Grant Achatz, one of the country's top molecular gastronauts, pens a column for The Atlantic this week titled "The Thrill of the Gel is Gone." After attending a large chefs' summit in Madrid, Achatz realizes that this avant garde style of modern cooking may have lost its momentum, or at least its inspiration. He writes that it would be premature to "declare the end of this cooking style, or even the micro pocket of creative focus contained within it," yet goes on to say the movement may have run out of ideas:
"It was difficult to see this at the time, but the breadth of this wave was quite narrow. When you really look at the techniques critically, the results are all versions of textural transformation involving liquids...
But what happens when the wow factor of a hot gelatin wears off? Or the mystery of how a liquid creates a wrapper from itself, its walls gelling to hold the still aqueous center inside?...once the iterations and the extensions have been explored to their peak, creativity slows and eventually stops, until a new source of inspiration is found..."
We wonder if this means he'll be going in a totally new direction with his Alinea Cafe venture.
