YEAR: 2008
Taste, for a chef, ought to be the one sense that is non-negotiable. Without the ability to savor food, to experience the sweets and sours, the salty and the bitter, how would he ever know whether his creations are a gastronomic success or a culinary disaster? Achatz confronted that shattering question in 2007, when doctors told him that the pain he’d been experiencing in his mouth was due to tongue cancer. The treatment? Removing his tongue, the one organ that defined who Achatz was. (By that time, he had worked for Thomas Keller at The French Laundry and Ferran Adria at El Bulli, and had opened his open restaurant, Alinea, in Chicago.) Not willing to give up his tongue so easily, Achatz got another opinion, and underwent chemotherapy and radiation that thinned out his tongue and robbed him of his ability to taste for about a year. But like Beethoven, who continued to compose after going deaf, Achatz turned to other ways to practice his craft, relying on the aroma of food and the taste buds of his staff to continue to produce dishes that would earn the restaurant three Michelin stars in 2009. Featuring what he calls “progressive American” cooking, the meals at Alinea are part performance, part molecular gastronomy, and all Achatz: some dishes come to the table as a centerpiece with instructions not to touch with your hands, and some are masterpieces strung on wire or fashioned into edible threads. His goal is to pique not just a diner’s eye and palate, but his memory and psyche as well, evoking long-ago places or emotions that the scent or taste of food can conjure.
While his sense of taste has returned gradually, with his cancer in remission, Achatz will not soon forget what he learned and experienced in the months he lived without taste — those are lessons he hopes to teach to others as well. “I have a very strong belief that people needed to be aware of my fight with cancer,” he has said. “Because something I learned during that process of determination could benefit a lot of people, not just people with cancer but sickness in general. So that’s why I was so public with it.” And diners everywhere are the better for it.