Chicago eats: Alinea review + menu details

Hi friends! How are you? Hope you’re having a happy Monday! I’d love to hear about your weekend and what you were up to! Today, I’m sharing a very exciting Alinea review!

In 2017, we took an AMAZING trip to Chicago to celebrate our 10th anniversary. We met up with our friends Betsy and Jeremy (who live in San Diego) for a weekend of fun, including ridiculous restaurants, a show (HAMILTON! It was everything), and lots of shopping.

Whenever we meet up with them, it’s like no time has passed at all. Since we move so often, we’re lucky to have friends all over the world. I feel so fortunate that our time in San Diego introduced us to these wonderful friends, who are really more like family.

I’ll be recapping some of the adventures, including where we stayed + all about Hamilton in the am, but for now, let’s talk about the food.

Chicago Eats: Alinea Review + Menu Details

Oh, the food.

In Chicago, there’s an awesome restaurant every 20 feet or so. I could stay there for 2 weeks, go all out for every meal, and not even begin to touch all of the best dining possibilities. While we depended on your amazing suggestions + online reviews to make restaurant decisions, going into the trip, we knew there was one place we had to go: Alinea.​

Alinea Chicago Booking​

The Pilot and I are huge fans of Chef’s Table on Netflix -it’s one of the few shows we both like- and when we saw the episode featuring Alinea and Chef Grant Achatz, we knew we had to go at one point or another. When we decided on a trip to Chicago with Betsy and Jeremy, Betsy was ready to place our reservations exactly two months in advance, because they sell out quickly. (I was knocked out on painkillers from my surgery, so there was no way I could/should have made reservations haha.) We got the LAST reservation of the weekend, for 9:15pm on Thursday night. It was an exciting thing to look forward to, and the perfect way to celebrate our first night in Chicago together.

We got dressed and ready to go, and then grabbed a cab to the slightly-hidden destination.

(dress is here and tassel earrings are here)

Alinea is a smaller restaurant, and only seats 16 people at a time in the main dining room. There are three experiences to choose from: The Kitchen Table, The Gallery, and The Salon. It was a 16-course meal, and we had no idea what to expect. I figured that they would be messing with us the entire time, by serving dishes that look like one thing but taste like another. I didn’t know how much we’d be surprised during the meal, and how incredibly flavorful and different each course would be. It was the dining experience of a lifetime, and by far, one of my most memorable meal experiences.

When we were led into the dining room, the scene was ethereal, with a long white table, candles, soft tulle, and small metal flowers. Potted flowers hung from the ceiling.

They filled glasses of champagne for everyone, and dinner officially began.

Our first course was a mix of different small bites: chamomile meringue flower petals that were placed on top of the metal flowers that adorned the tables, Japanese cheesecake, and a cold, creamy melon drink poured into a tiny china teacup. It was kind of like ice cream? I can’t even begin to explain, it was INSANE! We were all enjoying the small bites, and one of the servers told us that they always water the flowers for each meal. They began to pour a liquid into the potted flowers that hung over the table, and before we knew it, dry ice fog began spilling out with a powerful rose scent. It brought an entirely different layer to the course and gave the bites a sweet floral flavor.

We headed into the kitchen for the next course and enjoyed a romaine bite with avocado, coriander flowers, and lime.

We also had cocktails that were mixed using this machine.

There are only 30 in the world! I wish I could remember what was in said cocktail, but it was fruity, slightly sweet, and boozy. <— all you really need.

We were all feeling pretty happy by the point we headed back into the fine dining room, and saw that it was an entirely different room. The long table was gone and it was separated into 4-seater tables, the art and ceiling coverings were completely different.

I won’t go through each course in detail -it was a 3-hour meal!- but snapped some quite pics of the food, which was exquisitely plated.

Alinea Restaurant Chicago Menu​

The menu:

I ate everything, and looooooved it, minus the veal. The Pilot was happy to take it off my hands.

Some of my very favorites:

The hamachi with rosemary, kombu and sea salt was DIVINE.

Potato salad! A potato had been buried in salt and roasted on our table the entire time. It was previously cooked sous vide in butter for 12 hours. Our server turned it into a potato salad with crème fraîche, truffle butter, and chives. (I could have curled up and lived in that potato salad.)

A soup with dehydrated langostino -it was SO savory and satisfying- served with nori rolls, with a cashew-potato mixture inside.

The invisible Butterfinger. They placed a glass bowl on each setting that had an empty Butterfinger wrapper inside. At the top of each bowl was a clear gel. The gel tasted JUST LIKE A BUTTERFINGER bar. It was pure magic, I tell ya.

The famous dessert course -painted and splattered onto fiberglass at each table- and the concord grape sugar balloons.

When we left, we couldn’t stop talking about the meal. It was so much more than I was expecting, and while I knew the food would be plated gorgeously and be presented in a way that would completely mystify us, I didn’t expect it to taste as good as it did? I mean, it is a Michelin Star Restaurant, so it makes sense. Alinea took cuisine to an entirely different level, by completely intriguing all of our senses, experimenting with different textures, sights, sounds, scents (the Denver campfire smoke was incredible), and flavor profiles during the course of the meal. If you have the chance to go, I highly, highly recommend it. I’d love to go back in a few years, try Chef Grant’s restaurant called Next, and see how much the Alinea menu has changed.

While it was a lot of food, I found that it wasn’t heavy at all. We were totally full when we left, but not in a miserable way.

In other words, we had no problem eating our way through Chicago for the rest of the weekend.