Thanks extramsg for putting our collective eyes back on the ball.

Not to discount jazzfood's story, but these kinds of service lapses happen - it was certainly a bad way to handle your request and hopefully (for their sake, as well as ours) they will learn from the mistake. Your reaction probably gave them a pretty good idea of the screw up. However, Moto is still a pretty young restaurant, and Cantu is a very young chef, and these kinds of things are part of the learning curve - some will get it right off the bat, others will not - and it seems Moto is still doing some learning.

That said, as this post from eGullet suggests, there are still some pretty interesting (and tasty) things going on at Moto. I know many will poo-poo places like this because of the perception that style over substance is a bad idea - and maybe it is - but it is, if budget is not too great a hurdle, worth a try, you may even like it (so long as they don't run you out with absurd substitution edicts!)

I've been a couple of times for the 10 course, liked about half of the things I've tried and was mediumly interested in returning inthe near future. After reading and looking at that post, I will be returning for the big daddy in the immediate future.

afo

I'm posting so we'll move this up for the benefit of readers who come over from today's Chicago Sun-Times article http://www.suntimes.com/output/news/cst ... est11.html

There's also a discussion of Pluton here
http://www.lthforum.com/bb/viewtopic.php?p=9386#9386

and Green Zebra here

http://www.lthforum.com/bb/viewtopic.php?p=1449#1449
and more on all if you use our handy dandy search function.

I think that the more people understand about the restaurant and chef going into it, the more they will get out of it. Each and every chef has their own distinct voice, albeit some are still searching for it. Trying to compare Homaro Cantu to Grant Achatz, or Grant Achatz to Ferran Adria, or Ferran Adria to Michel Bras does nothing but confuse people. As chefs, we are all trying to get some sort of message across to the diner, and food/cuisine is the language we choose. Nothing but an open mind, less concerned about competition and or similiarities between chefs, will do.

ChefGEB
www.gebowles.com

ChefGEB wrote:Trying to compare Homaro Cantu to Grant Achatz, or Grant Achatz to Ferran Adria, or Ferran Adria to Michel Bras does nothing but confuse people. As chefs, we are all trying to get some sort of message across to the diner, and food/cuisine is the language we choose.

ChefGEB,

This is a classic aesthetic dilemma. People tend to make value judgements about different artistic productions, that's only normal, but at some point it's also just not reasonable. Both Kurt Cobain and Bach were musicians, but it's not reasonable to compare the two; you can say you prefer one or the other, but there seems to be no reasonable and shared dimensions along which the two can be productively measured against one another.

Hammond

David Hammond wrote:Both Kurt Cobain and Bach were musicians, but it's not reasonable to compare the two.

I think this might be true if one were trying to compare the recipes of Ferran Adrià with those of, say, Pliny the Elder. But comparing chefs not only of the same (relative) era, but moreover, who occupy a similar niche--in this case, avant-garde cooking, I suppose--I don't see how you can fail to compare someone like Cantu to Achatz, especially if you're making an argument about modern cooking within the context of modern art.

If indeed it is true "that the more people understand about the restaurant and chef going into it, the more they will get out of it"--and I think to a large degree it is--that understanding only comes in the context of the development of the discipline, and in the case of Cantu that context certainly includes Achatz and Adrià.

In this sense, Cantu's cookery invites comparison comparison to Achatz. I would expect Cantu to welcome the comparison. And for sure, there is a difference between comparing in order to understand and comparing in order to judge. Nonetheless, it strikes me that it is either the poor artist (common) or the artist with no ego (rare) who does not wish the quality of his or her work to be judged against that of his or her peers.

"I am the greatest Keith Moon-type drummer there is."
Keith Moon

Aaron,

This is a truly challenging aesthetic dilemma.

I agree that if you're going to compare artists (and I'm honestly not sure that this can be done in any objective way), then it's reasonable to compare only those artists who reside in the same 'niche.' This is still a very crude metric because each artist (if he or she is an truly artist) is expressing something unique, without any other valid point of comparison, whether with others inside or outside his/her canonical category.

But let's take your argument a step further.

You mention avant-garde, which rules out any artists over 6 months in the limelight. For the sake of argument, let's use as examples Regina Spektor (anything off 'Soviet Kitsch') or Colin Hay. Two avant-garde artists, two very different sounds. You may like one, you may hate the other. But what, exactly, does that prove?

My feeling is, that in the case of the newest of the new, the foremost of the avant-garde, you cannot realistically judge them in any but the most visceral and elemental way: me like; me no like.

With something like classic French or Thai cuisine, you can measure the chef's accomplishments against a standard that has been validated by tradition. With the avant-guard, there is no way to evaluate the accomplishment. History is no guide because the artform has no history.

I think back to the trompe l'oiel sushi that Mike referenced see, I'm not sure he should have even eaten that stuff. Maybe he was just supposed to look at it. Maybe that's how it was supposed to be appreciated.

Hammond

Not to get too philosphically off-topic, but I think it's more correct to say that while it may or may not be reasonable to compare A to B aesthetically, it requires coming to a shared foundation on which to build such an argument. But honestly, this isn't unique to aesthetic judgments. cf, Feyerabend's Farewell to Reason.

The answer is just to try to explain and justify your opinion with as much specificity as possible and be willing to carry on a dialogue and look for agreement.

In other words, saying "Moto sucks" is rather useless. But saying that you find Moto's extensive use of sous vide to hurt the....is a starting point upon which a dialogue can start.

extramsg wrote:it requires coming to a shared foundation on which to build such an argument. But honestly, this isn't unique to aesthetic judgments.

Finding a shared foundation is fundamental, I agree, but what seems difficult (if not impossible) to me is locating that foundation when discussing works of art that fall so far outside traditional standards that there is no reasonable foundation for discussion except taste (literal "taste," in the case of restaurants).

I'm setting aside, for the moment, the even larger question of whether works of art can be productively compared at all (are Shakespeare's tragedies "better" or "more tragic" than Ibsen's, is Monet a "better" artist than Manet, etc.). I do think there may be something "unique" about aesthetic comparisons that is not the case with comparisons between, say, athletes, engineers, pool players and others engaged in more "measurable" pursuits.

I don't know if Moto is great art (and I've never been there, so this is all speculative on my part), but it seems they're going for an effect for which we may lack adequate standards of evaluation.

Hammond

PS. Wallace Stevens was right: "Philosophy before breakfast sticks to the eye."

Since I'm allergic to seafood anyway, I have a dream of getting the little rice-paper picture of sushi, igniting it with a lighter, and explaining to the waitron that "I prefer my seafood blackened."

Bob S. wrote:Since I'm allergic to seafood anyway, I have a dream of getting the little rice-paper picture of sushi, igniting it with a lighter, and explaining to the waitron that "I prefer my seafood blackened."

A) The maki is vegan.
B) Perhaps we should take a picture of you lighting the maki on fire and make the image taste like a bruleed maki.
C) One must chuckle upon recieving an edible photo of ones self

Truth be told, not one diner has walked out of moto with a middle of the road opinion. That would be a waste of life itsself, including my own. If a diner is less than passionate about food, I am determined to change their view one way or the other. Its all I can ask with the extreme gastronomic view we hold. Life is too short not to place such a heavy emphasis on the interactive/transcension/post modernism/whatever you want to call it that has been missing since cavemen/women were eating solely for sataiation.
At the same time , the dawn of technology is playing a vital role in how humans will consume in the future. We just want to add some humor to it, improve the technology and still use the worlds best ingredients. (Is that asking too much?)
The only thing that dissappoints me, when reading these posts are the ones that still have not experienced our vision. To me, this is the ultimate travesty, if you based everything you do on second hand information, you will almost always form an inaccurate conjecture on the subject matter. This is not the search for truth, but rather a search for caveman food. And caveman food would be consuming where we have been (although I feel a new dish coming on here). That is just flat out not the way humans on planet earth have a history of progressing.

Its time for food evolutiuon!!!!!!, lets stop just talking about it.................imagine this.........................
Open a magazine, look at an ad for waffles.............mmmmmmmmm that looks good...................now tear it out and eat it.......................tastes great, looks great...............................now thats gastronomic evolution.

One must have a sense of humor about this stuff. But this is serious stuff.

homaro cantu wrote:Open a magazine, look at an ad for waffles.............mmmmmmmmm that looks good...................now tear it out and eat it.......................tastes great, looks great...............................now thats gastronomic evolution.

Or a scene from Steven Soderbergh's King of the Hill (1993). In a (no doubt doomed) attempt to allay his Depression era hunger, the young protagonist makes himself a plate of food pictures from magazines and plays at eating them. Little did he know he was anticipating four star dining....

If I'm ever on the state's reinstituted Death Row, I know whom I'll call for my Last Meal.

I think most Domenick's and Jewels can present one with an edible picture of oneself as well, albeit with some fairly leaden cake underneath. Nonetheless, stop plateauing, evolution, and get back to work!

Caveman Bob, picking nits

(P.S.: My silly postholiday mood aside, welcome, Mr. Cantu.)

Chef Cantu, I saw on eGullet that Chef Adria when questioned about American chefs mentioned you and said that Albert had very much enjoyed your restaurant. See here.

I'd say that you have things quite mixed up, however, in that it's not by personal experience that man has evolved. That's exactly what animals do. They must either go on instinct or personal experience almost exclusively. Man has the advantage of passing down his experiences through words to further generations who can then learn by their ancestors' successes and failures.

That said, I wouldn't want to *learn* or follow the advice of someone who had no experience with the thing itself and who had no expertise in the subject matter. We have that theme throughout the arts: the blind following the blind.

I'm wary of your approach to food, but I look forward to trying your restaurant some day when I get back to Chicago along with Achatz's Alinea because people I know and trust who have been there have loved them.

This is where it gets tricky, does one choose to no longer follow the rules of the past? If so, all contact with the history of food is to be severed. Furthurmore, is there to be no record of our discoveries and achievements so as to promote our philosophy of forgetting everything you know then tasting it. I have satisfied my own dilemma by no longer considering myslef and my team as CHEFS. We are now gastronomic transferers of energy in a post-modernist style. Self identity must be in constant evolution along with the technology we tap into. We opened as moto the restaurant, we are now a team of former chefs striving for knowledge in many aspects of science, from astrophysics, to thermal dynamics, aspects of mathmatics from tessalations to impossable geometric shapes you consume with images of impossable shapes tesselating on them. (Edible oragami tasting menu). In futuristic propulsion conceps like ion propulsion, superconductivity, utilizing new inventions to enhance these concepts.

We can no longer ponder the literature and ways of the past. Gastronomy is like a newborn baby compared to the wise old technology sector.....whyforehowcome? How has this happened, if humans choose a lack of interest in consumption, then we WILL become extinct. Consumption is the only thing keeping us here so why have we wasted so much time on the destructiveness of ourselves and not put more energy into more cerebral and pleasurable ways of consumption.

I guess you enjoy reinventing the wheel. Personally, I prefer to have a base knowledge, to learn from others and from the past. Only after I have achieved sufficient knowledge and awareness can I really begin to be creative.

Some years ago, I received an alumni magazine from the University of Arizona. It had an interesting article on creativity and the driving forces behind it. This article suggested people who are trained in one discipline, then involve themselves in a completely different activity still carry that experience and offer new perspective. For example, I have a friend who is a Ph.D. Physicist (with a strong organic and inorganic chemistry background) who has been working in the Biological field for the last 10 years. He has been conducting unique research in the biological field because he identified phenomena very apparent from his Physics training; which were not obvious to his Biologist colleagues. The positive feedback on his discoveries keep feeding his intellectual momentum.

I am certainly not in my friend's intellectual league. Though I am often identified as a creative type. My ideas which have had the greatest response and impact were rather apparent from my point of view. However, I do have a number of unrelated interests which allow me a variety of contacts and experiences. I bring ideas to a group, which are often something I observed as successful in another group. I consider every new skill, contact or piece of knowledge another asset in my life's toolbox.

When I first learned to cook, I made my first Turkey Thanksgiving dinner following a Gourmet Magazine article. One ingrediant was chestnuts, which they explained how to cook they just overlooked one fine detail: how to shell. I spent an excruciating amount of time trying to peel those nuts and suffered multiple cuts on my hands. After Thanksgiving, I checked the index of the Joy of Cooking to find there was an easy technique to shell chestnuts. From that point on, I began to acquire cookbooks, clip recipes and research what I did not know to avoid repeating again the chestnut peeling disaster.

I certainly subscribe to the notion, "If you forget the past, then you are condemned to repeat it."

I'm not sure what you mean by "gastronomic transferers of energy in a post-modernist style".

You can call yourself whatever you like, but it will be largely just obfuscation. The truth of the matter is that you *are* chefs. Why? Because you're making food that people eat and must want to eat. And that's what chefs do.

Any reading of post-modernist literature makes one thing quite clear (and there's rarely anything clear in post-modern literature): you can't establish a meta-perspective wholly beyond the world you are in. The best you can do is work within your world and disrupt it, create and exploit fissures and fractures, and "play" with them. And that seems like a more accurate description of what *chefs* like yourself and Achatz and Adria do.

You may want to be artists. You may want to be scientists. You may want to be philosophers. And certainly you can borrow from those disciplines. But, really, you're still "just" cooks.

If you want to be an artist, maybe you should change the word "menu" to "exhibit", the word "restaurant" to "gallery", and serve wine and hors d'oeuvres since the "art" is not to satisfy one's hunger, but to satisfy one's aesthetics.

And likewise, if you want to be a scientist, you could change the word "menu" to "project", the word "restaurant" to "lab", and order in pizza and Mountain Dew while you tinker with your "experiments". (Actually, I think this is what Achatz appears to be doing with Alinea.)

You're going to have to give up a lot more of your world, the world of cuisine, to enter these others.

Again, I haven't eaten at Moto. People I trust have and enjoyed it. I'm interested in the approach and find value in it. I look forward to eating there some day. But I expect it will be a meal prepared by chefs in a restaurant.

(And all this assumes someone's not yanking my chain and pretending to be Chef Cantu.)

HC:

I haven't laughed so hard in a long time. If this is parody, it's sublime; if it's egomaniacal self-delusion, it's still very funny. Let me comment from the perspective of a somewhat educated and proud descendant of the noble Neanderthal...

homaro cantu wrote:This is where it gets tricky, does one choose to no longer follow the rules of the past? If so, all contact with the history of food is to be severed.

This is the artistic vision of the adolescent. If you think of what you do at all as 'art', than one would hope you understand that 'art' has meaning only in the context of rules, violated or not. The difference between monkeys (human or otherwise) and artists throwing paint at canvases has to do with the degree to which the result stands in some sort of dialogue with what has gone before. Humans who step out of the dialogue are talking to themselves and probably need to be reminded to bathe occasionally.

Furthurmore, is there to be no record of our discoveries and achievements so as to promote our philosophy of forgetting everything you know then tasting it.

Huh? If you're not interested in rules and history and dialogue, why in God's name do you need to make a record of your 'discoveries'? Or is it that you have undergone apotheosis?

I have satisfied my own dilemma by no longer considering myslef and my team as CHEFS. We are now gastronomic transferers of energy in a post-modernist style.

Geez, I thought the post-modern kick was passe about five years ago, when all the intellectual left-wingers finally embraced their need to give in to the urges of their portfolios.

Self identity must be in constant evolution along with the technology we tap into. We opened as moto the restaurant, we are now a team of former chefs striving for knowledge in many aspects of science, from astrophysics, to thermal dynamics, aspects of mathmatics from tessalations to impossable geometric shapes you consume with images of impossable shapes tesselating on them. (Edible oragami tasting menu). In futuristic propulsion conceps like ion propulsion, superconductivity, utilizing new inventions to enhance these concepts.

If that is the case, you surely should raise your prices.

We can no longer ponder the literature and ways of the past. Gastronomy is like a newborn baby compared to the wise old technology sector.....whyforehowcome? How has this happened, if humans choose a lack of interest in consumption, then we WILL become extinct. Consumption is the only thing keeping us here so why have we wasted so much time on the destructiveness of ourselves and not put more energy into more cerebral and pleasurable ways of consumption.

Eating oragami is perhaps a more cerebral and pleasurable way of consumption for you but caveman food, when done well by accomplished caveman cooks, is quite pleasurable and, I would argue, cerebral enough, and it certainly doesn't seem to have led to extinction of (at least) cavemen (admittedly, some of the species eaten have perhaps gone the way of the dinosaur). Your suggested pioneer's path seems to this Neanderthaler a little dangerous in this very regard...

***

I enjoy iconoclasm and the occasional passionate championing of the absurd. I also think it a fine thing to fleece affluent philistines who get more out of talking about where they ate and what they paid for the experience than actually chomping down on some satisfying cibus primitivus of the sort I and my brooding Neanderthal forebears have so long enjoyed. But in the end, I can't help but suspect that someone who makes a living fleecing philistines is probably one of them.

Please read this caveman's comments bearing in mind the severe limitations of my ilk. My brow protrudes heavily, I am somewhat furry (despite shaving), and feel a constant urge to club things.

Grüß Göttle.

Antonius

chef,

all due respect, truthfully though, when i read your words i feel the same pretentiousness that i felt when i was in your restaurant... and left. still wouldn't mind trying the food to make a more informed judgment regarding its merit, as i've been fascinated w/adria for years now and would love sampling something in the same vein locally.


i'm all for free thinking and evolving the palate, but antonius' comment "someone who makes a living fleecing philistines is probably one of them" rings true regarding my particular experience @ your restaurant. sorry. i wish it weren't so. under different conditions, i might have been your greatest supporter. i've made a couple careers out of pushing the envelope and shapeshifting, so i can relate. tis a pity.

Dang, it's Beat Up on Homaro Cantu Week at LTHForum... no mistaking us for eGullet today... the fact is that several parts of my meal were outstanding, really sublime, even as one was godawful; and if I started the meal a bit irritated, I ended it with a kind of perverse affection for what Moto is up to. (I used to be disgusted, now I try to be amused.) Or to put it another way, the classic restraint of Pluton seemed shortly afterwards to be a relief, yet I only vaguely remember that meal now, and remain intrigued by several things I experienced at Moto. In other words, I can imagine a Moto that's a total fraud, but this wasn't it.

More than that, I don't think we benefit at all as a city from trying to rein in the outliers; the level of experimentation that's going on under at least three chefs (by Chicago mag's count this month) is good for the scene overall even if you should happen not to like any of the restaurants. As in the authenticity thread, I couldn't agree more with Antonius that a sound grounding in "the rules" is always the basis of artistry, and I couldn't disagree more that Cantu is someone who has thrown all that away-- clearly what makes Moto's wilder and, yes, goofier flights possible is that he has very high levels of classical skill.

Plus, anyone who can use phrases like "ion propulsion" in regards to food clearly has the tongue-in-veal-cheek showmanship that has been so lacking of late in our temples of minimalism. Imagine the Don Roth salad bowl spinning entirely under the power of superconductive ion propulsion... that's the niche that Moto fills that places with less personality like Crofton on Wells or Grace could not.

That, at least, is my case for the defense. As the Wilde quote (or the Monty Python skit) says, "The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about."

Well put, Mike. If anything, the recent posts make me want to visit moto more than before.

If Cantu is crazy, then I want to experience food prepared by an insane, highly skilled chef. If he's merely a showman, then at least it'll be an interesting experience.

So maybe I'll head by some time.

-ed

Mike G wrote:Dang, it's Beat Up on Homaro Cantu Week at LTHForum... no mistaking us for eGullet today...

LOL...just for the record, there has been some criticism of Moto at the eGullet forums as well. Not much, but some. Not everyone there is a "homer" for Homaru

=R=

After Mr Cantu's last post, I'm very open to going to Moto, but I'm not going to drink the Kool-Aid...

(Admission: I still have the Check, Please! episode that reviews Moto on my Tivo, and pull it out occasionally for a chuckle.)

But it's Fennel Kool-Aid! Try it!

HC, thanks for participating. As for the others in this "dialog", it seems some folks here have been duped. A propos of the season, it's like you are trying to have a discussion with Santa Claus at Fields about the commercialization of Christmas and its antecedents in Simonism. Or maybe you guys just did that to fool me. Anyway, Dali gave silly interviews and he certainly accepted Visa. HC seems to be in the same artistic tradition; that's supposed to be a compliment.

It's amazing this topic has made two pages with only two people (and one only by proxy) who have actually eaten there. It's also amazing to me how ready people are to discount it who haven't eaten there, especially considering that the only two who did eat there, liked it.

Nick, I'm always open to the prospect of being wrong -- it softens the blow the frequent times it actually happens -- but I just don't feel the need to eat a picture of food to think it's a silly idea. (Though I do appreciate Cantu's followups. But the recursion of printing an edible picture of me burning the previous edible picture quickly spirals into no one ever eating anything as the ashes slowly engulf me.) If in your view I must eat the paper to be able to say I think it sounds weird, we have a friendly disagreement, and the next time you're in town, we'll split a box of Twinkies and I hope you enjoy the wrappers.

extramsg wrote:It's amazing this topic has made two pages with only two people (and one only by proxy) who have actually eaten there. It's also amazing to me how ready people are to discount it who haven't eaten there, especially considering that the only two who did eat there, liked it.

Well, since the restaurant (or laboratory or whatever it is) is intended to make statements about a variety of things (at least according to the ex-Chef himself), I think it legitimate to discuss the issues the place is intended to address. This is all the more justified since Mr. Cantu has graciously joined the conversation here and given us further "food for thought" (if not actual consumption).

Lighten up. He's maybe saying some things quite earnestly but also some things less so (one hopes). Engaging him in similar fashion strikes me as not a bad thing to do even if I haven't genuflected at the tessellated ion altar.

Now, where's my club...

Antonius

It's one thing to be skeptical of a dish. But I think most of the judgments have been farther reaching than that.

On the "sashimi": if every course was in that vein, I think it would be a bigger problem. He would be stepping outside the world of a restaurant and a discussion of his work would be more appropriate on a site devoted to art than food. As it is, though, with only one course, it's the equivalent of a character in a movie who says something smart-alecky to another character and then looks at the camera and winks. It's just a moment of disruption in the order of things to be playful.

Earlier, I wrote:But the recursion of printing an edible picture of me burning the previous edible picture quickly spirals into no one ever eating anything as the ashes slowly engulf me.

I should note that this would not be inappropriate were it a picture of Chicken Vesuvio. Even in deconstructed food, a little context never hurts. (But perhaps better served at Pompeii.)

Seriously, I appreciate Cantu's interest in our reactions, whether we've been there or not, and like Mike I assume there's some tongue-in-cheek wordplay from him in those posts. As for my attendance at one of these physics lessons, I think I need to wait; the two things that seem obvious to me are that one needs to go with at least one other person but ideally a few, to enjoy others' reactions, and that the immediate novelty of each presentation is important, and having read about many dishes here and seen more on Check, Please!, the surprise would be lost.

Would there be any interest in organizing a LTH visit to Moto? I realize that it will exceed the $27 rule, but perhaps Chef Cantu will join us. I have been wishing to try Moto, but have been waiting for the right party.