my soup was steeped in strange ideas.

1/21/2008
Grant Achatz has opened a new restaurant in Chicago. While it can be considered the inverse of his current restaurant, it is, confusingly, also called Alinea. Reservations/meals at Alinea the Younger are purchased like concert tickets. They send them to you in the mail or you can pick them up like at Will Call.

I won three ticket/meals on a radio "eighteenth caller" contest. The people I brought with me were an old man and a little girl; I don't know either of them, but I get the feeling they knew Grandmommy and Poppa in the '60's, or at least hung out in their basement a lot.

We met in the parking lot and walked into the restaurant. It looked like Denny's or an Amtrak dining car. The carpet was bright blue-green with white rhombi spaced evenly throughout. We presented our tickets at the front desk and a man, dressed like the stereotypical ship's cook (stubble, wifebeater, white paper hat), handed us large plastic cups and bade us continue to the pop machine.

There were at least 45 flavors of pop available; the restaurant saved space by stacking flavors vertically (each tap had three options). In addition to the limes and lemons many restaurants keep by their pop machines, there were also raspberries.

We sat in a booth near the window, and Ship's Cook Man brought us each a large paper bag. Inside mine were three smaller paper bags. The first contained huge rolls and butter. I tried a roll. The crust was crispy and buttery, and inside was the best soft, chewy sourdough I had ever tasted. Even the butter was surprising and delicious (on the bread).

My second and third bag held french fries and chicken fingers, both similarly sublime. (The chicken fingers may or may not have been baked in Cheez-It crackers the way some whole fish are baked in sea salt.)

That was the end of the first course, but before the second came a different waiter brought us three small handheld screens. Apparently each reservation ticket had a tiny hidden camera implanted in it, and the restaurant's staff looked through the film and picked the most interesting several seconds to show each customer between the first two courses.

The old man's and the little girl's screens each showed them saying something mildly embarassing (uninformed). Mine showed me repeating a quote from my Electricity & Magnetism textbook to Nick ("Gauss's law is always true, but it is not always useful.")


1/22/2008
Nick and I are sitting on my bed. Nick is messing around on his laptop while I'm doing homework. Suddenly he grins wickedly at me and gestures at his laptop. iTunes is open. A song by Pere Ubu has come up on shuffle. I don't get it.