Let Them Eat Crème Brûlée and Pork, Takeout from Alinea and Isla Pilipina

There is nothing more predictable than a food critic ordering take out from Alinea in a time like this, except maybe the mass media pushing women and children out of the way to jump on the last lifeboat of the Titanic, aka amplifying panic during a global crisis. So, order from Alinea I did.

Alinea, of course, doesn’t need the ink. Their gourmet comfort food for the week is sold out, and it likely will be again next week. However, there are a few things worth exploring before I move on to a less obvious take out choice you should consider this week.

The pandemic has produced a democratizing opportunity for those who have never had the chance to experience Alinea. It’s like when the Rolling Stones warm up at a club before the big tour. The main criteria to experience it is to be one of the few souls who jumped on tickets at the right time. It doesn’t matter who you are or what you do, if you can click at the right moment. Then again, this is not entirely true. A $47 meal is not within reach of many who are struggling to find a bite while our food chain has broken down. But it is, in a relative sense, a lot more accessible than the $300 dollars you might pay otherwise.

So, for the opportunity cost of an Xbox game, or a couple Robert Caro volumes on Lyndon Johnson, what exactly do you get?

While not the traditional multi-course pre-fixe, the short rib Wellington, the 50/50 mashed potato, and the crème brulee are a high-quality ready-to-wear evolution tightly in tune with the bespoke line. The potatoes have the soul of Joel Robuchon, and the Wellington, its rare pinkness and flaky pastry is the stuff of Gordon Ramsay’s expletive-laden dreams. 

Set the table, light a duo of taper candles, put on Chet Baker, and hold hands with the one you love, and it’s extraordinary how, like a Gabriel García Márquez novel, magical realism can take over, and if only for a few minutes, the Alinea takeout really makes you believe you’re in a restaurant again. I felt surrounded by the warmth of what it means to celebrate the very idea of being alive in a time when we are highly uncertain of what life will be.

I also appreciate if you think that last paragraph is bullshit, because in some ways, of course, it is. I can’t really forget how messed up everything is right now. I have found at least 30 seconds of sheer panic at least a couple of times a day since this lockdown started, but then I write, or I take deep breaths, or find something to shift my neurons. I also understand how lucky I am to have this opportunity, to have worked on the Alinea cookbook in the past, to be able to be cared for by the folks at Alinea in a way that not everyone is.

But I truly want everyone to have this opportunity. And I don’t want people to have it as some fake-ass luxury good, a pricey purse made in the same developing countries as their cheap counterparts that is only differentiated by hype and celebrity. I want it for you, because Alinea is truly great. It means something.

Right now, at its most distilled level, the important part of this meal even existing is that it means a lot of people still have jobs. Nick Kindelsperger discusses this well in his own piece on the Alinea takeout experience for The Chicago Tribune.

On a more meta-level, the food served from the Alinea kitchen, whether a taco or black truffle explosion represents the height of the craft. To experience it is to know a devotion to the finest technique, the effort of a brigade of young cooks banding together to build something quintessential. It may not seem like it, but Alinea is the very definition of the American dream, a huge risk, borne of sacrifice, that was never a certainty.  

Chef Achatz is now a very famous self-actualized guy, but he was, for a very long time, a middle-class kid from Michigan. He became a broke-ass chef, who literally sacrificed a normal life, time with family, and friends, his marriage, his health and so many other things we don’t know about, in the service of creativity and the discipline to do things no one else had. It was a journey, almost 15 years in the making, or, almost 30 if you consider Achatz was washing dishes as a toddler.

One night, while I was working on the cookbook, I told Achatz, I wanted to watch a full service from beginning to end. So, I came in during the afternoon with the cooks and stood in the corners of the kitchen witnessing what it means to turn out Michelin-starred food for one night only. This was in the middle of Achatz’s cancer diagnosis. He was going through chemotherapy, could barely speak, because his esophagus was sloughing off like a snake’s skin from the treatment. He was slamming Haagen Dazs, the only thing he could comfortably eat to soothe the burn. But there he was, standing and expediting. At around 10 PM, he came over and asked me how I was doing. He said I could go home if I wanted. I said, no, I truly wanted to witness the whole service. He went back to his station, worked a little longer, then grabbed his hoodie and his Macbook and left.  Though this wasn’t a competition, even with cancer, Achatz wanted to outlast me. Frankly he did, because he’d come in earlier than I had. He only missed 14 services during his whole battle. He didn’t do this because he’s a masochist. He did this because the restaurant was literally his home in the way your actual home is your comfortable place. The son of a cook, he has spent more time in restaurants than his own bed.

It was also because unlike so many people, he found his purpose, and he wasn’t going to let something get in the way of that. Yes, Achatz did not invent a vaccine, but he has taught so many people to dream beyond, to push, to accept no limits, and that example, will, if it hasn’t already, push someone to make similar breakthroughs in science or world hunger or something bigger.

So, yeah, off the worship train, and on to the real world.

There are lots of places to get the spiritual and actual nourishment I’m talking about that are not Alinea. One of my favorites for a very long time has been Isla Pilipina. Sadly, it closes on March 30th. But the good news is they are doing a bustling take out biz before the closure. The other good news is that they will likely reopen this summer downtown in some form or another. Sarahlynn Pablo has the details over at Eater Chicago.

The thing I’ve always loved about Isla is that owner Ray Espiritu grew up not as a cook, but as an artist. He took the restaurant his family started and made it not only a stellar place for Filipino food, but also a supportive space for artists (the pictures and paintings on the walls have been a rotating gallery of sorts). The menus were whimsically illustrated, and it always felt like a more worldly version of the Friends coffee shop with people of color and heaps of killer adobo and pancit noodles.

When I first moved to Chicago and started writing about food and exploring beyond my suburban chain-fed childhood, it was one of the first places I visited. One bite of the garlicky pork-stuffed lumpia shanghai and I regretted 97% of every bite of every egg roll I’d ever had.  When the restaurant opened, the tocino was sweet and funky, it reminded me a little like pork mixed with foie gras fat. Today it’s completely different, but even better, caramelized and lacquered piggy candy glistening with a black molasses-like gravy. Mix it with a little vinegar dip and a mouthful of garlic fried rice, and just as at Alinea, even if zombies are pounding on the doors, you won’t pay any mind.

When my friends Jason Saldanha and Robin Linn had their second child, Isla Pilipina’s brontosaurus-sized crispy pata, a cracklin-swaddled fist of juicy roast pork was just the dish I believed I could bring them to restore some sanity and provide resilience for the other kind of walking dead, sleepless parents with a newborn.

Isla is where I first broke bread with The New Yorker food writer Helen Rosner, aka @hels, and the Chicago food writer Anthony Todd, now of Chicago magazine’s dish newsletter, two people I admire so much, and whose writing, like the food of Isla Pilipina, has enriched my life.

Finally, beyond those two, if the pandemic has granted you some additional down time and you’re looking for other great stories of food, please also spend moments with Mike Sula at the Chicago Reader, Titus Ruscitti of the chibbqking blog. Read Maggie Hennessey of Time Out, Mike Gebert of Fooditor, and Ashok Selvam of Eater. Mike Muser, partner in the forthcoming Ever restaurant with Curtis Duffy, has been putting out a great new podcast which is heavy on food, but also takes a fun look at things like parenting and motorcycles. Though, he doesn’t write much about food, I am so inspired by the infectious positivity and attention to culture building Ernest Wilkins is focused on. You should check out his newsletter, Office Hours.

Stay safe. Stay hungry.

--Mike