Weird Science

All the while, Cantu spent his days off tinkering with his own creations, imagining startlingly original ways of presenting and reconstituting food. What his ideas had in common was the combination of the fresh and the familiar--the deconstruction of a comfortable, memory-evoking food and its resurrection in a totally different presentation.

"This guy comes in with these little glasses, he looks like an accountant, and he starts talking about levitating food," says the restaurateur behind Moto. "I said, 'Wow, that's a lot to take in.' "

In late 2003, Cantu heard about an opening for a chef at a new restaurant called Moto. The backer was a young restaurateur named Joseph De Vito, whose earlier food forays consisted of a burger joint and a classic red-sauce Italian spot. De Vito wanted something different, perhaps Asian fusion. Cantu wanted something really different. "This guy comes in with these little glasses, he looks like an accountant," laughs De Vito, "and started talking about levitating food. I walked away saying, 'Wow, that's a lot to take in.' "

Cantu then asked to cook for De Vito and his wife. The seven-course meal was unlike anything De Vito had ever tasted. It included a spring roll with a shot glass holding a ravioli--whose spring-roll-flavored liquid center just "exploded in your mouth"--and a piece of fish cooked at the table in Cantu's polymer box. "Maybe this could work," De Vito remembers thinking. "I always wanted a chef who was going to run with the ball. I think the key to success in this business is to find the right people and let them be creative."

Creative, yes, but what Cantu called creative other people called bonkers. There was the edible menu, a soy-based concoction with vegetable ink spread out to resemble a soft piece of parchment; synthetic champagne injected into your glass with a giant black medical syringe; and flapjacks sizzling on a "griddle" frozen to -273 degrees. When Moto--which in Japanese has many meanings including "idea," "taste," and "desire"--opened in January 2004 offering only a tasting menu with little explanation, people were confounded. "They would ask for sushi, and you'd hit them with this degustation menu," says De Vito, "and then they'd get up and walk out."

Those with the guts to stay were in for a bizarre-yet-tasty combination of food and science, of high and low culture, of the comfortable and the absurd. Case in point: Surf & Turf, which combined a Hawaiian sea bass and duck cooked sous vide (in a vacuum), with mushrooms, a foamy puree of foie gras, and apple butter. Accompanying the dish was a sketch inspired by M.C. Escher, the mind-bending surrealist, depicting a sea that morphs into a sky. "And please eat the drawing," a server would say. "It's flavored on the top like a bird and on the bottom like a sea."

Eventually, Moto was discovered by foodies, who came to admire Cantu's strange combination of childlike playfulness, all-American flavor, and haute cuisine. There is, for example, the Donut Soup, an elegant espresso cup containing a few ounces of liquid that tastes exactly like the inside of a Krispy Kreme doughnut, chemical aftertaste and all. Or the sweetbreads and cheese grits, served on a spoon over white-corn-and-goat-cheese grits. Next to the spoon is goat-cheese "snow," which has been zapped with liquid nitrogen. Diners were asked to abandon their preconceptions about food and just put themselves in Cantu's calloused hands. His only promise was that the food would actually taste good. "Wow, this is so much better than Chuck E. Cheese's," joked one recent guest. The restaurant began to turn a profit, helped along by Moto's cheap rent and high prices.

It's a big night at Moto, because Ferran Adrià is coming to pay his respects. Adrià is the famous Spanish chef behind El Bulli, the restaurant outside Barcelona that in the 1980s became the first to successfully mine the vein between science and food, between perception and reality, in what is often dubbed "molecular gastronomy." Cantu, irreverent as ever, pretends it's not a big deal, flippantly answering "Pizza Hut" on the kitchen phone before realizing that it is Adrià's friend and equally esteemed colleague, José Andrés, confirming the reservation. But he clearly wants to impress. "We've gotta blow this guy away!" a note reads on the schedule downstairs.

Adrià, who was intrigued by a presentation Cantu gave in January at Madrid Fusión, a chef's conference, says he isn't going to drink wine until the end of the meal. "I want to concentrate," he says. And concentrate he does, his brow furrowed as he tastes bison with the aid of Cantu's aromatic utensils--forks and spoons with corkscrew handles that hold sprigs of thyme and rosemary--and watches him use his laser to burn a hole in a vanilla bean, whose fumes are used to enhance the flavor of the beef dish he is serving. Neither Adrià nor Andrés will comment directly on the meal, but they both clean their plates. "One of the things left in cooking today is to find out what is the limit--what is cooking, what is not cooking," says Adrià. "It is clear that Homaro is a chef with that capacity."