My stage at Alinea
I had arrived at what looked like an suite of offices. Looking down at my phone I scanned the address: 1723 N. Halsted St. This has to be the location. I walked past the building and looked down an alley. A man carrying a chef's uniform walked through a side entrance. From the exterior, Alinea was already defying the expectation from what a restaurant looks like. Even the fancier fine dining, Michelin starred restaurants around Chicago had the glassy windows to look in. The thought had occurred to me before I had even applied to the job but now seeing the building first hand: this was no ordinary fine dining restaurant.
I first heard about Alinea through watching a video of a desert plating on youtube. It was unlike anything I had seen. They were literally splaying it out on the table in front of the guests. They began by taking a chocolate ball and placing it in the center. They then proceeded to take several ramekins of different sauces and seasonings and 'painted' the table with them. It was an edible Pollock. After the sauces were finished, they took the spoon with which they spread out the sauces and crack open the chocolate ball unveiling a feast of white chocolate goodness inside. It was interactive. It was gastronomy. It was fun.
Researching the restaurant further led me to find out it was the highest rated restaurant in not just my state, but in the entire country. It maintained three Michelin stars for 12 consecutive years from its opening in 2005 up until now. To add some context, only 14 restaurants in the U.S. have the coveted 3 star rating.
Alinea means the beginning the first sentence on a new line. The approach the restaurant takes to cuisine follows suit. They rip apart the restaurant experience and put it back together. What the staff try to evoke encompasses all of the senses and evokes emotion. Take for instance, one of their more famous specialty deserts, the edible helium balloon. The balloon is made of inverted sugar and flavored with fruit essences. The chef then pumps helium into the mixture. A string made of green apple poached in concord grape is attached to the base and served to the customers. The customer can suck in the helium and make their voice sound extra high pitched. It's playful. It's fun.
The decision to apply there came from the need to challenge myself. There was a stasis with where I was at and I wanted to disrupt it. The position I applied for through Indeed was Food Runner and, to my surprise, got a reply back. There was an Open House Call for new applicants at one of Alinea's family restaurants, the Roister. One of three they subsequently opened through the years. I dressed appropriately for the interview and took an Uber.
The anxiety and over preparedness I did paid off. The interviewer told me that the interview process is two fold. The first is them interviewing me. The second if me interviewing them through staging. Do I have the passion and drive to want to work here? Am I ready to commit 110% to this place?
The interviewer gave me her card, a dress code for the stage and a login key to access learning modules regarding food safety and alchohol. All told, the tests took about 3 hours to complete.
I spent considerable time on youtube looking at just about very video regarding Alinea I could. I searched past experiences on staging on Reddit. Having expedited and ran food at Olive Garden, I looked at Alinea's expedite process in a video. The expedite process is basically the air traffic controller of a restaurant. You make sure the correct food goes to the correct table at the right time.
Looking at the way Alinea does it, I noticed they don't use screens to read the tickets. Everything is paper and color coded. If, for example, a ticket is in orange, it means a restriction such as food allergy. If a table has a birthday, they make a note of it on the ticket. Any good expedite knows timing is everything. They'll know if a table had a dish for 10 minutes when it really takes 5 minutes to eat. If the guest is doing a wine pairing, they add extra time to every single course for the sommelier to go out, put the glasses down and pour the wine.
I even looked at the possibilities of dining there myself. The restaurant pricing is as such:
-The Salon: $315-385 per person
-The Gallery: $425-485 per person
-Kitchen Table: $495 per person (minimum 4-6 people)
After which, a wine pairing is offered. The standard pairing is $155, the Reserve is $245 and The Alinea pairing is $395. If I were to just get the Salon with a Standard pairing, the cost is $663. Without the wine pairing we're looking at $455. A man can dream.
It was the day of the stage. I dressed appropriately and took the Metra and transferred to the Red Line to take me down to North/Clybourn.
Going down the alley to enter the building, I saw the liquid nitrogen tank outside with which they use for their dessert course. A skinny, tattooed chef was exiting and I let him know I was here for a stage. As I walked in, I heard someone whisper "Faster". My nerves went off like a fireworks display. What I read on reddit about how hard it was to work at Alinea was being confirmed with a single word and I only just walked through the door. How the hell was I going to get through this?
Walking through the immaculately clean kitchen to a room they call The Gallery, I was seated at a table and told the manager will be with me shortly.
Faster.
A drawer was built into the wall with one slightly sticking out. The contrast in hindsight wasn't much but sitting there, it looked significant. Don't be the drawer sticking out. Conform.
There was dadaist artwork on the walls, buckets measured apart from each other where the keep the iced champagne. Along the wall was a staircase that curved upward. Voices boomed from above. A man wearing casual clothes and glasses approached me and asked who I was waiting for and I told him the manager. After this, the manager took me upstairs and into the room they called The Salon.
He was frank and concise about what it is they do. "A good number of people end up not working out because they are not 100% fully invested. Nobody in this restaurant is here as a means to get by and go onto the next gig. They are all here because they are passionate about the restaurant industry. They see it as a career."
It was what I needed to hear. Did I want to pursue the career of being in the service industry? This is what he was asking. Up to this point, I had already devoted 7 years to it. All the videos, the fancy deserts, the gastronomy meant nothing if there wasn't passion behind it. The question of travel was brought up. Being that I commute to the city from the southwest suburbs, this posed a significant problem. I mentioned my commuting situation. He laid out a timetable: Start at 2pm. Doors open at 5 pm. Leave at around 1245 to 1 am. This meant, were I to land the job, I would finish at around 1 am, take the red line back, this time to the end of the line at 95th because the Metra doesn't run past 1 am, and then transfer to the Orange Line to get to a bus to take me home. A two hour round trip to and from work. Be in bed by 2:30 am. Wake up at 10 am to do it all over again. I could see living in the city was mandatory if you wanted to work here. How else would anyone be able to make it?
After the sit down, I was handed over to my follow. A nice Pakistani who would fill me in on all the details of my job. I was given a chef suit. About 5 minutes later, the daily meeting to go over reservations was to take place. All servers, hosts, captains, sommeliers, and managers gathered into the room as the head host went over who the plan for the day. Anyone who was of note or importance was mentioned in the reservations. After the plan for the day was done one of the managers said "We have a stage today."
I was asked what my favorite karaoke song was "Peter Gabriel's Sledgehammer" and what my favorite candy was "Sour Skittles". After the bits of trivia the room broke up into sections. Each section run by a captain who went over what the team they were in charge of could improve. The team members I was with suggested always making sure the guest' glass was full with water while another mentioned signaling for a finished table to be reprepped and reset accordingly and in a timely manner.
I can count on one hand the number of time I had a team meeting with the restaurant I work at. It isn't fine dining so to expect the type of excellence from it can be a bit much. But sitting through this meeting, I thought to myself: "Is it really much to expect?" Everyone was on the same plane in the room. There was no manager meeting that excluded servers. The managers weren't sitting down to have a meal and talk while servers worked around them. The impact on morale was palpable and it only continued in the group meal.
The food they had prepared for the group meal was fantastic. The servers and expediter were all seated at a table in the Salon. I listened intently. Talk about Game of Thrones and Lord of the Rings. One discussion about the hospitality of Hooters between two servers. Uncle Nick was spoken of. Nick Kokanos, the co-owner of the restaurant was, according to the information at the table, currently on a vacation in Spain.
When the meal wrapped up, my trainer showed me through the kitchen and downstairs to where the cleaning supplies is kept and the locker room. From a geographic standpoint, the Salon lead right into the kitchen. In the walkway between the two, there was a single table behind glass. The most exclusive (and expensive) table in the restaurant. He'd take me to each room and tell me about the positions where I was to stand. In the Salon, he went through the table numbers and the way servers come out of the kitchen. It can be compared to choreography. The servers are in a line and when the first course is served, they come out and go to their designated table. They drop the plate and share information about the dish in front of the guest.
He went through the courses:
Caviar
Charred
Turbot
Thai
India
Lamb
Turf Surf
Japan (this couse was for the Gallery and Kitchen Table)
Beef
Paint
The table where we had our team meal now had plates being polished by a server, while another server was rolling towels. My trainer gave me a task to take several small trays, put in a light and fill it with scented nuts. We divided them between ourselves. I kept thinking to myself, I never would have hough of doing something like his at my resaurant, but again, this was Alinea. At the end of the task he told me about closing work. After every shift, we are given a list of tasks to perform. He broke it down to me and showed me where all the supplies were to do them. It was 15 minutes to 5 pm which was when doors opened. For my stage I would follow my trainer into the Salon and Gallery and position myself at the assigned point in the room to observe. After the server plated the table, I would return to doing two tasks.
The first task was standing by the stairs and making sure the people coming down or up had clearence so they would not bump into anyone as they hold their tray of food. I'd use hand signals for this. The second task was to wipe down each tray of food the server brought down any bring any remaining glassware or silverware to the dishwashing room.
"Chefs, DOORS!" the expediter shouted. The chefs in the kitchen all shouted DOORS in unison.
Service began.
The restaurant's limited capacity slowly filled up. I watched the bustle of the kitchen and the chefs concocting intricate food art. I followed my trainer through the Gallery and stopped at the Stage position I was instructed to stop at. What looked to be blackened mangos hung from the ceiling by strings.
I observed the first course- Caviar- and went back to the kitchen. I've never had caviar, a food almost exclusively reserved for the middle to upper class considering how expensive it is. The Kitchen Table had two black bottles in the middle of it. I asked a server what they were and in a response loaded with sarcasm, "I believe they are sanitizer bottles." It was a sting of embarrasment which dovetailed to self flagellation. Of course those are sanitizer bottles. In hindsight, it shouldn't have been so obvious. I've never seen a restaurant provide them for each table.
I followed my trainer upstairs toward the Salon and was told to wait in the hallway connecting two rooms. The sommelier was preparing a bottle of wine at the top of the stairwell when a server pulled me aside and told me about the timing of when to enter a room. Timing and coordination was something I continued to see pulled off masterly.
Whenever there was time to help clean off trays and empty the contents in the dishwashing room, I did it. I had hope this would shown I was capable of taking initiative and one of the new servers told me just that. Once again I was thinking to myself only at Alinea as a glass skull was on the tray where the contents of the food were once placed inside the eyes.
At one point I was in the Gallery standing in my stage position and watched the captain take one of theblack balls hanging from the ceiling down while another team member wheeled an antique potato skinning machine out.
"It's time for paint." said my trainer. In any other environment I would have looked at my trainer like he had two heads, but knowing Paint was what the menu titled desert, I anticipated something special. I was in the Gallery and I noticed a chef in the middle of the stairwell. A line of chefs waited from the kitchen area. Queen's Don't Stop Me Now began and the chef on the stairwell came around to each table and sprinkled strawberry dust on each table. When the "Having a good time" section of the song started, the chefs came out and started plating the table with ramekens of sauces and creams. Each table looked like a Picasso of sugary filled goodness. Then, each chef brought out a nitrogen frozen brick of milk chocolate, placed it in the center of each table and smacked it with their spoon, crumbling the pieces onto the table.
The Kitchen Table got the same treatment only the song was Ghetto Superstition.
The floor manager pulled me aside as it was the end of my stage. He was middle aged, sported chestnut hair and had an Irish accent.
We went outside and I was taken to an office in back. I was asked how everything went and what I thought of my experience. I told him how different it was from my experience at Olive Garden. On just about every level. The way the kitchen operated. The guest experience. How everyone was in sync with one another to prepare the best meal they could for their guests.
The problem of transportation came up. Making it non sensical for me to take a job where 2 hours would be devoted just to me getting to and from the location.
The experience of watching a restaurant take apart a food and put it back together to fool the eyes but to cause the other two senses- smell and taste- to unlock nostalgic bliss on the part of the guest was something, even from on the outside looking in, I will not soon forget.
