'Alinea': Treat Your Economic Wounds With Suspended Bacon

Alinea: We're not sure what this is, but it looks delicious, or possibly confusing, or possibly both. Lara Kastner/Achatz LLC

 

by Todd Kliman

On the heels of the biggest Wall Street collapse since The Great Depression, and at a time when the snaking lines at thrift stores and food banks recall images of the '30s, the most hotly awaited cookbook of the season hit stores this week -- looking for all the world like the last, great blast of foodie obliviousness.

Alinea is a collection of recipes (and paeans to culinary exploration) from the four-star Chicago restaurant whose chef, Grant Achatz, has taken the expression "playing with your food" to a head-shaking extreme. Flaunting bourgeois expectations -- like, for instance, the ones that say a meal moves from appetizer to entree to dessert, or the ones that militate for a separate-but-equal segregation of sweet and savory -- Achatz stages a kind of elaborate dinner-as-theater, candying bacon and suspending it from a trapeze, or sending out waiters with atomizers to spritz the air with the scent of pine (how else is a chef supposed to summon the smell of the forest?).

Alinea is the reductio ad absurdum of the food world, inspiring pilgrimages from food lovers all over the country, many of whom are unable to resist snapping pictures of the elaborate concoctions for recollecting, later, in tranquility (and presumably, hunger).

Those who have never ponied up the $145 for the 13-course tasting menu can live vicariously through the book, which renders other food porn as dated as the skin flicks from the era of wah-wah music and shag carpets. It also makes Julia Child's seminal cookbook, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, look like Dick and Jane.

Paging through these glorious photos, the foodie is at first awed, then humbled, then, well -- puzzled. Is anybody expected to cook this stuff?

Apparently, some are trying. Achatz has created a web site for customers to post pictures of their knockoffs (sorry -- members only!), and the cookbook's slew of early adopters has flooded the site with their faithful-looking snapshots.

At least one homecook is attempting to go them one better, and enter into Achatz's mind. Long before the book hit stores, Washington, D.C-area blogger named Carol Blymire announced her intention to cook every recipe in the book (a cute gimmick first attempted by Julie Powell, then later by Blymire with The French Laundry Cookbook.) In an interview with Amazon.com hyping the book, Achatz sounded flattered by her project, but warned that the blogger "will be forced to scale back in a few areas unless she makes this her full time job."

With restaurant business off by as much as 30 percent nationally, it might just be that Alinea has come along at a good time, giving ambitious, if cash-strapped, foodies a chance to recreate the magic of a great restaurant at home.

Or it just might be that the book already harks back to a vanished age -- a reminder that in America, with all our toys, Nero would not have fiddled while Rome burned. He would have suspended bacon.

Todd Kliman is a James Beard Award-winning restaurant critic and the food and wine editor of Washingtonian magazine. The Wild Vine, his book about the Rosetta stone of American wine, is due in 2009.