Twenty First Century Limited: EMP at Alinea

What do you get when you put two Michelin three star restaurants together?  According to Grant Achatz, the answer is six stars – and a truly unique experience.


There’s a close relationship between Alinea and Eleven Madison Park, and between Chefs Achatz and Humm – as evidenced by prior events like the EMP cookbook party at the Aviary.  But their Twenty First Century Limited project, essentially a restaurant swap, is their most ambitious yet.

First, the Alinea team packed up a truck and drove their equipment and serving ware to Manhattan, and cooked their menu for five nights at EMP (read about it here or here). And then, in return, the EMP team came to Chicago and took over Alinea for five nights – complete with their own cooks and servers, a rolling drink cart, and white roses for every table.

The transformation was evident as soon as D and I stepped into the restaurant and were welcomed to “New York”.  Here are a few of the highlights from our evening:

The bar
Just inside the door, a miniature bar had been installed, to create the same feel as at EMP itself.  Before being shown to our table, we stood there for a bit and sipped our “Twentieth Century” cocktails of gin, Lillet, crème de cacao, and lemon, while watching the action in the kitchen just beyond.

The black and white cookies
Black and white cookies are a New York tradition, and they bookend the meal at EMP: a box of savory cookies (black truffle/Parmesan, with foie gras filling) to start, and another of sweet cookies (lemon/chocolate, with apricot filling) to finish.  I saved the sweet cookies to eat the next day when I wasn’t so full, and they were fantastic, especially the subtle stickiness of the apricot filling.

The plates
It must have been quite an undertaking to move all the dishes and serving ware from one city to the other, but they really did make the transformation complete.  You’d certainly never see an earthenware plate like this at Alinea, but it gives a nonchalant sort of feel to dishes like a beautiful cranberry gelée with fresh ricotta and nasturtium leaves.  The dishes are custom-made for EMP, and are set down in a specific orientation so that nosy diners like me see the markings right side up upon flipping them over.

The sturgeon
Another New York classic – bagels and smoked fish – inspired this dish.  There’s sliced sturgeon presented beneath a glass dome filled with smoke, then lifted tableside; a dish with “everything bagel” crumbles, lettuce, and poached quail egg; a little jar of dill pickles; a custom-made silver toast rack holding thin rye crisps; and a tin of cream cheese topped with caviar.

The carrots
The interactive portion of the meal began with a meat grinder (yes, really) being clamped to the table.  Then Chefs Achatz and Humm arrived, the latter bearing a bunch of carrots that he fed into the grinder, yielding a soft pile of chopped cooked carrot – “carrot tartare”, if you will.  As Chef Achatz portioned the carrots, Chef Humm explained the various condiments and garnishes – among them mustard oil, carrot vinaigrette, horseradish, quail egg yolk, chives, sunflower seeds, and sea salt.


I mixed in a little bit of everything, yielding a sweet-spicy, soft-crunchy, and very carroty dish.

The picnic
Another fun and interactive course – a picnic basket dropped off at our table with the instructions, “Everything you’ll need is in here.”


Inside, we found a pretzel roll, a wooden box containing a wedge of soft cheese, some grapes, a jar of plum mustard, and a bottle of EMP “Picnic Basket Ale.”  We even had our own plates and utensils – not paper plates, though they looked like them on first glance, but cleverly crafted trompe-l’oeil china.

The card trick
I’m fairly certain that no other dinner in the world ends with a card trick.  (And definitely not with its own custom-made deck of cards, featuring flavors and ingredients from pecan to lemon to bacon.)


I have no idea how it works, but after a few minutes of shuffling and cutting the deck and picking cards, we each ended up with a card in front of us that perfectly matched the piece of chocolate that had been placed on our table, covered, before the trick began.  I drew hazelnut and D got mint, so we swapped – my mint-filled chocolate was like a very fancy Peppermint Patty.

There were so many other delicious dishes and fun moments throughout our dinner – someday we’ll have to go to EMP itself.  But in the meantime, this was a fabulous way to get a sense of the experience without leaving home, and all the more special since it was so unique.