miracles, but I wished a meaningful sequencing. I wished for a sense of what Achatz considered his unique philosophy of dining (a sense that one does get, strongly, at Moto). Of course, shorter menus may provide more of what a chef considers his most important work. But the competing strands and loose ends force us to recognize that Achatz is still a chef in process whose control of dishes is stronger than his control of the meal.

Our party ordered the wine tasting menu. The wines were designed to match the dishes, and most did so quite successfully. I particularly enjoyed the opening nutty Madeira (which, oddly, was billed separately from the wine flight, even thought it wasn't ordered separately). In contrast to the brilliant selected wines that Matthew McCammon offers at Moto or that Aaron Elliott chooses at Avenues, at Alinea wines are more modest affairs. There was not a single wine, adequate as all were (we were not served vinegar on this visit!), that I would select for my own cellar.

The service was extraordinarily attentive as one might expect at a restaurant of this caliber. However, there were almost too many people (a dozen?) serving us throughout the evening. I prefer establishing a temporary, if intense, tie with a few men and women who I can come to know, question, josh with, and rely upon, but at Alinea just as each course was different, it appeared as if each dish was served by a different person (not true, but close). Like the meal, the service was both excellent and somewhat disjointed. I must note that our check was improperly figured, which they caught (the original bill had been in our favor, but we were too blissed out to notice and to decide how far our ethical sensibility would stretch). This is something that if common demands correction.

The bill: approximately $400/person - the grand tasting menu, the flight of wines, coffee, tax and tip. Was it worth it? Surely. Would I try the long menu again?: Probably not. Would I return?: Tomorrow. The meal was not flawless and is in progress, but Alinea is a four-star restaurant and unlike such fine Chicago establishments as Everest, Ambria, or Tru, Alinea is a restaurant with a national reputation. Grant Achatz's experiments matter for all Americans who care about how high a chef can fly. We should be astonished when a chef soars towards the heavens, and be moved when the downdrafts send him hurtling to rocky shoals, trusting the wind of imagination will send him still higher.

(Based on dinner, May 21, 2005)

Thank you for the excellent review. It was as entertaining to read as it was to imagine the experience.

GAF wrote:
While Alinea began with a twenty-eight course menu, the grand tasting menu, after three weeks, it has been trimmed to a comparatively svelte twenty-five (twenty-four listed and one extra). And in 330 minutes, we never felt full, just filled.

5 1/2 hours??? I'm no stranger to long meals and have friends that can't believe a meal can take 3 hours but my goodness that's a long time. Was it paired with a performance of Siegfried?

I ate there this weekend too. I certainly can't begin to describe the meal to the degree you did, but I agree with you on a lot of points (thought I think Achatz might have learned more from Keller then Trotter). However, I would gently disagree with you about two things -

a) I loved the wine pairings, and thought they were every bit as good at the ones we had at Moto and Avenues (actually, having given the matter a few minutes thought, the pairings at Avenues may have the edge slightly - but I thought the wines at Avenues actually out-shined the food!).
b) I didn't have a problem with the sequencing of the meal. Reading your review, I think you have a point...but it didn't occur to me at all at the time (which is probably a good thing).

That was an excellent review GAF. But I have a question for you. You say you haven't been to El Bulli. Besides Moto, Avenues and Alinea, had you been to any of the restaurants featuring modern cuisine that are not in Chicago? Fat Duck or Anthony's in the U.K., any of the other restaurants in Spain, Mosaico in Miami, WD-50 in Manhattan, Jacques Decoret in Vichy, France plus there are some others.

The reason I ask is that I am trying to put the conclusions you reach in context of your experience. Not that there is anything wrong with not having been to the restaurants I listed, but it is hard for me to evaluate what you are saying unless I know something about your dining experience. Since I am new to your reviews, and don't know the history, I thought it was fair to ask the question. Please don't take it the wrong way.

Since my first reply was deleted, I'll ask this instead:

How were their tire-changing services?

Easy way to find out what somebody else is about is by clicking the little Profile button, which leads directly to all past posts. No, scanning them is not entirely easy, but if nothing else you get this, which may not be restaurants GAF has been to but is books he has read.

Thanks but that doesn't really help.

Ahh, tire changing. For those who don't know, after our LTH eight hour meal at Moto in February, my little Honda Civic hit a pothole that was almost as large as it was and was nearly swallowed. One tire was fully shot, but one of the servers helped change the tire (they are excellent with all kinds of mechanical gadgets!). For that alone my loyalty was cemented, but the time I returned to Moto, you can be sure that I drove VERY carefully. Having a flat on Halsted would not have anywhere near the frisson of a flat on Fulton Market. However, I was still driving that Civic, which bids well to be the cheapest and most decrepid car that the valet parkers have had to deal with. I hope the maitre d' didn't get his impression of me from my car.

On to more serious things:

A trip to El Bulli and to Bilboa is our next roadtrip. Last time in London, a few years ago, we ate at Gordon Ramsey, Petrus, and Chutney Mary (the first and last superb), but not the others that Steve mentioned. WD-40 (and Per Se - to see Keller's influence) is planned for September. But you must start somewhere. If you have eaten there, I would love your reactions.

Kman, as usual, raises an excellent point about the length of the dinner. Our eight hour Moto extravaganza was a full day's work. While I don't mind dining alone (and sometimes enjoy it), I would not attempt a tasting menu of this size alone, or even with my wife. A party of four means that each person will have three conversation partners - although I even prefer six people if possible. With just my wife there would be three topics of conversation: 1) How beautiful she looks, 2) how can we ever balance our budget, and 3) how can we tell our kids that we just ate their inheritance. As stimulating as these topics are, they do not quite hold up for five hours (topic one might have sufficed for five hours in our twenties - not that she is less beautiful but she has heard the lines before).

P.S., I will be out of town until Sunday, so if I don't respond to questions that is why.

Go to my blog and there are reviews of gazillions of restaurants including Alinea, El Bulli, Per Se and many others. If I knew how to post a link I would. But the url is http://www.oad.typepad.com.

I will post a longer response to your response when I get back from dinner.

How do you compare your Moto experiences to Alinea? I actually liked Moto better, although it is possible that I had an atypical meal at Alinea. The funny thing about my meal at Moto is that after I was finished, Chef Cantu sat with me for about 15 minutes talking about what he was trying to accomplish at the restauarnt and it made me view the food differently.

We had the same experience on this board. Read this thread, and then this one which was the result of it.

Steve Plotnicki wrote:How do you compare your Moto experiences to Alinea? I actually liked Moto better, although it is possible that I had an atypical meal at Alinea. The funny thing about my meal at Moto is that after I was finished, Chef Cantu sat with me for about 15 minutes talking about what he was trying to accomplish at the restauarnt and it made me view the food differently.

Steve, are you planning to put a review of your meal at Moto up on your blog? I'd love to read it. I last ate at Moto around Christmas, and am hoping to eat there again soon.

I had a great time at Moto, but I think I had a slightly better meal at Alinea, if you see what I mean. My main quibble about Moto was that there was a little too much of a dependence on the use of innovative/unusual techniques to create very familiar flavors - for example, chips and salsa, Kentucky fried chicken, sour cream potato chips, baked potato and tuna maki (to name the first 5 examples that come to mind - there were a few more, if I recall correctly). It was fun, but might have been a little more fun in moderation. At Alinea, only the PB&J dish used this trick (I suppose you could also include the 'granola' dish - one of my least favorite dishes that I tried there) - on the whole, there seemed to be more of an emphasis on actually creating unusual tastes and flavor combinations then there was at Moto. I thought most of them worked, but I know that you had a disapointing meal there...hopefully it was your meal that was atypical and not mine

I had been waiting for Moto to send me an email with all of the ingredients they used in each dish and it arrived late this afternoon. So I would say a blog review will happen sometime next week.

Do you have your particle beam accelerator yet? It's not the same if you just make it in the Kitchenaid.

I haven't seen a link to this NYT article yet, but it's very appropriate to the conversation:

Alinea may sound like a restaurant off its rocker, like gastronomy gone round the bend. But it is much more: a multi-million-dollar wager - the most ambitious yet - that sophisticated American diners are ready to embrace a newfangled cuisine they have largely resisted. It boldly raises the stakes.

Its opening last week marks a milestone and invites an examination of how meaningfully this kind of cooking, born in Europe and pioneered in large part by the chef Ferran Adrià in Spain, has taken root in the United States. On this side of the Atlantic, its advance has been fitful. Its application has often been shallowly theatrical and its successes qualified, facts made clear during trips I took recently to some of the lonely outposts of this innovative style.

I went to Alinea and Moto in Chicago, which has emerged as an American center for this cuisine. I dined at Minibar at Café Atlantico in Washington, an experiment by José Andrés, who is closer to Mr. Adrià than any other American chef.

The efforts of these restaurants paled beside those of Mr. Adrià's El Bulli, where carnival flourishes more often had a payoff of pure pleasure. His American disciples are still struggling to integrate showmanship and artistry, an evanescent gee-whiz and an enduring wow.

But they are also providing transcendent moments, made possible by their willingness to toy with unusual textures, play with wildly unlikely flavor combinations and generally venture in directions that might turn out to be silly, but then again might not.

I won't try to compete with the excellent posts and erudite expositions already made regarding Alinea. I very much enjoyed my meal last Wednesday night (I had a reservation for opening night on May 4, but had to cancel). Anyway, I'll preface by stating I've been to Moto (the infamous 7 hour meal with raccoon, that made press in Time magazine) and Alinea, and I've not ever been to Bulli, the Fat Ass (or whatever it's called in England), or any of the other alchemical restaurants. Bottom Line: Alinea is better than Moto; not just a little better, but "I paid $525 for this dinner for two and I'd do it again" better. Yes, the foods were a bit funky, and our main waiter did remind me a bit too much of Donald Pleasance. Anyway, I want to recommend Alinea and hope that if you can justify the obscene cost, you will try to go.

Here's my take: Both Moto and Alinea are like Willie Wonka's chocolate factory. Alinea is Gene Wilder as Willie Wonka. Moto is Johnny Depp as Willie Wonka. Both Gene and Johnny are known as peculiar actors. We all love Johnny Depp; but so often he wears his peculiarity on his sleeve. Gene got it right, as does Alinea. Sorry to have to offer review by analogy, but frankly I'm not up to a better analysis.*

Finally, I want to focus on one course that continues to haunt me. That was the five-sectioned heart of palm. And most particularly, the wine with which it was served, a heavily oaked California white (I think it was a pinot gris blend). I am not a fan of oaky wines, but here was an amazing tour de force of wine/food pairing. Each segment of the filled heart of palm accentuated or complemented a different flavor aspect of this complex wine: vanilla, fig, truffle, leather, citrus fruit ... all of these flavors and more were hiding in this wine, and each was brought out in order, each a greater surprise than the last, in this marvelous dissertation. It would be worth a meal at Alinea for anyone who wondered what the heck the wine reviewers were talking about to try this dish, with this wine, and have the blinds lifted.

ADDED NOTE: We had the 12-course dinner ("Menu 1"). This occupied 3 hours and 45 minutes, from valet park to driving up Halsted. For the record.

* O.K., the new Willie Wonka isn't yet released and I'm talking out of my hat here. But seriously, could you imagine a better Willie Wonka performance than Wilder's? Why would anyone even try? But then that chutzpa's just the sort of thing we love about Johnny Depp, isn't it?

JimInLoganSquare wrote:ADDED NOTE: We had the 12-course dinner ("Menu 1"). This occupied 3 hours and 45 minutes, from valet park to driving up Halsted. For the record.

Ahh, a Verdi (vs. Wagner) dinner then.

Thanks for the writeup. I'd love to hear more, though, about Donald Pleasance as your server. I mean which version - the Blofeld which you link to, the forger in The Great Escape, the shrink in Halloween, . . . exactly what about him caused you to think of him in that way?

JimInLoganSquare wrote:* O.K., the new Willie Wonka isn't yet released and I'm talking out of my hat here. But seriously, could you imagine a better Willie Wonka performance than Wilder's? Why would anyone even try? But then that chutzpa's just the sort of thing we love about Johnny Depp, isn't it?

You know, (fwiw) last night I was watching a bit of Willie Wonka on HBO, and I thought pretty much the same thoughts as you. The original, Wilder version is quite black, but it is not hit your over the face black. I imagine that the new version will be equally black, but with so much of the Burton trademark wild animation and patented Depp deep character absurdity that it will not be as effective. In other words, even though I have not eaten at Moto or Alinea OR seen the new Willie Wonka, I thought your analogy was great

The reason I asked about people being to El Bulli and the other restaurants is because if one has been to to those places, the wow factor at Alinea is significantly diminished because the techniques are pretty much copies of what you will find at those places. What made Trio stand apart was that it sort of straddled the techno-wow of those places with the deliciousness of more traditional restaurants like The French Laundry. Given what Grant's current cuisine is like, in my opinion it pales compared to the cuisine at any of those places. Both from a technique AND a deliciousness perspective. Moto on the other hand is a singular experience whether you like your meal or not. So for me, until Alinea finds their way (if they do,) Moto is the more enjoyable experience.

Kman wrote:Thanks for the writeup. I'd love to hear more, though, about Donald Pleasance as your server. I mean which version - the Blofeld which you link to, the forger in The Great Escape, the shrink in Halloween, . . . exactly what about him caused you to think of him in that way?

Oh, I don't know, Kman. Maybe it was the multiple wine pairings, but with each wine course, the waiter to my mind did drift more toward the Blofeld end of the Donald Pleasance spectrum. The refinement of his manners and speech was definitely in Blofeld's league, although I can't answer for his evilness, which was not tested or made apparent during our meal.

Anyone catch Pat Bruno's review of Alinea in today's Sun-Times? After 8 paragraphs of heaping ridicule on egulleteers and other "foodistas" as Alinea-obsessed lunatics (and also getting egullet's web address wrong ... for the record, Pat, in case you lurk on LTH also, it's egullet.org, not egullet.com), he then declares the meal "as monumental .... as, say, the stone carvings on Mt. Rushmore" and "pure magic." It's the most disjointed piece of non-journalism I've encountered in some time. It seems like Bruno feels like he has to establish "street cred" or be "down with the common man" by ridiculing the bread and circuses of the origiastic foodistas in their culinary cloud cuckoo land, before he can get down to the matter at hand and provide -- surprise, surprise -- an actually very favorable review, ultimately tempered only by his observation that you probably don't want to eat at Alinea very often -- well, duh. Here's my condensed version for those who don't want to click on the link above: "There's this new place called Alinea where they serve crazy, new-fangled food like you never heard of. Look at the loonies who have been hyperventilating about this place for 9 months ... look at the absurdity of the uberclass and their $500 meals ... they count how many bites they take per course ... they take PICTURES of their 28-COURSE, $500 FOOD ORGIES ... It's crazy, its SCANDALOUS, as if, oh, maybe the Water Department was selling HEROIN ... not something a decent person like you or me would ever DREAM of doing ... but oh, by the way, it's really an amazingly good restaurant ... just thought I'd mention ...". Feh! The irony here is that I more or less agree with Bruno's evaluation of the food and the dining experience itself, I just hate the fact that he felt compelled to include eight unnecessary paragraphs that (1) are insulting to a group of people who don't deserve to be publicly ridiculed in this way and (2) would probably discourage most readers from actually finishing reading Bruno's full review. So he also shot himself in the foot with this misguided effort at humor and/or bonding with the "common man." Alinea is an extraordinary -- and extraordinarily expensive and challenging -- place to eat. 99% of the popluation of the U.S. (99.99% of the population of the world) could not afford to eat there. Of those who could afford it, maybe one in 10 could be expected to appreciate or enjoy the experience. So what? And that's the frustrating part of Bruno's review; he clearly belongs in that tiny minority who can and did enjoy Alinea, yet feels compelled to make it seem like a place for dweebs and obsessives. Is there self-hatred being expressed here?

But, of course, in Mr. Bruno's estimation, it's not a 4-star restaurant.

nr706 wrote:But, of course, in Mr. Bruno's estimation, it's not a 4-star restaurant.

Yes, 3 and one-half, which is pretty high. And I think the reason he marked it down is because it's not a place you could return to often, and also maybe because the emphasis on circuses rather than bread is pretty high. And let's also not forget the possibility that he, unlike I and Mrs. JiLS, did not have Donald Pleasance's doppelganger as a server.

A rather schizophrenic review. Psychef, where are you when we need you!

I had assumed that Bruno and Vattel were waiting until they could eat at Alinea several times to get the true measure of the place - trying all three levels of menu. I guess - at least for the Sun-Times - they don't quite see themselves in the league with the (NY) Times - and given that Pat suggests that he won't be returning, I suppose that the restaurant budget at the CST is not what we might hope.

It is not that his assessments are all wrong (although they are rather thin on description) and I wouldn't even argue mightily against a 3.5 star rating, but his recognition of the seriousness of the food stands starkly against the tone by which the review begins.

Now, Phil your turn at bat. Your public(s) await.

For those of you who missed it Phil Vettel reviews Alinea in today's (August 18, 2005) Tribune.

Four stars. Vettel's focus is primarily on the more recent additions to Achatz menu. Perhaps Vettel is a little breathless, but it is a quite credible review - and a 3 1/2 star review might pose problems for those Chicago boosters at the paper who are convinced that Alinea is the new Millenium Park.

Dennis Wheaton also reviews Alinea (and Moto and Per Se and WD-50) in this month's (i.e. September) Chicago magazine. He likes Alinea and Per Se best.

[/url]http://metromix.chicagotribune.com/search/mmx-050817-alinea-chicago,1,2289178.story[url]

I recently dined at Alinea. I dont have time to post an extensive review. But what I will post is it was amazing! My wife and I loved every minute of our experience. Their team was watching every minute detail from the food to the pairings and beyond. We were there for 5 1/2 hours and I wish I could have slept over. I hope to return soon and all of you should give it a try.

In casual mention of Alinea with various people, I found that everyone seemed to have a different way of pronouncing the name or they had no idea how to say it. I've heard everything from "ala-NAY-a" to "align-ya" to "a-LYN-ee-ah" to "a-lawn-ee-ah." Does anyone know, and what does the word mean?

Quoting from this post by JiLS:

NOTE: I also learned, by paying close attention to the reservationist's pronunciation, that it is "Ah-LIN-ea", not "ah-li-NE-a" as I had thought. Just for what that may be worth to all and sundry.

As to the meaning, my memory is it's the typographical symbol denoting a new paragraph.

gleam wrote:As to the meaning, my memory is it's the typographical symbol denoting a new paragraph.

Really? I thought it was Layla's cousin.

gleam wrote:As to the meaning, my memory is it's the typographical symbol denoting a new paragraph.

Indeed. More, including the symbol itself, here.

Alinea, a typographical sign formerly used in printed texts. It indicated the beginning of a new train of thought, a new paragraph