Food Geeks

Haute Cuisine On The Culinary Frontier

By Elaine Bergstrom

A near-deserted street in Chicago's market district is hardly the spot where one would expect to find an upscale restaurant known for cutting-edge cuisine. The experience in Moto's sleek and stark dining room can last up to five hours. During it, customers are treated to edible menus that taste deliciously like crostini or cotton candy, fish that cooks in insulated polymer boxes at the table, red wines spun into white in a centrifuge, and sugarless desserts as sweet as anything coming from a French pastry chef.

Chef Homaru Cantu's unique approach to cuisine is featured in the series Future Food, airing Tuesdays on Planet Green (HD). The series takes you inside the culinary lab at Moto, where Cantu, pastry chef Ben Roche and their team tackle the world's food problems with centrifuges, liquid nitrogen, meat glue, ion particle guns and little-known natural ingredients.

I got a chance to visit the basement lab at Moto, sample the food and speak to the two chefs who, along with their staff, are boldly going where no chefs have gone before.

What sort of new ingredients are you using in the series?

Homaru Cantu: What we're actually doing is that Ben and I will be here in the lab and come up with a crazy idea, like for these plants here that grow wild in different parts of the U.S. We'll say, "Hey, can we make chips out of taking this plant called Dracaena, which is actually a relative of the corn plant? Or, can we do something with wild cactus? Can we eat this stuff?" And the answer is yes, but it doesn't taste very good. So we take this product called Miracle Fruit and use it to make wild plants taste wonderful.

People are aware of the flavor tripping parties, but on the show we take a look at world hunger and at all the plants around the world that can be food but they don't taste great. So, we feed people Miracle Fruit. We're eating it down here. We take it into the kitchen. We take it to the Chicago Conservatory. We take it into the dining room. In one episode, unprompted, one of the diners actually comments, when he sees everything he has been eating, "Wow, this could actually end world hunger." And it's sort of an interesting concept. If you think about it, it's entirely possible. And not just that Miracle Fruit makes foods taste good -- [they become] amazingly delicious.

One person who tried Miracle Fruit said, "You taste this lemon, and it's a sweet lemon. But it's also the best lemon you've ever had." So that's part of the wild food episode.

We're not focusing on the negative side of what we are dealing with. All we focus on is the solution. We're sort of Mythbusters meets American Chopper -- in the kitchen.

After reading about the Moto dining experience, I have to ask. Have you ever been sued by your customers?

Cantu: No. All the science happens here, in the lab. It's nothing we would experiment with on our diners. Every once in awhile, we like to have fun with our guests but for the most part, we keep the experimenting to ourselves -- particularly if it is potentially dangerous.

How did your interest in the science of food evolve into Moto?

Cantu: When I was 12, I used to work on the floor of my dad's job. That was a company called GNP Corporation, owned by Lockheed Martin. It was one of the first companies to do rapid prototyping, back in 1989. I'd be sweeping the floor, looking at the things around me, robotics, you know, and not thinking too much about it but sort of absorbing little pieces of information. I was never a good student in school -- grade school, high school, culinary school. I just never had that passion until I got my first restaurant job. That was with some crazy people. It's no secret that nutty people work in restaurants and these people were the top tier of that class. So, basically I started to meld food and science. We fast-forward to Moto, where for the first time I got a chance to do something really outside the box and take a really big risk. And Ben joined the team about three months into it. Had he not, we really wouldn't be here today. He took the pastry area and just exploded with the same thing I want to do with the savory side. And then things sort of started mish-mashing together into anything goes, no holds barred, so long as the food is organic and natural.

We've always been green, people just never think of Moto that way. But think of the edible menu. Why would you take a piece of paper and print it up using toxic inks that are bad for the environment when you can just eat it? Restaurants waste tons of paper a day. So it's like you just start there. At Moto, the menu alone is the greenest menu on the planet.

We're outside the box and we're proud of that. We love to experiment with things. For example, we convince people they are eating seafood when we make this seafood -- bass and scallops -- out of tofu. We do this to address the overfishing issues, but we aren't tapping too much into that side of "Oh, my god! All the fish are gonna die!" We believe if we are going to deal with an issue, why keep talking about the issue? Just find a solution. You aren't going to eliminate the demand for skatewing with the French people unless you give them something like skatewing that tastes better than skate.

Next: A lot of what you are creating required a lot of work. Do you think that what you are doing here can move out of your lab and into grocery stores?

Page: 1 | 2 | Next »