Alinea: The Progression

Lou Stejskal

10 years ago

SPOILER ALERT

If you are planning on attending Alinea: The Progression, please read this afterwards. It will be a richer experience if you don’t know what lies ahead. This is NOT the new Alinea, but a FUN, temporary, Alinea dinner series they are doing before the original Alinea reopens.

Alinea restaurant has been closed during their remodel. In the meantime, the staff has been busy and kept employed by holding pop-up dinners in Spain and Miami, working at Alinea Group’s other establishments, and opening another restaurant called Roister.

On April Fools’s Day, Alinea released tickets for the first in a series of highly experimental “extremely limited” dinners promising nothing but “something unedited and spontaneous.”

ADDED 1:42PM April 11, 2016
From the Alinea Website:
“A highly experimental dinner hosted by the Alinea team, The Progression is an informal evening of food and beverage highlighting concepts and ideas that we simply cannot produce anywhere else. Created over the course of only a few weeks in collaboration with the visual artist Adam Siegel, The Progression is unedited and spontaneous, an improv version of dining.

We hope that stripping away the constraints of formal dining will allow our team to conjure new concepts and ideas that will, once edited, make their way to the new Alinea.”

Sold only in pairs, my friend and I were among 20 people experiencing the first of these dinners titled, “Alinea: The Progression” which was held in the former Moto restaurant space in Fulton Market District, Chicago.

Fulton Market Street. Chicago. Today’s weather report. Today it rained, sleeted, hailed, snowed, got bright and sunny and then gray and cloudy, all in a matter of hours. Tonight’s dinner. Highly experimental.

While we waited to begin, we were each handed a black bag filled with various items including vials, glass bottles, matches, a key, a glove, and a squeeze tube of bronzer.

Contents of our drink purse, or murse for the men.

Art for Food’s Sake

We walked over to dinner as a group, hung up our own coats and entered a room filled with colorful art by Chicago artist and photographer, Adam Siegel.

Click on the collage then swipe through the photos to read about our first beverage of the night, a communal champagne punch.

We gathered around the table and poured our assigned bottle from our bag into the punch bowl.

Coriander

Pineapple

Japanese whisky

Some of the bottles used for the communal punch. But wait. There’s more.

Champagne sabering and a friendly wave.

The Senses

We were asked to take out the baggie that was in our black bag. Inside were matches, a glove and a key to open our next drink.

Pouring the bottle with the white sticker on the cap into our shot glass.

The Quieter You Become, The More You Can Hear

How do your senses shift when one of your other senses is interrupted? For this next course, the music was turned off abruptly as the lights were brightened which immediately silenced the room.

Servers came out in white hazmat suits and placed a white card on our table.

Click on the collage, then swipe through the photos to find out what we weren’t allowed to do during this course.

This is what the envelope said.

Inside the envelope.

Apparently my visual senses kicked in and I started to look around. I looked at the decor.

I tried to read the type on the bottle sitting on the bar.

Somebody is having a hard time not saying anything.

I checked out the art on the walls.

Almond, white asparagus, white mushroom.

We continued to eat in silence, paying attention to textures, temperature, taste. How does the stimuli of conversation, music, taking photos or other diners affect your dining experience?

Somebody at my table was unable to hold their silence.

What We See Is What We Look For

For the next course, we were told to snuff out our candle. The entire room went dark and “Paint It Black” by The Rolling Stones came on.

We ate this next course in complete darkness with the song “Paint It Black” by The Rolling Stones at a fairly loud level There was nothing to look at and it was too loud to chat, so I focused more on the flavors and the textures. Was the dish intensely flavored or was my sense of taste heightened by the darkness which made it seem more intensely flavored? Does seeing your food affect how it tastes?

Kitchen Course

We were whisked into the kitchen and stood around the center counter.

Mike Bagale, executive chef of Alinea, tells us the ingredients of our boilermaker drink which contained Grand Marnier and Japanese beer.

Romaine, shaved dried tuna, miso dressing, pepper

The Final Destination

We headed upstairs for our final destination of the evening.

But first a walk down a textile-wrapped corridor.

Our wrists were stamped earlier in the evening which indicated which of three palate refresher drinks we would be served.

The entrance to the final room of the evening.

No instructions on what to do or what order to follow. The room was filled with picnic tables, lawn chairs, milk crates, a blanket laid out on the ~~Astroturf~~ real grass that is alive, drink, food and dessert stations.

“Ice Tea” was the second to last beverage of the evening. The last one involved a smoothie machine and adding “bronzer” from the squeezable tube, the final item in our bag which I forgot to take a photo of.

Udon noodles, XO sauce, white soy cured, orange tempura crisps, pickled plum

Spring pea soup, dill, liquid orange sphere, carrot fruit paste cube, solidified parmesan cream

Click though the collage to see dessert.

Sprinkling on the guava snow

Bubble gum mochi, blueberry sauce with lime and red wine vinegar, coconut mousse, guava snow, ginger snow, blueberry meringue, ginger coconut aroma.

Coconut and ginger aroma

Dessert

It’s not often you get to say to your friend at dinner, “I figured out what the glove is for! Go get your glove, it’s time for dessert!”

Come to momma

Bubble gum mochi, blueberry sauce with lime and red wine vinegar, coconut mousse, guava snow, ginger snow, blueberry meringue, ginger coconut aroma.

The Goodbye

We headed through one more corridor, this one draped with sheets.

We began writing messages on the sheets. There were the usual notes of thanks mixed in with the occasional silly bathroom wall messages. Even as adults, someone is always trying for a snicker. I hate saying goodbye and I wanted to run back to all the different rooms and see it all again and talk about dinner with everyone. Oh well!

Final bite. Rhubarb served on the anti-griddle

Food for Thought

This was unlike any dining experience I ever had before. It was bold, innovative, risky, overstimulating, and fun. I loved every minute of it but admittedly, some of it not until the following day. It was new for me to move from room to room with each area having different environments and sensory levels.

I was a late bloomer to the Alinea dining scene but from my initial visit, I decided I would return every chance I could. I always feel very relaxed and comfortable at Alinea because I trust everything they do. It’s not easy for me to be anywhere with a quiet mind, but somehow it happens when I dine at Alinea and it tastes better than doing yoga.

Alinea: The Progression served as a good transition until the new Alinea is reborn. I am enthusiastic and (finally) open to the changes, no matter what they may be.

We strive for synchronicity as givers or recipients. Once it is achieved at both ends, how do we know when and if it’s time to grow and move beyond something that has finally reached a level of comfort with predictable results? In order to innovate, is it better to proceed with analytical caution or is it better to remove and break the barriers?

The only way to know is to try.

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Alinea: The Progression was last modified: December 1st, 2017 by Lou Stejskal