7,000 calories later: Bootleg dining with A Razor, A Shiny Knife

If chefs are the new rockstars, then fans make bootlegs accordingly: Instead of trading live recordings over the Internet, the fans behind the “educational, social and theatrical culinary experience” group A Razor, A Shiny Knife bootleg the meals served by their favorite chefs. Specifically the five cooks, only two of whom are professionals, recreate the $1,500-a-head 21-course meal Grant Achatz (of Chicago’s much-ballyhooed Alinea) and Thomas Keller (California’s The French Laundry, New York's Per Se) created last fall to celebrate the release of their books. But ARASK does it for $300 per person, with far fewer cooks and non-fancy equipment in residences and loft spaces. It’s a little like trying to recreate My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless in your garage with some friends and a few amps.

The group’s first attempt was a sensation among foodies in New York, so ARASK brought the event to Achatz’s hometown last week for a two-night stand at a private residence on Lake Shore Drive. The A.V. Club ingested more than three times its usual daily caloric intake—we wish we were kidding—to file this course-by-course report.

7:25 p.m.: We pull up to a staid, squat high-rise on Lake Shore near Belmont for the dinner. “I didn’t realize this was going to be at someone’s apartment!” exclaims my wife, completely weirded out. Stepping into the building’s rich, wood-paneled atrium to call up for someone to buzz us in, I joke that it’s going to be just like Eyes Wide Shut. When someone picks up on the other end of the intercom, I say, “Fidelio,” the password that got Tom Cruise entrance into the sex mansion in the movie. After a confused silence, I add, “We’re here for the dinner.” Someone will be right down.

7:27 p.m.: Chef de cuisine and master of ceremonies Michael Cirino escorts us to the elevator, which opens into a tiny private foyer for the host apartment. A long table with eight seats is set up in the family room. The adjoining room acts as a staging area, where a cheap plastic bucket with boiling water cooks some items sous vide. This is clearly the $300 meal, because everyone knows that Achatz cooks sous vide in a crystal bucket filled with unicorn tears.

7:38 p.m.: The vibe is decidedly informal, like a big dinner at a friend’s apartment. An iPod on a dock plays everything from Notorious B.I.G. to Curtis Mayfield, Cirino jokes with the guests like they’re old friends, and the five cooks buzz around the trapezoid-shaped kitchen. All eight diners are encouraged to help prepare the dishes, or just stand around and sip champagne. I opt for the latter—there are too many cooks in this kitchen. Hey-o!

8:40 p.m.: Prep for the first course finishes up to the jovial sounds of “Killing In The Name” by Rage Against The Machine. Do you think Tom Morello and Zack de la Rocha enjoy fine dining, or do they feel guilty eating luxuriously while the proletariat starves? Whatever, it’s the economic disparity that brings out the flavor!

Courses 1-4. Only 17 more to go!Sally Ryan

Courses 1-4: The first course—actually four courses on a bizarrely heavy square white plate—arrives just before 9. Cirino prefaces it by saying the dinner will last roughly three and a half hours, and we’ll be consuming between 6,500 and 7,000 calories. Holy shit! He keeps piling it on: “There are eight of you, and the meal contains roughly 8 pounds of butter.” I make mental plans to move a cot into the gym Saturday and live there for the next week or so.

On the plate: prawn (with yuba, miso, orange), white sturgeon caviar (with lemon verbena gelee and a cauliflower puree), blis char roe (with coconut, coriander, and vanilla fragrance), and one of Keller’s signature dishes, cornet of salmon (with black sesame tuile and red onion crème fraîche). It looks like a miniature ice-cream cone, and tastes like a fishy rainbow. The rest of the night will follow suit: The courses—none more than one or two bites in size—burst with complexity. Nothing tastes like one thing; there’s no, “Mmm, cheesy!” or “Mmm, steaky.” Here’s a rough tongue transcript of the sturgeon caviar: Hmm. Light, smooth lemon. SALT. Slightly fishy but not overwhelmingly so. CREAMY. Hints of cauliflower. Odd mish-mash of everything. Clean finish.” 

9:02 p.m. – My wine glass—now switched to chardonnay—is never empty for long. My mental acuity decreases by the minute, as the food coma and booze begin to tighten their grip.

Cirino preps the wax bowls.Sally Ryan

Courses 5-8: Wondering where 7,000 calories can hide in 21 single-bite dishes? The second plate helps explain: a truffled potato soup; a black truffle ravioli; and two types of custard, both with truffles (hen-egg custard with ragout of black winter truffles, and Jacobsen’s farm musquee de provence soup with sea urchin saboyon and black-truffle puree). Two of the items are Achatz’s signature dishes: The hot potato-cold potato soup places a black truffle, chive, and butter on a pin over a cold potato soup in a wax cup. You pull the pin out, the items fall into the soup, then you drink them all together. Like all things Alinea, its simple elegance is a bitch to pull off: The pins are custom-made and exorbitantly expensive, and so are the little bowls. But ATASK pulls off the replicas using wax. 

The truffle ravioli, bottom right, was the star of the show.Sally Ryan

The star of the night, and one of Achatz’s most popular dishes, is the black truffle explosion. “The idea is what’s really brilliant here,” Cirino says. It’s a ravioli filled with a sphere of liquid black truffle that literally explodes in your mouth when bitten. At Alinea, they make it with a custom ravioli press (of course). One of the diners at the ATASK dinner noted its version didn’t explode with the force of Alinea’s, but it the pop was strong enough that some shot out of one diner’s mouth.

Course 9: ATASK keeps it simple here, and by “simple” I mean one item that would probably take me six hours to make: Japanese greenup abalone with yuzu, tapioca, seaweed, and matsutake mushroom broth. Delicious.

American cheese? No, a ginger gel.Sally Ryan

Course 10: Another single item from Achatz’s brain: wild striped seabass with chamomile, clams, mussels, and ginger. It sits atop what, from a distance, looks like a slice of American cheese. If I’d trust anyone to make something haute out of American cheese, it’d be Achatz, but this isn’t cheese: It’s ginger, which has been cooled and cut into semi-solid squares. Tasty, alluring, creative—but what if he had used American cheese?

Course 11: “The lamb has a lot of interesting shit on it,” Cirino announces to the group, and thereby sums up the whole vibe of ATASK: informal, collaborative, but engrossed by the source material. The interesting shit on this Elysian Fields farm lamb is fennel, pernod, and an aroma of coffee (which wafts from a smoldering centerpiece).

Course 12: “If you’re wondering where all the calories are,” says one of the diners, “I bet most of them are right here.” In front of us lies a galette of Hudson Valley Moulard Duck foie gras with Italian pistachio financier, compressed red sensation pears, and garden mâche. For all the talk of foie gras in Chicago these past few years, I was once again underwhelmed by the dish itself. I wanted to enjoy it more just out of pure spite for my incompetent alderman—Joe Moore, who wrote Chicago’s short-lived foie-gras ban—but the flavor just doesn’t do much for me.

Courses 13-14: “These are two of the most technically difficult plates,” Cirino says ahead of the calotte de boeuf grillee and chestnut. The first features medium-rare brisket—cooked sous vide—and cabbage dumplings, horseradish pudding, and sour cherries, and the latter is deceptively simple with quince, chocolate, and baked potato. To be honest, it’s all starting to blur together, and my notes are getting more indecipherable. I think we’re on at least our third, maybe fourth varietal of wine, and my stomach can’t take much more. Whatever lucidity follows below is mostly incidental.

Raspberry transparency and bacon with butterscotchSally Ryan

Courses 15-17: The next three take a sweet-to-savory approach: bacon with butterscotch, apple, and thyme, held aloft by pins; a raspberry crisp with powdered sugar that looked like red Saran Wrap but tasted like a potent raspberry reduction; and a concord grape with yogurt, mint, and long pepper. For the life of me, I can’t remember the last one. The nearby sofa is starting to look good. Just. Need. A few. Minutes. Of. Rest…

Course 18: Buttermilk sherbet arrives with a roasted pecan crumble and a whiskey-sour coulis. The sherbet is tooth-achingly cold, but the flavors all work together to create something refreshing. It fools my body into thinking it’s not insanely full for all of 30 seconds.

ATASK preps the spice cake, cooked sous vide!Sally Ryan

Course 19: Cooking beef sous vide I can understand, but spice cake? Okay, so it’s not so much “cake” as “warm viscous stuff that’s kind of like a thick batter,” but it’s tasty. The persimmon, rum, and Ohio honeycomb are nice touches.

This s'more deconstruction, in a word, ruled.Sally Ryan

Course 20: There’s still some room in my esophagus, so I’d might as well cram in this s’more deconstruction: graham-cracker crunch, a chocolate cremeux that’s so dark and bitter light barely escapes it, a creamy foam, and a homemade marshmallow and chocolate emulsion. I may not be able to support my own weight at this point, but I could eat about five more of these.

Course 21: Served on a burning twig of cinnamon, the little nudge to send us over the edge: a sweet potato dumpling with a shot of bourbon in it. I’m starting to wonder if I can keep it all down.

I do, and somehow manage to stumble out of the building at 2 a.m., but not before saluting Cirino and his colleagues like the pros they are. It’s not Loveless, but I may just like the bootleg better.