A near-deserted street in Chicago’s market district is hardly the spot where one would expect to find an upscale restaurant known for cutting-edge cuisine. The experience in Moto’s sleek and stark dining room can last up to five hours. During it, customers are treated to edible menus that taste deliciously like crostini or cotton candy, fish that cooks in insulated polymer boxes at the table, red wines spun into white in a centrifuge, and sugarless desserts as sweet as anything coming from a French pastry chef.
Chef Homaru Cantu’s unique approach to cuisine is featured in the series Future Food, airing Tuesdays on Planet Green (HD). The series takes you inside the culinary lab at Moto, where Cantu, pastry chef Ben Roche and their team tackle the world’s food problems with centrifuges, liquid nitrogen, meat glue, ion particle guns and little-known natural ingredients.
I got a chance to visit the basement lab at Moto, sample the food and speak to the two chefs who, along with their staff, are boldly going where no chefs have gone before.
What sort of new ingredients are you using in the series?
Homaru Cantu: What we’re actually doing is that Ben and I will be here in the lab and come up with a crazy idea, like for these plants here that grow wild in different parts of the U.S. We’ll say, “Hey, can we make chips out of taking this plant called Dracaena, which is actually a relative of the corn plant? Or, can we do something with wild cactus? Can we eat this stuff?” And the answer is yes, but it doesn’t taste very good. So we take this product called Miracle Fruit and use it to make wild plants taste wonderful.
People are aware of the flavor tripping parties, but on the show we take a look at world hunger and at all the plants around the world that can be food but they don’t taste great. So, we feed people Miracle Fruit. We’re eating it down here. We take it into the kitchen. We take it to the Chicago Conservatory. We take it into the dining room. In one episode, unprompted, one of the diners actually comments, when he sees everything he has been eating, “Wow, this could actually end world hunger.” And it’s sort of an interesting concept. If you think about it, it’s entirely possible. And not just that Miracle Fruit makes foods taste good — [they become] amazingly delicious.
One person who tried Miracle Fruit said, “You taste this lemon, and it’s a sweet lemon. But it’s also the best lemon you’ve ever had.” So that’s part of the wild food episode.
We’re not focusing on the negative side of what we are dealing with. All we focus on is the solution. We’re sort of Mythbusters meets American Chopper — in the kitchen.
After reading about the Moto dining experience, I have to ask. Have you ever been sued by your customers?
Cantu: No. All the science happens here, in the lab. It’s nothing we would experiment with on our diners. Every once in awhile, we like to have fun with our guests but for the most part, we keep the experimenting to ourselves — particularly if it is potentially dangerous.
How did your interest in the science of food evolve into Moto?
Cantu: When I was 12, I used to work on the floor of my dad’s job. That was a company called GNP Corporation, owned by Lockheed Martin. It was one of the first companies to do rapid prototyping, back in 1989. I’d be sweeping the floor, looking at the things around me, robotics, you know, and not thinking too much about it but sort of absorbing little pieces of information. I was never a good student in school — grade school, high school, culinary school. I just never had that passion until I got my first restaurant job. That was with some crazy people. It’s no secret that nutty people work in restaurants and these people were the top tier of that class. So, basically I started to meld food and science. We fast-forward to Moto, where for the first time I got a chance to do something really outside the box and take a really big risk. And Ben joined the team about three months into it. Had he not, we really wouldn’t be here today. He took the pastry area and just exploded with the same thing I want to do with the savory side. And then things sort of started mish-mashing together into anything goes, no holds barred, so long as the food is organic and natural.
We’ve always been green, people just never think of Moto that way. But think of the edible menu. Why would you take a piece of paper and print it up using toxic inks that are bad for the environment when you can just eat it? Restaurants waste tons of paper a day. So it’s like you just start there. At Moto, the menu alone is the greenest menu on the planet.
We’re outside the box and we’re proud of that. We love to experiment with things. For example, we convince people they are eating seafood when we make this seafood — bass and scallops — out of tofu. We do this to address the overfishing issues, but we aren’t tapping too much into that side of “Oh, my god! All the fish are gonna die!” We believe if we are going to deal with an issue, why keep talking about the issue? Just find a solution. You aren’t going to eliminate the demand for skatewing with the French people unless you give them something like skatewing that tastes better than skate.
A lot of what you are creating required a lot of work. Do you think that what you are doing here can move out of your lab and into grocery stores?
Ben Roche: For us, a lot of our time is spent doing R&D in the lab and coming up with new products in the restaurant. We do work with outside sources to develop products but we don’t get to a lot of that in the show. Future Food is mostly about the two of us managing the food and the rest of the crew in the restaurant.
Cantu: For example, in one episode we take health food products and we make them taste like unhealthy food products. We take that super green food, that green goo, and we centrifuge it and the solids that result from it are the same texture and density as catsup. And we add a bit of tomato powder to it to make it look like catsup and people swear they’re eating catsup. Not only that, it tastes better than catsup because it’s all natural sugars, whereas catsup has high fructose corn syrup and is about 39 percent sugar.
We take a high-fiber food bar and we separate everything — either through physical means or centrifuge or freeze dry it — and we make it into a flour and reform it into French fries. We serve it on the Willis Skydeck and people believe they are eating French fries and catsup.
So when you talk about things in aisle six, absolutely. I do consult with Fortune 500 companies on innovative products. These ideas are clearly in the future but this is what every food company is looking for right now.
Roche: I made a chocolate cake with chocolate frosting made from the same two ingredients in the super food drink and the granola bar. It was quite tasty for being a very healthy dessert.
What have been some of your most successful experiments, and what experiments just absolutely failed?
Roche: With every episode, we come up with the experiments in the lab, take it out somewhere in Chicago and let people try it. We came up with this dish that replicates raw tuna using watermelon. We used a couple of different savory ingredients to try to take the sweetness out. Then we coated the cut watermelon so that it looked like tuna with black sesame seeds. Then we froze the outer layer with liquid nitrogen so it looked like it was seared. We served slices of that with an Asian dressing on that. We both thought it tasted great but 95 percent of the people who sampled it at Mitsuwa Market said, “What are you trying to do with this watermelon?” So we brought it back, reworked it that day and put it back on the menu that night as a changed dish — actually a dessert.
What’s been your greatest disappointment?
Cantu: There was one episode where myself and the chef de cuisine Chris Jones try to make a burger out of things a cow eats — corn and hay. We used a lot of this equipment to pull this off. So we were out in front of DePaul University, because they have their PhDs in Burger King physics. So the veggie burger, along with the replicated burger overwhelmingly beat the real burger, but the one we wanted to win came in last.
What one piece of equipment is most essential for each of you?
Roche: I rely on liquid nitrogen. There are so many applications. That’s the most important tool.
Cantu: It’s a hard question. There are so many things working in this kitchen at any one time. If I lost just one piece of equipment, we’d be screwed.
When you aren’t working, what is your favorite meal?
Roche: We both have pretty simple tastes. I’m a pizza guy. I love pizza.
Cantu: I’m a pizza addict, and I love burgers.
What made you pick this location for Moto?
Cantu: We chose this area because the leases were very expensive downtown. Here it translates into a better experience for our diners. In New York it’s been proven time and time again that this kind of experimental food is just a fad unless it’s done in a way where the economics work out for the restaurant. Otherwise, it just doesn’t work.
Here people like their comfort food and that’s basically what we are giving them, but it’s comfort food on steroids. People appreciate the fact that we are taking their comfort food to a whole new dimension. At the end of the day, it’s like the lemon you eat with Miracle Fruit, or with our bread and butter, which hopefully it’s the best bread and butter that you’ve ever had and it’s something that you’ll never forget. That’s what we like to do — just have fun and make sure the food is absolutely top-notch quality and delicious, and organic and local. It is future food. This is what we think people will be eating in the future.
My Tasting At Moto
The proof, to reword the old adage, is in the tasting. Here are a few of the dishes I sampled:
Edible Menu, Slow-roasted Garlic, Homemade Butter — The menu was my favorite dish. Totally delicious. So was the garlic, slow roasted in a warm oven with just a garlic oil coating until it was soft and a nice golden color. After trying homemade butter, I went home and made my own. I think I need to practice more.
Onion soup — This soup was created because Chicago health department rules state that restaurant kitchens must leave their pilot lights on overnight. The chefs decided to use the energy to create a slow-cooked onion soup — just onions, they told me. After cooking, the onions were removed, whipped into a matzo ball dollop and served with the broth. An onion chip and a wash of liquid Gruyere completed the simple dish. It was served with a spoon whose handle had fresh rosemary along its length so you can inhale the scent as you drink the soup.
S’more Bomb, Dessert Burger — The bomb features a liquid graham cracker center, a chocolate shell resting on a marshmallow base and a marshmallow fuse. The dessert burger looks like a mini-slider and tastes like a delicious little torte. Ben Roche says it actually has lettuce in it. When lettuce tastes like this, kids will eat their vegetables.
All photos: Credit: Planet Green, David Nicolas