gourmet babble: moto

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moto

Food:	37	Ambience:	32	Purity:		Cost:	$$$$	SHAVE:	Close

Cuisine:	Post-modern	Executive chef:	Homaro Cantu	Dining date:	2005-08-16

Region:	Chicago	City:	Chicago, IL		West Loop

Not the cell phone company. In this case, I'm talking about the absolute sheer genius of Homaro Cantu and his staff at moto restaurant.

We had the "gtm", the Grand Tour Moto, which is the largest of their three degustations (all they offer as alternatives are the aptly-named "five" and "ten" — guess how many courses come in each?). The gtm is a shifting 15 to 20 course tasting spectacular; tonight it was an 18 course festival of taste, texture, temperature, and trickery.

Yes, he's famous for mad inventions of his own, such as edible inks that he prints via inkjet onto edible paper that incorporate with various dishes, and repurposing other technology, such as a cook-at-the-table 400° NASA-designed-polymer steamer that offers spicing of two courses via aroma while you watch it cook a third course (without any heat source other than the 200° sauce in the bottom compartment) in front of you.

More importantly, though: he's an artist. He understands the subtleties of the holistic dining experience and presents them in a way that transcends description. He's no mere technician or trickster; he's the genuine article, capable of taking you to a state of culinary bliss that I've only experienced in four or five restaurants before.

In fact, during the third dish, I hit a place that I truly hadn't found in perhaps six or seven years, in terms of dining. I recognized a resonance that I hadn't felt, gastronomically, since the height of Charlie Trotter's in the 90s. So it came as no surprise when we asked "Where was Chef Cantu before here?" and one of the first answers was Trotter's. Clearly, tutelage under the master worked wonders for Cantu; you can see the touches in the waitstaff's attention to detail, in the nature of the tasting menu, and in the daring of the dishes. But Cantu takes it to the next step, truly embracing the "postmodern cuisine" phenomenon full-tilt. Edible info blurbs float like hypertext on your dishes (we had no less than three expositories in our dinner); he even had a nod to the very concept of hypertext in the name of the first dish — "MAKI in the 4th dimension". An artichoke and macadamia nut morsel that came on one spoon as a combination of purée and sorbet, shaped like a little snowman, designed to be eaten in one swift pop into your mouth. A carbonated half-orange that you squeeze yourself over a portion of lobster sitting next to a sphere of brown butter, all resting on a small cake of lobster sorbet. Chips, in the form of a small ball of purée, and salsa, in the form of a small translucent gelée cube, on one spoon. Every dish, every single dish, had some flair or distinction to it.

It was a blissful, almost holy experience. I'll end this post with a repost of the menu for illustrative purposes. Although it's one of the more expensive restaurants I've ever eaten at, if you are ever in Chicago and want a dining partner for a truly transcendent dining experience, just let me know. Yes, it truly was that off-the-charts good.