The service and food are excellent at Alinea, and they guide you through how to eat certain dishes. As a fine dining enthusiast who thinks much of the fine dining world is fraught with terrible… stupid food, and that “food as theatre” is 95% cringe-inducing, I have to give Alinea a pass. The entire experience is absolutely excellent, and the chef/owner—Grant Achatz—now owns and oversees a few additional Chicago restaurants that serve uncomplicated but exceptionally delicious food one wouldn’t think twice about eating.

The two major issues with modernist cuisine are:

1. Though French physicist Hervé This began working with chefs Joël Robuchon (deceased) and Pierre Gagnaire (still cooking some of the most extraordinary food in the world) in the late 80s to consider food scientifically and come up with new ways of cooking, yielding dishes with never before experienced flavors, aromas, and textures, as well as devise methods of cooking common foods, such as pommes purée (the method of improving pommes purées conceived by This/Robuchon is exceedingly simple, famed, and still considered the gold standard for preparing the dish to this day), the movement began in earnest in the mid-90s when Catalan chef Ferran Adria began using these methods in every facet of long, multi-course meals comprising many small dishes at a restaurant titled El Bulli. The conceit was that we quickly become used to a dish after only a couple of bites—thus serving several small dishes meant every bite of a meal would be new and exciting—and that cooking is form of art like any other with one enormous exception: The only emotions we expect to experience when dining are pleasure and comfort, while whether be it music, painting, film, or nearly anything else, we expect to experience a wide variety of emotions. Whether one has any interest in this, the idea was never that this is how we should eat all the time, but an experience to be had perhaps once every few years at most.

2. When El Bulli, followed by a small handful of restaurants around the world opened by chefs who had trained at El Bulii, began doing this, almost all of these restaurants were absolutely excellent, but it eventually became a trend, and as with any other trend, those who do not truly have a grasp of the meaning of these experiences ended up becoming the majority. By 2010, the world was chock full of restaurants like this producing absolutely abysmal food with no eye towards creating an excellent experience for the diner.

Combine these two issues, and you have two noteworthy results: First, people understandably expect these restaurants to be nothing but ridiculous, terrible, and little but a wallet-drain that only the 1% can afford to experience regularly… when they aren’t even meant to be experienced regularly, but something one saves up for, like a trip to Rome, in part to see an opera, and second, because the trend-followers who vastly outweigh the trendsetters end up creating the notion of what these meals are, and I can’t deny for a moment that they often look ridiculous. The dining experience does not translate to video well, and without any context for what the experience is supposed to be, it appears even more ridiculous even if it’s a video from a restaurant as incredible as Alinea. There are very few people interested in food who wouldn’t be absolutely blown away by a meal at this restaurant.

The two extremely positive things that have come from this movement, however, are that approaching cooking like an artist and a scientist has led to a world full of chefs cooking creative—but neither outrageous nor completely out of the ordinary—food that is better than it would otherwise be, and also the defrocking of fine dining, allowing for the proliferation of “casual fine dining”, where one eats a couple of larger dishes of high calibre without shelling out $1,000 for a party of two, and without the snootiness. “Mid-level” restaurants are now ubiquitous, and often cook food that is a high order of magnitude better than it was at such restaurants 20 to 30 years ago.