The entrance to Alinea, a restaurant in the Lincoln Park neighborhood of Chicago, is unmarked. Visitors pass through gray metal doors, go down a narrowing corridor, and arrive at a set of doors that slide open automatically. The diner walks into Alinea just to the side of the kitchen, which lacks a big oven or hanging pots. Instead, there are gleaming low stainless-steel tables, ceiling lighting of the type found in a conference room, and gray area rugs. On the wall are large sheets of poster board covered with sketches, in black ink, of dishes that Alinea’s chef, Grant Achatz, is thinking about adding to the menu. When I visited on a Tuesday evening in April, there was a drawing of what looked like a flag; in fact, it was a slice of Wagyu beef attached to a pair of chopsticks held up by a base. Another sketch depicted “edible string,” made from corn silk or herb stems. In a third image, a sphere had been divided into three concentric layers: a core of strawberry, a middle of Niçoise olives, and a crust of white chocolate flavored with violet. Alinea is closed on Tuesdays, but Achatz, who is thirty-four, was working on new dishes—he tries to change his menu every season. He likes to come up with new culinary ideas late at night, when the restaurant is empty, sketching various “prototypes” on pads of paper. He later transfers these drawings to the large posters on the kitchen wall, so that his staff can look at them. That evening, one bore the words “Capture spring. What is it? New, Fresh, Ice, Sprouts, delicate, gradual.”

Three sous-chefs had joined Achatz, who is a lean five feet nine—“Five feet ten, if you ask me,” he says—and has a handsome face with red hair razored short. After the four men had changed into their long white chef’s coats, they gathered around a table. They were focussing tonight on the dessert involving strawberries, Niçoise olives, and essence of violet. Achatz (his name rhymes with “rackets”) had thought up the dish in March and, at first, wasn’t sure how to combine the three ingredients, which, he explained in an e-mail, captured “the idea that, in certain red wines, people often smell strawberries with ‘purple flowers’ (a.k.a. violets) and olives.” He had simply scrawled “Composed dessert?” near the exhortation to “Capture spring.” Over the next few weeks, he came up with various approaches: a broth, a capsule, an aromatic bath. He works in the tradition of molecular gastronomy, which aims to take familiar foods and, using scientific techniques, give them new tastes and textures. Molecular gastronomists talk of “manipulating” ingredients rather than “cooking” them. For the dessert, Achatz finally settled on a ball the size of a jawbreaker: the three ingredients would be wrapped around one another. Achatz said in the e-mail, “The flavors are put together on the assumption that if they smell good together they will taste good together.”

As the men talked, Achatz sometimes paused—his voice was hoarse—and opened a container that he kept with him, coated the heel of his hand with a white chalky liquid, cocked his head, and rubbed his hand along the inside of his mouth. The liquid was Lidocaine, a pain reliever.

Ten months ago, Achatz was given a diagnosis of tongue cancer. He was informed that if he did not start treatment immediately he would die. “You have Stage IV cancer,” he remembers being told by a doctor at the University of Chicago Medical Center. “There is no Stage V.” Doctors removed lymph nodes from his neck; a pink scar now extends from an inch below Achatz’s left earlobe to an inch above the collarbone. He was also given twelve weeks of chemotherapy treatment, which made his hair fall out, and six weeks of radiation, which nearly swelled his throat shut, and caused the skin inside his mouth and on his face to peel. “They burned me so bad I had to wear a burn mask,” he recalls. The therapy also destroyed his sense of taste. Although it is slowly returning—the process can take a year or more—he is in the precarious position of having to create and serve food that he cannot really taste.

That night, Achatz and his team wanted to figure out the balance of ingredients for the white-chocolate-and-violet outer layer of the new dessert. The filling was another puzzle: too much strawberry would overwhelm the salt in the olives; too much olive would mask the strawberry. The violet had to serve as a link between these two strong flavors—as a reverberation of spring.

After the white chocolate had been melted, Achatz stepped back and let his sous-chefs take over. One used a medicine dropper to add lavender into the beige liquid, while another stirred the drops in. Achatz was using lavender as a proxy that night, because the restaurant had not yet received its shipment of violet oil.

“How’s it taste?” Achatz asked the three chefs.

“Not there yet, Chef,” one said.

Achatz put his nose deep in the bowl. “More drops,” he said. He stood back again, his concentration intense.

One sous-chef added more lavender, while another took out a spoon and swiped a bit off the top of the mixture.

“Do you taste it yet?” Achatz asked him. He danced around his staff.

“Not really,” one answered.

More lavender. Achatz turned to another sous-chef and asked him to taste it. The sous-chef picked up the spoon put down by his colleague, flipped it, and loaded the handle end with a taste from the pot. “No,” he said.

Achatz put his nose into the bowl again. His staff kept adding drops and tasting. Finally, they said that the blend of white chocolate and violet had the right flavor.

“I can really smell it,” Achatz said.

The four men dipped chunks of strawberry coated in an olive mixture into a pan containing liquid nitrogen, flash-freezing them. Then they coated the balls in the flower-infused white chocolate, and put them in the freezer.

Afterward, Achatz and I sat down at one of the tables in his empty restaurant. He said that, if his ambitions were different, his condition might not matter so much—many successful chefs leave their menus mostly unchanged, season after season. But this is not a route that Achatz is willing to take. He noted that he had once worked for Thomas Keller, the celebrated chef of the French Laundry, in the Napa Valley. He said, “Thomas has his Oysters and Pearls”—a signature dish. “We just don’t do that. We develop dishes that we feel are great and then eventually replace them.”

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Indeed, Achatz’s rising fame rests on his restaurant’s commitment to novelty. (“Alinea” is the word for the backward “P” symbol that proofreaders put at the beginning of a new paragraph.) So if Achatz can’t keep creating new dishes the restaurant will close, or, at the least, it will lose the central place it currently occupies among food enthusiasts. (Ruth Reichl, the editor of Gourmet: “Grant Achatz is redefining the American restaurant.”) And so Achatz is willing, while his body heals, to play an odd, new, dependent role in his kitchen. “For years and years and years, it was the opposite,” he told me. “My sous-chef was handing me food, and I was saying, ‘No, it needs more salt.’ ” He added, “Now I just have to trust them, to either confirm what I myself am perceiving or to tell me, ‘No, Chef, that’s not it.’ ”

Achatz comes from a family of restaurant owners. His relatives—some of them German, others French-Canadian—owned seven diners within a fifty-mile radius of St. Clair, Michigan, Achatz’s home town. When he was five, his parents made him a dishwasher at their establishment, Achatz’s Family Restaurant. He stood on a milk crate so that his hands could scrub the bottoms of the pots. By the age of twelve, he was a cook on the line. “I was on the schedule, like a normal employee,” he says. Achatz’s Family Restaurant served basic food—eggs, roast chicken and potatoes, beef stew. The restaurant, he recalls, was “a social gathering place in the community, a place where everyone went after church on Sunday. And it did the most fundamental thing that food does—that is, nourish people.”

Such food did not lend itself to decoration. When Achatz was eleven, he added a sprig of parsley to an omelette plate. His father told him, “It doesn’t have to look good. It just has to taste good.” Undeterred, his son continued to experiment. One day, in 1988, when he was fourteen, Achatz was whipping potatoes in a Hobart mixer and his eye fell on some McCormick poultry seasoning. He remembers thinking, Hey, I wonder if I put some poultry seasoning in there what it would taste like. The whip of the mixer knocked the container out of Achatz’s hand, and the seasoning quickly spread throughout the potatoes. Achatz added milk and butter and put the potatoes on the steam table, hoping that no one would complain. They had to be thrown out.

Despite this mishap, mixing flavors was one of the aspects of cooking he liked most. “Since I’ve been ten years old, even eight years old, my life has been devoted to tasting and memorizing flavors,” Achatz says. “They are really burned in my brain.”

Over his father’s objections, he skipped college and enrolled at the Culinary Institute of America, in Hyde Park, New York. On one break from school, Achatz returned home and roasted emu for his parents and their friends. “We didn’t even know what it was,” his father recalls.

In 1995, the year after he graduated, Achatz went to work for Charlie Trotter, the owner of the eponymous restaurant in Lincoln Park, near where Alinea is today. (“I want to be like him,” Achatz remembers saying to himself. “I want to be the best.”) A year after that, he moved to Northern California to work at the French Laundry, under Keller, a cook’s cook who emphasizes fresh ingredients and combines them in often dazzling ways. Achatz still recalls his surprise at the Oysters and Pearls dish: “Caviar with pearl-tapioca pudding? Not only is it delicious, but who thinks of putting pudding with caviar? It was just mind-blowing.”

In 2000, Keller sent Achatz to visit El Bulli, a restaurant in Catalonia run by Ferran Adrià, one of the leaders of the molecular-gastronomy movement. “Thomas always looked at me during my tenure as kind of an idea guy,” Achatz says. At El Bulli, Achatz saw foaming foods and hot gelatins. Adrià was also known for serving meals in a fantastic manner. One season, peanut butter came to the table in a toothpaste tube; in another, diners were given a plastic ampule to squirt mushroom cream into their mouths. Keller, at the French Laundry, was more interested in what you could do with food rather than to food; Adrià made Achatz consider new possibilities. Soon after his trip, he sat down with Keller and told him, “I need to go. I need to do my own style, ’cause I’m thinking of food differently from the way you need it and want it prepared here.” Keller wished him well.

In April, 2001, at twenty-six, Achatz applied to be the chef of Trio, a well-known restaurant in Evanston, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. The owner hired him after he auditioned with a seven-course meal. He quickly became renowned in the food world for a dish called Truffle Explosion—the diner bit into a piece of ravioli and was greeted by a burst of intense black-truffle liquid. In 2002, the Chicago Tribune’s restaurant reviewer gave Trio four stars; a year later, the James Beard Foundation named Achatz its Rising Star Chef. A month or two after that, a tiny lesion appeared midway along the left side of Achatz’s tongue.

The main risk factors for cancer of the “oral tongue,” as the forward two-thirds of the organ are called, are alcohol and tobacco. Achatz never smoked or drank heavily, but his life style wasn’t exactly healthy. At Trio, he ate poorly, drank ten Diet Cokes a day, and worked long hours, sometimes as many as ninety a week. (When a local magazine featured Achatz and asked him to name “one thing that’s overrated,” his response was “Sleep.”) He had also recently become a father: he and Angela Snell, a former events coördinator at the French Laundry, had moved to Chicago together, and had a son, Kaden, in 2001.

Cancer cells can grow wildly; they can travel through the bloodstream to find distant organs to colonize; they can take over blood vessels. But, as skillful as they are, they meet a remarkable opponent in the mouth, whose tissue is designed to withstand salivary acids, bacteria, fungi, and chewed food. “Our mouths are set up to tolerate a large amount of insults,” Joseph Califano, a head-and-neck surgeon at Johns Hopkins, says. “Evolution has created the cells lining the mouth to be extraordinarily resistant to tumors.” So at first Achatz’s cancer, which may have emerged as early as 2003, had only marginal success in gaining a hold in his tongue.

The tongue’s nerves rise close to the surface, and the lesion, as small as it was, exposed these nerves, which soon came in contact with Achatz’s teeth. Achatz’s tongue began to bother him. He felt it at night and when he put hot or sour foods in his mouth. One day, in April, 2004, Achatz, on his way to work at Trio, stopped in front of a mirror, opened his mouth, and stuck out his tongue. He saw the lesion—a white dot—which he at first took to be a canker sore. He made an appointment to see a dentist, who told Achatz to stop biting his tongue. “You’re stressed, you’re young, you’re successful, you’re stressed, you just had a kid, blah, blah, blah” is Achatz’s summary of the diagnosis.

Dehydrated bacon wrapped in apple leather; shrimp, lemon rind, and cranberry-gel tempura fried on a vanilla bean; tropical fruits under a sheet of coconut; two preparations of rhubarb; huckleberry juice thickened with modified starch and frozen.

That month, Achatz began organizing a group of backers to invest in his own restaurant. He loved Trio, but since he was a teen-ager he had wanted his own kitchen. He found a partner, Nick Kokonas, a former derivatives trader who was a fan of the food at Trio, and they wrote up a business plan and started looking for money. Six investors soon joined Kokonas, who himself put in more than half a million dollars. The owner of Trio was devastated by Achatz’s departure. He complained to the Tribune, “What’ll I do without truffle ravioli? It’s like the memory of an old girlfriend.”

Achatz wanted his new restaurant to be different—no tablecloths or silverware waiting on the diners’ tables, and no rubber mats in the kitchen. His chefs would be so precise that they could work on carpeting. He planned to cook with Cryovac packets, a technique that uses vacuum-sealed containers to infuse meats and vegetables with seasonings; molecular-gastronomy advocates say that the method creates more flavorful food. So Achatz would need lots of hot water but hardly any ovens. He did not want a huge range from which he could command a kitchen brigade but, rather, a modular field where cooks could rotate in and out of different tasks as equals.

In all this, Achatz followed in the footsteps of the molecular gastronomists, who believed that the standard repertoire of cooking—the roasting, boiling, and sautéing that dominated the kitchen since the time of Auguste Escoffier—was out of date. Chefs like Ferran Adrià had noticed that a hundred years ago kitchens and science laboratories used the same techniques, but in recent years labs had pulled far ahead. Multinational food companies benefitted from the labs’ innovations, converting solid foods into sprays (the coating on Cheetos), and using nitrous oxide to aerate them into foam (Reddi Wip). The world’s best restaurants, Adrià and his ilk believed, needed to catch up with Nabisco.

Adrià’s influence was unmistakable when I ate at Alinea, in March. The meal was almost comically elaborate, involving twenty-four courses and costing three hundred and seventy-five dollars, with wine. The food starts off at the savory end of the spectrum, and slowly turns sweeter, concluding with coffee, in the form of crystallized candy. Most items could be eaten in a bite or two, but the procession took four and a half hours. I had liquefied caramel popcorn in a shot glass, and a bean dish that came on a tray with a pillow full of nutmeg-scented air. The plate of beans was placed atop the pillow, forcing the aroma out. I sampled a “honey bush tea foam cascading over vanilla-scented brioche pudding,” in the words of the young man who brought it. There was also a dish centering on a cranberry that had been puréed and then re-formed into its original shape. The berry was then prepared on a device called the Antigriddle, which Achatz had helped design. The Antigriddle froze the bottom of the berry but left the top soft.