Weird Science

It may be freezing outside on this wintry March morning, but deep in the bowels of one of the most elegant--and possibly strangest--restaurants in Chicago, it's getting hot fast. It's the weekly chef's brainstorming meeting at Homaro Cantu Jr.'s Moto restaurant, and Cantu and his passel of wacky young chefs are coming up with fresh ways to tweak the restaurant's wildly innovative menu at a rate that would make a corporate creativity consultant lose his lunch--or, perhaps, clamor to eat another one.

Even before the session begins, there are a few clues that this is not your average fine-dining establishment. Start with the Class IV laser, normally used for surgery, on prominent display in the dining room. At Moto, it's an important cooking tool. Then there's the huge tank of industrial-use liquid nitrogen in the backyard, used to freeze things that are normally hot and to mold foods into wholly unnatural shapes. Finally, there's the huge photo of Salvador Dalí, mounted prominently above the stairs leading into the basement kitchen. Printed on the photo is a quote: "The only difference between a madman and me is that I am not mad."

That is not immediately obvious as the meeting gets started. Ben Roche, Moto's 23-year-old pastry chef and resident science geek, describes a current project: "I'm trying to make a scoop of ice cream that you cook at a low temperature so it shatters into a powder when you eat it."

Cantu, a tall 29-year-old whose black hair, pale skin, and devilish smile gives him a faint resemblance to Eddie Munster, nods encouragingly. "What else?"

Darryl Nemeth, a Moto line cook, pipes up, "One idea I had was making ketchup fryable, in a form that was cuttable, with waffle-fry sauce."

"Like a cross-cut dealy? You get ketchup and fries all in one? That's cool," says Cantu, his face lighting up. "That's a great idea. I think you could do it with tapioca. The only issue is whether the tomato sugar would burn."

The meeting turns to what the chefs ate on their days off, a regular source of new ideas. One chef fesses up to eating Hot Pockets, those soggy, microwavable excuses for stromboli that are more suggestive of a date with bad reality television than a gourmet restaurant whose 18-course grand tasting menu goes for $160 a head (wine not included).

But not for Cantu. He is so excited, he can barely sit still. Finally, a flavor and a concept for the "lava lamp" drink he has been yearning for, with solid pieces that slowly turn into liquid. Says Cantu: "Okay, so it comes in a glass and there are little pockets inside that are actually hot, and the whole thing is hot, then gets cold as you drink it. That's a no-brainer."

"Are you sure that wouldn't creep people out?" the Hot Pocket eater ventures.

"Any idea's a great idea as long as it tastes great," Cantu says.

There are people who play it safe and people who just can't. Cantu is the latter, a rosemary-wielding rebel who loves to challenge a diner's assumptions about how food should look, taste, and feel. "He's an inventor who accidentally ended up as a chef and is returning to being an inventor," says Wylie Dufresne, chef-owner of WD-50, a New York restaurant known for a similarly technomodern approach. "But his food is good and tasty."

It is this quirky lust for the unexpected--the desire to push the culinary envelope by combining flavors, textures, and temperatures in previously unimagined ways--and his general irreverence for the accepted parameters of food and fine dining that have suddenly propelled Cantu into the role of the restaurant world's enfant terrible. In just two years, this young chef has drawn attention from The New York Times and Gourmet, had the Who's Who of modern gastronomy in to sniff (and taste) around, and scored an invite to cook a dinner for Nobel Prize winners. He has made many more-traditional chefs nervous--and been called everything from a faddish flavor of the month to a creative genius.

But while Cantu is most certainly a chef, he is also someone whose approach to innovation has relevance far beyond the kitchen. He is the classic mad scientist, a Stephen Hawking acolyte with a basement filled with gadgets, robots, and gazillions of inventions aching for just a little bit more time and attention. Unburdened by pesky details such as practicality or resources, he's the type of guy who reaches for the nightstand at 4 a.m. with yet another nutty thought (his wife, Katie, bought him a tape recorder to mutter into). And despite the accolades, in his mind he is just getting started. "This isn't just gimmicky s--t," he says. "There is a point to this."

Cantu wants to use his self-taught rocket science and culinary training to change how the world thinks about food. "He's an inventor who accidentally ended up as a chef," says a colleague.