Chef Grant Achatz to Open Molecular Bar in Chicago

by Jennifer Lawinski, Posted Feb 2nd 2010 @ 2:00PM

CORRECTION: Achatz Not Opening Molecular Bar Called 'Boom'

The Chicago bar scene is about to get a little more creative.

Grant Achatz, the chef behind Chicago's award-winning molecular gastronomy restaurant Alinea, is opening a bar -- Boom -- that will turn the classic cocktail on its head, Eater National reported.

Achatz told the Wall Street Journal that Boom will be a stand-alone cocktail bar where food will come second to drinks.

"Liquid nitrogen, dry ice, tapiocas, foam cotton candy, it's endless," Achatz told the Journal. "Not that I am bored here, but it's opening up new possibilities. I would love the opportunity to sit down at a bar and say I am going to have an alcohol tasting menu."

For example, Achatz has re-imagined the Sazerac, a classic cocktail made from whiskey, bitters and sugar. In Achatz's version, the bitters is made into "pudding dots" and the "whiskey is transformed into gelée," the Journal reported.

"It's the size of a thimble," Achatz told the paper. "It's got all the classic components of a Sazerac. But you're chewing and it's fun."

Achatz isn't the only mastermind of molecular gastronomy transforming mixology. Wylie Dufresne has been toying with traditional cocktails at WD-50 in New York and Danny Meyer, whose restaurant group runs Tabla in Manhattan, have been mixing it up behind the bar.

Achatz, however, is the first to put drinks out in front by opening a bar, the Journal reported.

"Chefs make great bartenders, they just don't know it," Douglass Miller, a lecturing instructor at the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, N.Y., told the Journal.

[Eater via WSJ]

Filed Under: Restaurants, Chefs
Tags: alinea, grant achatz, grant achatz opens molecular bar, molecular bar