Weird Science

The point, for Cantu, is simple yet starkly, almost insanely, ambitious: He wants to use his strange brew of self-taught rocket science and professional culinary training to change the way the world thinks about food--which has barely evolved, he says, while everything else has advanced at warp speed. "What is cooking? 'Cooking' is a loose term. It's understanding energy or the lack thereof," he says. "People are afraid because their mentality as a whole has been held back with food and pushed forward with everything else around them." Cantu hopes to commercialize some of his inventions, with the ultimate aim of improving the lot of man. "My main goal here is not to wind up on aisle seven at Safeway. I don't want to be the guy doing the bottled hot sauce. We're changing the way humans perceive food."

And although some people think Cantu is talking a big game to get more people to his restaurant, there is a clear method to his madness. While Cantu refers to Moto, a slick minimalist spot in Chicago's meatpacking district, as his "test kitchen," he is also expanding beyond it--not with a chain of Motos in Vegas and beyond, the traditional route for a name-brand chef, but rather with a new business, Cantu Designs. He hopes to license such patent-pending inventions as his "food replicator," a tricked-out printer named in homage to Star Trek that creates "edible surfaces" such as paper flavored like cheesecake or a mojito; new utensils, which he hopes will change the way people eat; and his polymer cooking box, which allows food to continue cooking even after it is removed from a heat source.

If it's not so easy to find the link between edible paper and world salvation, a few hours with Cantu will at least get you thinking differently about the possibilities. He's a strange and paradoxical combination of idealist and cynic, a guy who in one breath talks about working with the U.S. government to help revolutionize the MRE (meals ready to eat) system and in the other proclaims he'll never be able to work for "the man." But working with contradictions is exactly what Cantu's all about. Others' obstacles are his possibilities.

To change the world for the better--not to mention run a restaurant that is quickly becoming a temple for science-based gastronomy--is a hell of an ambitious goal for a self-proclaimed screwup. Cantu was a troubled kid from the Pacific Northwest, with a mother who drifted in and out of homelessness. He narrowly avoided a trip to juvie for setting a huge fire in a field next to an apartment complex when he was 12. In school, he routinely slept through class. In fact, he had only one discernible passion: taking things apart. There was the lawn mower, the remote-controlled cars, the transistor radio. Although he took a job at a fried-chicken joint when he was 12 (he said he was 16), Cantu saw food more as sustenance than the source of a career until the owner decided to bring in a tandoori oven and Cantu realized that there was more to chicken than McNuggets.

As high school ended, Cantu found himself with no place to live. Fortunately, he connected with a couple named Bill and Jan Miller, who sometimes took in troubled teens. They offered him a couch in their living room on the condition that he go to culinary school. He did--and found his calling. "He came home with a Charlie Trotter [the famous Chicago chef] cookbook one day and said, 'One of these days, I'm gonna have a book just like this,' " remembers Jan. "You know what, he probably was the most ambitious, determined young man we have ever met." Says Cantu: "If it hadn't been for them, I'd probably still be struggling as a line cook somewhere."

Cantu determined that the only way to learn how to be the best was to work with the best. He decided to take the traditional "stage," the free internship most would-be cooks do for a few weeks or months, and turn it into a way of life. He spent about two years traveling up and down the West Coast, knocking on the back doors of some 50 bistros, organic cafés, and fusion restaurants that he thought could teach him something and offering his services for free. Through this hands-on form of benchmarking, Cantu began to develop his own style and became more determined than ever to open his own place.

In February 1999, when Cantu was 22, he decided that Trotter, whom he idolized for his beautiful presentation and use of the best ingredients, would be his next stop. Arriving in Chicago armed with nothing but a stereo and a backpack, he went straight to Trotter's and scored a meeting for the next day. Trotter told him it was rude to show up without an appointment. Cantu was unfazed. "Sometimes I just want to do things," Cantu responded, "and right now I want to work at this restaurant, and that's the only thing I want to do." Trotter hired him, and Cantu spent the next four years climbing the ranks to sous chef. "It was a tough kitchen," he says. "Some people call it hell. I call it a character-building experience."