 That the cancer would attack Grant Achatz’s mouth, and his tongue no less, was beyond ironic; it was cruel and seemingly impossible. After all, this is among the most important tongues in the world, belonging to one of the country’s elite chefs. Even demographically he is all wrong for the diagnosis—the usual patient is in his early 60s, a prodigious smoker, and a drinker. And here is Achatz—a boyish 34, a fit nonsmoker who uses alcohol strictly in the company of food. Yet there he sat last July as a doctor explained that the pain he felt in his mouth was cancer. It was like Tiger Woods losing his arm, Steven Spielberg losing his sight. Except for Achatz it wasn’t just his livelihood that was on the line, but his life.
“The fear was that he would die,” says Thomas Keller, arguably the most acclaimed chef in America, the Yoda to Achatz’s Luke Skywalker. “And what a tragedy that would be—a young man with such talent and desire who has the ability to set an example for his generation on work ethic, integrity, and determination. It would have been a shame to lose all that.”
At Alinea, the Chicago restaurant Achatz opened in 2005 and Gourmet named the country’s best a year later, the wunderkind treats dining as something beyond an exercise in consumption. To Achatz, eating is an event, combining all the senses. As such, he treats classic comfort foods like an alchemist in his lab, reinterpreting caramel corn as a liquid served in a shot glass, manipulating shrimp cocktail with a wine press to present it via plastic atomizer, encasing a peeled grape in peanut brittle and brioche in a strange (but delicious) take on the PB&J. His meals often consist of 25 courses, take hours to complete, and employ custom-built service pieces—an evening of sensory overload that dazzles Alinea’s 75 diners each night. But despite all the kitchen pyrotechnics, flavor remains the ultimate goal.
Achatz is, by all accounts, a mad scientist, obsessed with deconstructing ingredients molecule by molecule in a quest for the most pristine flavors—the chemistry equivalent of playing with his food. Accordingly, gourmands categorize (unfairly, he protests) his culinary restlessness as “molecular gastronomy,” a discipline that originated in Europe and now includes a coterie of American practitioners who endeavor to use science in the service of their cuisine (see sidebar). Achatz is at the vanguard of this revolution, part Willy Wonka, part Albert Einstein. Some early headlines about the chef: “My Compliments to the Lab,” “A Taste of the Future,” and “Chef Darwin.”
But the mad scientist isn’t mad at all. He’s disarmingly simple; when he’s not cooking, he tends to favor chain restaurant fare like Potbelly sandwiches, HomeMade Pizza Company, and any
other treat replete with salt and starch. In fact, shockingly, Achatz has never dined at his own restaurant. “It’s like a comedian laughing at his own jokes,” he explains. The décor of his Chicago
apartment is unwittingly minimalist; the couple of pieces of furniture include a television (a divorced dad’s concession to his two young sons), a table from Alinea, and a bed—a new addition. “I slept on the floor for months,” he says. Until recently, he made the trip to Alinea in a 2000 Ford Focus. After all, he grew up in Michigan, with a mullet, the adolescent gofer at his parents’ family-style restaurant (“Polish Night” every Thursday!), where he proved himself a prodigy in traditional dining: pierogies, meatloaf, Western omelets. Says Achatz’s father, “At 14 years old, I could leave him with more responsibility than the best chefs or line cooks.” The sole parental rebuke resulted from Achatz’s eagerness to adorn dishes with parsley and orange twist garnishes—a suspicious frill to father and clientele alike. His father’s advice: “Don’t go into cooking. You won’t make any money. Go be an architect.”
After attending the Culinary Institute of America, Achatz willed himself a job at Keller’s French Laundry in Northern California—sending a résumé every week for months until Keller called him. “His early days here, he was quiet—not shy, but quiet,” says Keller. “He was absorbing as much as he could so he could become an even more integral part of the team.” Four years later Achatz
migrated to Chicago, whereupon Food & Wine named him Best New Chef and the James Beard Foundation named him its Rising Star Chef of the Year. The accolades for Alinea were immediate.
And then, last July, the announcement that he had tongue cancer, a diagnosis that threatened his sense of taste, the ultimate arbiter of his peculiar genius. “Let the comparisons to a deaf Beethoven begin,” wrote one blogger. Achatz’s response: “Beethoven composed one of his greatest symphonies when he was deaf.” But still—his tongue? “The irony is just bizarre,” he admits.
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