America’s hottest young chef was diagnosed with cancer and told he’d lose his tongue

THE ALINEA RESTAURANT at 1723 North Halsted Street, Chicago, is not easy to find. There is no sign at its entrance, just a notice for delivery people on what time packages are received. The cream curtains are drawn and the pizza guy next door, like most people in the neighborhood, has no clue that this repurposed Chicago brownstone contains one of the best restaurants in the United States – the thriving workplace of one of the country’s most celebrated chefs. When a guest enters Alinea, no one is there to greet him. (“Am I in the right place?”) Then a door opens dramatically to the left of a dark passageway, and you are ushered to a table adorned with nothing but napkins. During your meal, you might be given a bowl with a rounded bottom: you can’t set it down, so you’re forced to hold it. Or you may be served squid tempura on a little steel contraption that prevents the crust from getting soggy. According to those who believe in the Alinea mission, the food tastes better for all of this.

Fate almost aborted the Alinea mission last year. Grant Achatz – the man on the cutting edge of the molecular gastronomy movement in the US – was diagnosed with cancer of the tongue. The doctors told Achatz that unless he had a large part of his tongue removed, he would die in six months. “Thankfully, I didn’t listen too carefully,” Achatz, 34, jokes. He refused surgery and underwent a regimen of chemotherapy and radiation at the University of Chicago Medical Center. Achatz lost hair, weight and his sense of taste (which is now gradually returning). Even though he could taste nothing and survived on liquids, Achatz never stopped working, “composing” food (his preferred term), or working on the Alinea Book, which he thought of as a legacy in case he didn’t survive. (Alinea Book was published in October.) Achatz’s tongue was saved, his taste buds are approaching normal (although this is hard to quantify) and his cancer is in full remission.

Achatz spoke to power on the upper level of Alinea. Downstairs in the kitchen, there’s that low buzz you find in high-focus environments. About 20 cooks chop, grate, cut and rinse as they prepare to feed 60 guests (who’ll pay between US$200 and $300 a head) in a few hours. It is preparation of not just a meal, but a culinary adventure.

Are you getting back your sense of taste?
It is very hard to judge. Unlike hearing or sight, the sense of taste cannot be evaluated on a scale. I have had to retrain my palette. I experience flavors differently now. But my mind is able to evaluate them from the old perspective, the way most people perceive them. So I have the advantage of understanding the new but an appreciation of the old. It was an interesting process – if a bit scary – to lose the sense of taste and then have it slowly return. But it does awaken your awareness of the relationships between flavors – flavors themselves and which flavors relate to the sense of smell.

Would you describe the time the surgeon told you that he would have to remove two-thirds of your tongue as your greatest crisis?
Yes, for sure. Either that or the moment he told me that if he didn’t remove my tongue I would be dead in six months.

Your partner Nick Kokonas says that you created a special beef tongue dish so that everyone in the kitchen was forced to use the word “tongue.”
[Laughs] People approach adversity and difficult times in different ways. Some people close up, some people lash out and become aggressive. Some people laugh! And some people do a combination of all of those.

For me, I’m this guy that 52 other people look at to lead this thing – 52 employees that are unified in a vision. They work an incredible amount of hours and they don’t get a lot of money [Alinea cooks get $26,000 a year, service staff make more]. They’re here because they believe in it. And I felt that it was my responsibility as the leader of that group to show some lightheartedness, to show some elements of being human. Like, “You know what? I’m really sick, I could die. But come on, the world is not going to end if I die. This restaurant might close. Maybe it won’t. So what?”

How did people react to the tongue dish “joke”?
Some people laughed. Some people were like, “What’s the matter with you?” But everybody was appreciative of the fact that I was open about it, that I was able to talk about it. I didn’t show any great sense of fear, like, “What’s going to happen?” If you wanted to talk about Alinea, it was always on the table. It was my way of breaking the ice.

Exactly what was the dish?
It was smoked beef tongue with morel mushrooms. A bunch of different lettuces, arugula, romaine, watercress, a piece of actual rib eye beef [not tongue]. It was just a composition that played off the tongue. We cut it in a way that looked like it was the silhouette of a tongue. You know it was just fun. And it tasted good!

When Nick asked you what you wanted to do with Alinea in case your time was up, you said you didn’t care because you’d be dead.
Right. What do I care? “Do what you think is right. It’s not going to affect me.”

What was life like before you were diagnosed?
It was exactly as it is now. Busy. I was very driven (and still am) to make Alinea the best it can be ... to make myself the best I can be. So I was, and am, hyper-focused.

You only took eight days off work through your illness. Why was that?
I looked very sick.

What did you look like?
What did I look like? I weighed 129 pounds [58.5kg]. I lost about a third of my weight. My eyes were very sunken and very dark. I had a rash, a very bad rash, all over my body from the chemo. I didn’t have any hair. I looked very sick.

I mean who wants somebody that’s very, very sick cooking them dinner? People can get scared of that. They might go like, you know, can I get cancer if he cooked my food? It was like AIDS in the 80s. We don’t want to make people uncomfortable.

A lot of people come to the kitchen and ask to see me. So if I’m here and they see me back there then I have to go and talk to them. Even though I look very sickly. But if I’m not here then at least the staff can say that.

A simple question about the Alinea Book: what’s special about it?
Not a simple question [laughs]. I think what we tried to do with the book is, to the best of our ability, to capture the essence of our restaurant. And I think very few cookbooks, very few chef books, very few restaurant books, actually do that. And the ones that do are known as the great books: the French Laundry Cookbook captured the romance, the discipline, the technical ability of Thomas Keller in the French Laundry. And I think that’s why it sold so many copies. And I think with the Alinea Book, what we capture is the creativity, the aesthetic, trying to explain our position and making an argument for food as art. And that’s a big debate right now.

You were very sick during the book’s process and you had discussed the possibility that this was your legacy.
Right. I always wanted a book.

So was it a rush job?
No! [Laughs] It took two years! I always wanted a book, and then we started it, and then I got sick. Yeah, I wanted something to leave behind.
I feel awkward saying this, but Alinea is very important to the United States because it legitimized modern cooking. There had been attempts to open restaurants in this country that were cooking in this avant-garde, molecular gastronomy/modern way, whatever you want to call it. That failed, and they got pushed out. People didn’t like it.

We were the first one they embraced. They said, you know what, they’re cooking in this genre and it’s really good. And there’s a future in this if Alinea can remain this great restaurant and the trickle down remains at a very high level.

So we were two years in, and I felt like, if I’m going to die, then at least I can leave this book. And maybe somebody can pick up where we left off and carry the importance of modern gastronomy forward.

You’ve said, “flavors are burned in your brain,” and that would mean new flavors couldn’t be memorized once you began losing your sense of taste. As someone who is constantly innovating, how did you overcome this?
The artist’s palate doesn’t change too much; colors are colors, or if you will, notes are notes. It is rare that I taste something entirely new. The creativity comes in the refinement, juxtaposition and crafting the dining experience. The creative process is still the same, and frankly would not change whether I could taste or not.

You survived only on liquids when the tumor was really bad. Has your diet changed now? Do you, say, sometimes eat off the Alinea menu? Have a personal favorite dish?
I only eat Alinea dishes while we are developing them and, of course, to taste components each night to make sure they are well made.

Are you a control freak?
Yes.

You were saying ...
I eat pretty normally now, I just avoid overly spicy foods – they still produce some pain. I don’t have a personal favorite. I have some that I feel really represent our style well conceptually, like the Hot Potato/Cold Potato [a cold potato soup in a custom-made paraffin wax bowl with a pin pierced through it that holds a hot potato, truffles and cheese. You pull the pin to release these into the soup].
It encompasses both the food itself, the service-ware for the presentation that is made every day in the kitchen, and the interaction of the diner. That is what we strive for much of the time.

Is it true that your first piece of innovative cooking was an unusual whipped potato concoction that was a complete disaster?
Yes. That was something I did while working at my parents restaurant when I was 12. I tried to make the normal mashed potatoes something different. Of course we had to throw the potatoes away because the guest would not have liked them. But it was that creative spirit that proved valuable years later.

Lots of chefs swear in kitchen. Do you?
Our kitchen is very, very quiet. It is rare for me to raise my voice. It’s very, very rare for me to swear at someone. I think my favorite swear word would be whatever is appropriate at any given moment – it becomes a management tool. When I raise my voice and then begin to swear, the staff knows I have reached a level of frustration and disappointment that needs to be addressed immediately.

How much chemistry do you need to know to be a good chef?
Not much. You need to know flavor and interaction. But that is not chemistry in the sense of the hard sciences. The most important thing is a sense of intuition.

I don’t look at the kitchen as a lab. Rather, I try to approach cooking as a creative endeavor. So I look at it more as a studio than a laboratory. Certainly my experiences at the French Laundry were the formative cooking experiences, and my travels in Spain and my visit to El Bulli [near Barcelona] let me know that you can push cuisine very far indeed so long as the fundamentals are strong.

Speaking of fundamentals, is Alinea insulated from the current economic situation?
I think so, at least in the early stages. Who knows what’s going to be like a year from now? But in the initial stages it hits the middle restaurants. Look, when money’s tight, you’re either going to go out for an inexpensive meal. Pizza, burger, a taco, you know something like that. Or, you’re going to have a special occasion where you need to go to the highest level. The recreational dining of going to the three-star restaurant feels like a wasted splurge when money’s tight. You have to eat so you’re either going to cook at home, or you’re going to go low-end. But if it’s a special occasion or you’re celebrating something, you’re still going to want to go high-end. And when you want to go to the high-end, then you’re going to go to what everybody considers the best high-end. And we’re lucky enough to be the one that everybody thinks of as one of the best. They’re either going to come here or they’re going to Charlie Trotter’s [billed as one of the finest restaurants in the US, located not far from Alinea]. But who knows what’s going to happen, eventually if it gets worse, it will affect us.

How complete is your remission?
Well, they won’t call me until two and a half years after treatment ends. I’m one year out. And so far all of the scans and tests and everything have been fine. So it hasn’t tried to come back. Yet. But they’re watching very closely.