He’s a chef who has his customers eating sushi made out of paper. (He prepares them on a Canon inkjet printer.) They’re supposed to eat the menu, too. He’s working on producing food that levitates. He’s thinking of ways to grow food on Pluto.
No, he isn’t a character in the new Charles Stross novel. He’s real, he’s twenty-nine years old, his name is Homaro Cantu, and he runs a restaurant in Chicago called Moto. I kid you not—edible menus, paper sushi, food that levitates.
Chicago somehow has become one of the nation’s capitals of avant-garde, or shall I say weird, dining. All the way back in the column for February 2001, I had this to say about some of the newer trends in dinner concepts:
Weird food is the innovation of the day. In Paris you can get deep-fried Mars bars, which must seem wondrously exotic to the jaded palates of the French. In our own nation’s capital, one restaurant offers an appetizer of sea urchin sprinkled with Altoids mints. At Sushi Samba in New York, twenty-nine dollars will get you—my God—“lobster sashimi,” a freshly killed critter that comes to the table still waving its pincers. They sell forty orders a week of it. I never had any trouble writing about such stuff, but seeing it at the next table would, I have to say, send me out the door.
The future is invading the kitchens of our most adventurous restaurants at an astonishing pace. (These are “edgy” restaurants, in the new sense of that word, and are sure to make this particular veteran gourmet “edgy” in the old sense.) For example, a three-star restaurant called El Bulli in Spain now serves chocolate smeared with mustard and squid ravioli containing coconut soup. (Gracias, no por me, señor!) The same—edgy, yes—restaurant offers an ice cream cone full of trout eggs, which actually doesn’t sound so awful. They also have a yeast soup with sorbet. Sushi Samba in New York, where the pincer-waving lobsters are so groovy, lets you ease your uneasiness by quaffing cold sake that has the aroma of rotten eggs. And one of the fave appetizers is a plate of silver-dollar-sized crabs that you eat (fried, and dusted with kosher salt) right down to the claws. “Oh my God, they were scary,” one diner told the Journal. “They looked like insects.” (Why the kosher salt? Don’t ask me. I’m neither a chef nor a rabbi. I can tell you, though, that you can fill a restaurant three feet deep with kosher salt and it still won’t make crabs of any kind kosher.)
And then I went on to mention, back then, the seafood tartare course at Tru Restaurant in Chicago, which is a dish of chilled minced seafood served floating over a bowl containing a live Japanese fighting fish. “I was afraid it was going to jump out and bite my nose,” one diner said. I did indeed dine at Tru myself a few months after I wrote that, during the 2000 Chicago World Science Fiction Convention, but either I failed to find the sea-food tartare on the menu then or our entire group—my wife and I, and Joe and Gay Haldeman—saw it and decided to, well, chicken out.
Now we have Mr. Cantu’s Moto, and the computer-generated sushi.
“The map is not the territory,” said the famed semanticist Alfred Korszybski in Science and Sanity, a book that attracted a great deal of attention in SF circles half a century ago. (A.E. van Vogt’s celebrated novel The World of Null-A was allegedly based on the Korszybski teachings.) That is indeed true of maps and territories, but not of Mr. Cantu’s maki sushi, which is made not of crab and rice wrapped in seaweed, but of a picture of the same that he prints out on his Canon printer, using organic inks and edible paper made of soybeans and cornstarch. The back of the paper is flavored with a seasoning of powdered soy and seaweed, and the diners at Moto gobble this printed sushi with, I presume, enormous pleasure, as well they should, considering that they are paying two hundred forty dollars per person, wine included, for the twenty-course tasting menu at Moto. As it happens, I am not a great fan of sushi in its old-fashioned form, but if I were paying twelve dollars for a plate of sushi printouts I would endeavor greatly to find delight in it.
Every meal at Moto includes two or three items made of paper. This includes, as I said, the menu too: it’s printed on the same edible paper, and you are expected to ball it up and drop it in your soup. You might get a printout of a cow flavored to taste like filet mignon, or, perhaps, a splendid photo of some gooey dessert, from which you derive the flavor of the dessert but, wonderful to consider, none of the calories.
As for the levitating food—
That’s not quite available yet. Call it a work in progress. All I can tell you is what the New York Times tells me, which is that “Mr. Cantu is experimenting with liquid nitrogen, helium, and superconductors to make foods levitate.” What this will mean, in practice, I’m not sure. Possibly he envisages doing away with waiters entirely, and simply having your meal come floating out of the kitchen toward you. Or maybe your filet of sole will be delivered in the old-fashioned way, but will hover two or three inches above your plate when it comes to the table. If so, how do you cut it? (Just lean forward and bite off a chunk?) What if the levitating food develops lateral thrust as well as vertical, and wanders away from your table?
And how does the superconductive part work? Superconductivity, so I have been given to understand, is a phenomenon that takes place only at temperatures very close to absolute zero, and even in a really bad Chicago winter it’s usually warmer than that inside your average restaurant. If Moto plans to offer supercooled dining conditions, I doubt that it’s ever going to count me among its customers: I am widely known for my adventurous tastes in dining, but (after decades of soft living out here in California) I have no interest at all in chilling out at restaurants that maintain temperatures of two or three Kelvin. I don’t have the right sort of wardrobe for that.
If the superconductive stuff doesn’t work out, Cantu has another plan for levitation up his sleeve: a hand-held ion-particle gun, already being tested, which thus far he has used to make salt and sugar jump around. I am unimpressed with this. Anybody can make salt jump around—put some on a hot skillet and watch what happens—but I foresee some time at the drawing board before a mere ion-particle gun can achieve mid-air osso buco or nongravitational lamb chops. (And imagine, if you will, levitating paella, with the rice drifting off in this direction, the mussels and clams going thisaway and thataway, the chorizo heading upward toward ceiling-level orbit—)
This cutting-edge chef, a relentless gadgeteer who used to take all his Christmas presents apart so that he could figure out how they were assembled, is planning to buy a three-dimensional printer—I didn’t know that such things existed yet, but I’m not as cutting-edge as some science fiction writers I know, and maybe Cory Doctorow or Rudy Rucker can fill me in on this one—so that he can use his computer to create silicon molds for his concoctions. (He’s talking about pill-sized dishes coming in such flavors as bacon-and-eggs, watermelon, or beef Bourguignon, or, perhaps, all of them at once.) Also on his shopping list is a class IV laser, the most powerful laser that the Occupational Safety and Health Administration will allow to be used. Ordinarily class IV lasers are used in welding or surgery, but, once he’s sure of getting OSHA’s blessing, Mr. Cantu wants to use it to whip up dishes that are “impossible through conventional means.” Among them: sashimi tuna that’s raw on the outside but cooked within, and “inside out” bread that has the crust in the middle and the soft doughy part outside.
A Chicago outfit called DeepLabs is providing technical consultation for this project. “I tell them I want to make food float, I want to make it disappear, I want to make it reappear. I want to make the utensils edible, I want to make the plates, the table, the chairs edible,” declares Mr. Cantu. “I ask them, what do I need to do that?” And the enterprising designers at DeepLabs, who clearly find Mr. Cantu a more stimulating employer than Home Depot or Motorola (two of their other clients), do what they can to oblige. They have created a combination fork-knife-spoon for him, and utensils with pressurized handles from which aromatic vapors come, and another one with a silicone handle that can hold liquefied or pureed foods, so that you just have to squeeze it and your sauce comes squirting forth.
Nor does his vaulting imagination stop at the stratosphere. He’d like to find ways of growing food down there at the superconductive temperatures, so that mankind can begin farming the fertile acres of Pluto. He’s got some project for Mars, too. It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that he’s working up food-production concepts for the first Heinlein-style multi-generation starships—self-sustaining nutrient vats that make our present-day hydroponic concepts seem pitiful. And so forth, until the mind and alimentary canal both boggle.
This very twenty-first century chef believes that sophisticated diners are “sick and tired of steak and eggs. They’re tired of just going to a restaurant, having food placed on the table, having it cleared, and there’s no more mental input into it other than the basic needs of a caveman, just eat and nourish.”
Very well, Mr. Cantu. I accept the challenge. As all my friends know, my own credentials as a sophisticated diner need no affidavits. I’ve eaten the damndest strange things in the finest restaurants of every continent except Antarctica. The next time I’m in Chicago I’ll check out your restaurant. I am undaunted by that two hundred forty dollar price tag. (It’s deductible, after all—I’ll be doing research for my next Asimov’s column.)
I don’t know about having dinner at two degrees Kelvin, though. I like it a lot warmer than that when I eat. I guess I’ll need to check on the temperature at your place when I call to make that reservation.
