Walk the Line - no this is a New Line

Walk the Line, perhaps the most famous of the Johnny Cash songs seems a fitting title for this post which is all about the restaurant called Alinea which my google translate suggests means, from the French, new line or new paragraph, it notes it comes after a full stop. The logo of the restaurant is a version of the pilcrow (¶) so familiar to users of Word (though I have always called it a backward P until now). The Pilcrow donates the latin 'a lineā'  which means 'off the line', or 'next line'. Whatever the meaning what Grant Achatz and his people do is so new that it is truly amazing. As I kept thinking, with apologies to Star Trek: "It's food Jim, but not as we know it!"

Getting a 'ticket' for dinner at Aliena is an art. They advertise tickets for a particular month in Facebook and you need to be quick to click through. While I had targeted being here on Saturday night, all the reasonable Saturday times had gone within the first few hours, so I opted for a Friday booking - even that had to be at 5.30 (or very late). Now 5.30 might seem early to eat, but lucky for us we were travelling from a different timezone, so 5.30 here was 6.30 to our timeline making so it was not a problem.

The whole principle of Alinea seems to be to confuse the senses, so you have smells of one thing with tastes of another and then textures that are completely unexpected.  

All our photos of eating at Alinea are in one place, I found it almost impossible to choose a representative sample.

I guess the one of Grant, the main man, who decorated our table for dessert, back in his domain is one key one - the other the balloons which had us, and our neighbouring tables laughing at their impact.

<<Co-pilot's note: I think it was the remnants of the half balloon left dripping from Mr B's chin and nose was what did it, my concern about how the photo was going meant my balloon went a little limp before I burst it, so it could never have been the cause.>>

Having started the meal at 5.30, we left the restaurant at 8.00 pm. There are comments, all glowing, under most of the dishes in the photos on Flickr, so I'm not going to copy them here, but all I can say is WOW.