Whenever you say that you don’t like The Beatles to someone who really loves music, or someone who is like over 60 (sorry), they act like they are Ringo Starr’s brother and you have offended their entire family.
They tell you all the ways that The Beatles have influenced the music that you love. But that’s not actually what you were saying. What you were saying is that you don’t enjoy listening to Yellow Submarine on a loop and you prefer to listen to other music. Whether they influenced that music or not is not the point of what you are saying.
The same thing happens to me all the time when I tell people that as a woman who travels the country to eat essentially for sport, I have yet to find a three Michelin starred restaurant that I will send people to–and I don’t hate Michelin stars or awards. I love them.
I chase them. When the 2024 James Beard Foundation semi-final noms came out, I scoured them, looking for my favorite restaurant in the country (it’s on it, but didn’t make the finals) but also looking at some of the restaurants I’ve been to in the last year going, “Really?” When they dropped the Michelin stars in Colorado and Georgia, I started planning trips to go there in 2025 (I plan my trips a year in advance and 2024 was full, though you never know, sometimes I fly places on a weekend when I’m feeling antsy).
The idea that there is somewhere out there a group of well-traveled people ranking the best restaurants in the country and the world? Hell yeah. Count me in.
I want to eat at the places those people say are the best in a world of Eater listicles that include like ⅛ of the restaurants in the city as “best of” in some category.
But… in the US? The three stars? I think they are mostly boring and stodgy and tired and in general not worthy of traveling out of your state just to eat there. I was trying to figure out why.
psst if you’re reading this via email, it’s too long for the whole essay to fit and you should view it in browser.
Three Michelin stars means that the food is worthy of a special journey, i.e. like crossing an ocean for the sole purpose of eating there.
I leave the walls of my state all the time to travel to eat places 100 days out of the year. When I tell people who love fine dining that I haven’t eaten at a three star restaurant that blew me away, they like to tell me that those restaurants have influenced the ones that I love like I don’t know that.
I do. Know that. I also care about that.
But I also look at the restaurants they influenced and just, on the balance, think that someone who doesn’t give a shit about food history but cares about eating good food should go to those restaurants.
I know how hard it is to lose those three stars once you have them–we hardly see it and when it happens, it’s not like, “Oh that great restaurant got a little worse. It’s news.”
Chef’s Table in Brooklyn lost all of its stars this year due to closing and reopening with a new head chef and here’s two snippets of the articles about it. Not just plastered all over the internet about the star loss, but deeply personal and highlighting the internal ugly dispute at the restaurant. Honestly–a press nightmare.
Similarly, when I was going to New York on a trip this year, jetting out of Philadelphia, a chef with a tiny empire in that metro tried to correct me when I said that Jean Georges had lost its third star. “It’s Per Se,” he said.
“No,” I said, “It was Jean Georges in the 2018 guide.”
He was dug in, so he pulled out his phone. He thought I was wrong. I knew I was right. He looked up at me over the table and asked, “How do you know that?” Then he corrected himself, “No why do you know that?”
It’s that I give a shit about food history in this country–and it’s that I started looking into it when every restaurant with three stars that I’ve eaten at had let me down in ways that left me baffled.
Here’s the news about Jean-Georges losing their star. Equally damning described by Michelin guide director Michael Ellis in Eater as “Unfortunately, we saw a slow glide downward. It started off with small things ... and it didn't get any better.” As if the restaurant didn’t just lose one star but everything it was known for.
And here’s Daniel with that second article in Daily describing Daniel as having a bad year because it was bumped from number 29 to 40 on San Pellegrino’s Best Restaurants list, like most chefs wouldn’t make a deal with the devil for spot number 50.
And here’s Saison.
And that’s it. That’s the list. That’s the USA restaurants that are still open who rose to three stars and lost some of them. Ever. The vast majority of restaurants are retaining the stars they got since before 2015, 1/3 of them holding onto stars since before 2010, and only 2 awarded new third stars since 2020.
And if you know anything about restaurants? You know that the best restaurants in your city change over much faster than that.
What are you going to do, as a Michelin reviewer? Are you going to make a restaurant you love news, a failure for telling them: hey, pick it back up, you just lost a star, your food has slipped a tiny bit, we want to see it better?
It’s like when you sit at the top they don’t want to take your crown–but anyone who hangs out in restaurants knows when chefs turn over or change, restaurant quality changes, too. It’s why I’m terrified that my favorite restaurant in the country is reopening with a new Chef de Cuisine in a new space and making a move from small plates to large plates. It’s also why in my city when a restaurant I thought was honestly pretty shit changed their Chef de Cuisine I went–and he’s still finding his footing in a space marked by two culinary superstars but his food is genuinely, honestly better under his leadership.
Some of my favorite places that used to be outstanding lost their outstanding chef and are no longer outstanding all over the country–and where that chef went is outstanding That’s just the way it goes. You have better years. You have worse years. You have your best dishes of all time. You have good dishes. You have dishes that shouldn’t have gone up. You have good nights. You have bad nights. You have beautiful service. You have service that felt you’re just trying to survive.
Stars or not, you’re not that different. So when people tell me that I should respect those restaurants for their legacy, I ask them: Does three Michelin stars mean that the food is the best in this nation in 2024 or does it mean that those restaurants have influenced the best restaurants in 2024?
People always start defending that they are the best and then I will ask them this question as an interruption: Name the five best restaurants in your city right now. That’s when they get it. I can see it click in their head. Their answer never includes any of the restaurants with three stars. When I ask this question (and I ask it all the time), the answer never is–never has been–a list of all the restaurants with three stars. There hasn’t even been one of them on that list–and I’m not asking random people, I’m asking really talented chefs who you know and admire.
That’s when I shrug and say, “Exactly.”
That’s when I ask them to tell me about their favorite restaurants right now. Their eyes light up in a way they didn’t when they were defending the old guard, because they aren’t talking about the past. They’re talking about the future.
The first time I ate at Alinea was in its heyday. A man wanted to show me what was the best restaurant in the country at the time, in his opinion. I loved it. I did. But I also said: “The balloon tastes bad and it’s way too sticky,” voice high on helium and drunk off my ass.
“Shut up,” he said in a high pitched voice, joshingly, “Enjoy it.”
The plates were different. Weird. The we play with our food motto meant things like we’ve hung some food up by a string and here are some axes for one of your courses. It did not feel stodgy or rehearsed. It felt fun and pushing the envelope and extremely cool.
Years have passed, almost a decade. I’ve developed my own sense of taste. People have stopped inhaling the helium out of the balloon at Alinea. They pull their hair out of their face to pop it because it is sticky. They push their face into it to pop it. Then they watch all that precious, finite helium deflate. I’ve watched 20 or so diners at Alinea in the last six months and only have seen one table eat the helium in 2024 and they kept talking about stocks like it was nothing. Which was, in a way, entertaining, but also kind of sad.
Last time I was there, I popped the balloon with a goddamn knife.
The man who took me to Alinea in its heyday respects my opinions on food but he disagrees with me on this piece–thinks that I shouldn’t write about Alinea, thinks I shouldn’t write badly about any restaurant because it’s burning bridges like I have any bridges to burn.
He told me not to publish it, because Alinea is about experience. I looked at him and said, “Matt,” (not his name but it’s like every other chef’s name so why not?), “At the end of the day, it’s a goddamn restaurant.”
But also—I haven’t seen anyone, personally, all that delighted by the experience he was saying I should elevate.
I sat across from him over my favorite coffee in Chicago (Dark Matter) and asked him, “Do you think it’s the best restaurant in the country?”
He said, “It used to be.”
I asked, “Today, is it one of the best? Like top 10?”
He said, “It used to be.” I could tell that made him sad, that it used to be.
Then I asked, “Is it one of the top 10 restaurants in Chi–”
He took a kind of pissed off breath and said, “It used to be, Kirstie,” before I finished.
But… You? You might think it still is one of the best, most innovative restaurants in the country. You might think that because Alinea is the food world’s version of The Beatles.
When I went back to Alinea almost a decade later, walking in the giant front door in a sparkly evening gown, I felt electric.
I felt the thing I feel when I go to restaurants that might make me feel something or show me something new or do something classic really well. The women at the front cooed over my pretty pink hair, one of them flabbergasted that it was real. Then they took me up to my table and there was a candle flickering in front of me. A gold duck filled with flowers. An emptying room. It was gorgeous and understated.
A couple was across from me, holding their green apple candy balloons on the woman’s birthday, curled into each other. He had a gift for her–in a jewelry box. She was so glad he took her there. They were wrapped up in each other, side by side, in a way that felt like I was spying on one of the most intimate moments of their life. Just me and them in an empty room. I can’t tell you I wasn’t jealous. I want that kind of thing so bad–a man to go with me to really expensive restaurants and put tiny jewelry boxes on the table and say, “Fuck decorum,” while he wraps his arms around me. But that was not my reality.
My reality was that I jumped on a plane or hopped in my car and go to these places alone, which has its own perks. Like going wherever I want and back to backing dinner reservations in cities I love. Like not having to gently tell a man I need him to stop talking because I have to write something down. Like this view, into the lives of others, something I genuinely do miss when I am dining with other people.
The team at Alinea came by with one last thing for the woman on her birthday. One last candle she could blow out and they would capture her wish for her to take home. It was deeply tender to watch her close her eyes and make a wish. It made me feel something.
I watched tables reset. Looked at the choreographed motions executed perfectly. It was done with the precision of a chef and a speed that’s dazzling. Table after table filled in around me. To my right, a group of six who looked mismatched–a mother with her children for her birthday. They scoffed at the price of the wine saying out loud in the restaurant, “I would never spend that on a bottle of wine,” and the server talking to them looked slightly taken aback as she said, “Well you don’t have to,” which was a service point that they found funny and I’m sure other people would not.
That same server came over to me and said, “It’s an honor to meet you,” which I heard her say to everyone she met all night and which felt, quite frankly, bizarre.
I was coming off eating at Dear Margaret, whose service was so impossibly tender and real, that it felt jarring to be here after that. She said she noticed that I’m sober and said they had a few options (three to be exact). Over the night, I had each of those three totally unremarkable drinks not even worth writing about except to say that it was the first time I thought, “Well that’s dated,” while in the restaurant.
To my left a couple very much in love, for a long time, for 32 years. They got the reserve wine pairing because, as the man said, “Only the best for my baby,” which honestly good for her.
The table across from me was empty, as was the one directly to that table’s left. Reset and ready for whoever was going to come. A mother and son joined later, then a couple, their voices inaudible to me across the divide.
Alinea, at the time, might have thought its own strange version of theater was my show, but it wasn’t. My theater was the people to my left and right–always is. What do they feel? What do they see? People who don’t eat like this meal after meal after meal, what’s going on in their heads?
All the gold birds on the tables were different. My server told me that tonight we would be celebrating a duck hunt from the 1800s, that our meal would bring us through some kind of interpretation of that. This was both something that wasn’t delivered on, not really, and also an odd theme–one that forced conversation with guests in scripted ways and told me more about duck hunting in the 1800s than it did about the work of the food in the kitchen. I know that Alinea often reaches back to really old recipes to re-interpret them, but you might not. And that fact? That’s far more interesting than telling me about the hunt itself.
The scripted nature of the meal also sent the team scrambling when the music changed too soon in our room later in the night, everyone looking up like a cue change was missed, someone looking extremely flustered. It also meant we were, for the most part, paced together—a group of six, a few groups of two, and me a party of one.
I often make the flower or the candle or the chopstick holder my dining companion for the evening. Tonight, it was the duck, who had a kind of funny face. So I looked at him and said, “I really don’t want to have to write that the service here is stodgy.”
Then I said, “They probably stuffed something in you other than flowers, didn’t they?”
A tiny spoon was set down for me. And then there was caviar in my hand. The first time I had eaten it in a very, very long time. Because I was no longer vegetarian and trying to navigate my way back to meat in my own way. The bowl was tactile, bubbly, black and gleaming with streaks of color. I felt moved eating it, like the start of any great meal might make you feel.
At Alinea, they start you fast. Hit after hit after hit. An apple sphere in a celery juice shot–when you bite into the globe, horseradish hits you in the nose. It’s theater. It’s surprise. It’s play. When I was holding this in my mouth and writing to try to capture the feeling, someone walked past me and for a moment stopped in front of my table, almost imperceptible, and said something to someone else.
He came back to present me with their famous hot potato, cold potato, which is honestly just a potato jaggerbomb and when I said this to the man who served it to me, he looked at me like I just asked him to a Bud Light with my dinner. “Oh, no,” he said. “It’s not.” (It is.)
You drop a ball of hot potato into a tiny thing of cold potato soup and then you shoot it really fast. And look, I’m an ex drunk but the reference is spot on and everyone who has had this dish loves when I call it that. When I didn’t stop taking notes because he was standing in front of me, my service changed. My table was cleared faster. More people paid attention to me. It’s a thing I notice and when I notice it, I immediately stop paying attention to my own service and start paying attention to others.
The famous Black Truffle Explosion hit my table with its own famous tagline said the same way someone at Trader Joe’s tells you that they love what you put in your cart (they have to say this, by the way, you aren’t like a uniquely excellent shopper). The woman serving me, the same one who told me it was an honor to meet me, said, “At Alinea we love to play with our food.” Which you’ll hear every time you go. It feels mandatory and overplayed, not spontaneous and true. She told me to take it all in my mouth, seal my lips (there’s a hand gesture they do with this, like locking your lips), and eat it in one bite so it didn’t get all over my gold dress.
That's the moment I looked out at the restaurant and texted my ex-boyfriend who took me years ago. “Do you still have our menu from Alinea?” I asked. He didn’t. But when I listed the dishes I had, he said, “Yeah, that’s how we started our meal.” Almost a decade ago. Almost a decade ago.
But I had so much time between courses later in the night that I Googled when those dishes were created—I’m not going for accuracy here. I’m going for first mention on the first page of Google search.
Hot potato, cold potato: 2006
Truffle explosion: 2009
Apple, Horseradish, Celery Juice and Leaves: 2009
I looked out into the dining room and I said, “Oh.”
Look. I get it. There are classics that are classics for a reason. You gotta serve them. It’s what you’re known for. But nothing new in the first few bites in 15 years isn’t that.
It’s saying, “That’s the best that we’re gonna get,” and then leaving it there to die as time passes and other people keep innovating. It’s saying, “We don’t have new classics in us.” Downstairs, you can get what I’m guessing is new food in The Gallery for a higher price. But most people are going to eat in the Salon. Both by volume of the restaurant and by cost prohibitiveness.
These three dishes back to back told me something about the restaurant: they expect you to come once and they think dishes crafted almost 20 years ago can compete with the new kids today. Which, hey, if that’s true, bravo. One of my favorite pastas in the world has sat on a menu, completely unchanged, for 15 years. But as I waited a significant period of time between that course and my next course I pulled out amuse after amuse photo, starter after starter photo, from other restaurants with fewer stars that were better.
I was paced with a six top on a goddamn birthday, starving at my table. My duck did contain something—kind of bad biscuits with jam and creme fraiche. I had a delightful bite of quince in the basement. I had eggplant disguised as sardines that sent me into the night to taste sardines for the first time and I can report they do not taste like sardines. I had a fancy tiny straw of boba that was sealed on both sides so when you sucked it, the entire straw came out into your mouth. I recreated myself in my house while grumbling, “I shouldn’t able to do this in my kitchen with no formal training.” Mine was ugly, but when I brought it to Chicago to give to a chef who worked at Alinea a long, long time ago, he said, “Ugly as shit but spot on.” I had potato chips in a branded Alinea bag that tasted like any other potato chip served with a dish of ashed onion dip.
At the end of the night, I couldn't get out of there fast enough, but I had to stop and look out at the room I was in before I left. I asked myself if I was wrong. If joy was here. I asked myself if people really, really liked it. The people I walked in on at the beginning of my meal, celebrating her birthday? They had joy. But it was joy at their love and the event being in any space might have been special.
But the woman with her children? They were talking about stocks with helium voices. And the couple to my left hardly talked at all. And the other two groups who came in later, who I couldn’t hear, I tried to see if I felt any joy from them. But I didn’t. I felt rite of passage. I felt place you go to knock it off your list. I felt perfunctory. Sometimes, I felt confusion.
I take no joy in saying that about a restaurant that should be more than that. I mean it.
I was starving on my way to get a goddamn slice of pizza. The man at the pizza shop asked me where I came from when I bit into the pizza before I walked away.
Mouth full of hot cheese pizza, I said a garbled, “Alinea,” and he said, “Classic.” “Oh,” I said looking up at him while something clicked into place in my brain. “Yeah, it was.”
In 2024, Alinea has gone the way of steakhouses of the 90s. Alinea is a place you might go to remember a time gone by and no longer here.
Alinea is classic and other chefs all over the country, with less acclaim and less recognition, are doing the innovating now because once, a decade ago, Alinea taught them how. And that matters—the lineage matters, but don’t tell me that the lineage matters so much that I should tell people to eat food that is old school and tell them it’s the most innovative thing going on in food right now.
I’ve read menu after menu after menu. Alinea has a playbook that has been in use for a long time.
You start with caviar, which yeah, of course. They hit you fast with teeny tiny classics and lots of instructions. They use a lot of dusty elements. Something is often hidden at your table. They shave a big dome of something on one of your dishes at the end of your savory courses. Almost every menu in the past years has “potpourri” as an element on it. One dish often has what I refer to as a blanket (i.e. a piece of protein is under something). Plates look like things they are not (napkins). There’s an element of high-low (potato chips) that feels out of place with everything else around you, but didn’t when they opened. Based on lots of google reviews, they’re using some kind of incense most of the time. And you end on a dessert that is mostly dusty elements, too sweet sauce, and a balloon that no one inhales the helium out of in 2024. It’s a formula.
People think I hate Alinea, but I don’t. I respect it. I just don’t think it’s as good as everyone tells you it is. And I don’t think it’s innovative at all anymore. I think it’s found what works for it and has stopped pushing in new directions.
And you get to do that—you do. But when you do that, we should all notice it and identify you as what you are.
Alinea, like for a lot of chefs, is a part of my origin story. Like: Have you ever gone to something that was supposed to be spectacular like a concert or movie or my case a restaurant and it failed to deliver on the things that it promised to do so tragically that when you left you found yourself staring up at a starless sky in a major city, wondering what your love of thing is all for? Wondering if you’ve lost the fucking plot, if it was actually good and you’re the one who is wrong?
Arguably considered the greatest restaurant in America, I could name 10 others in Chicago alone that I would send you to before I told you to darken its door. At first, I felt like it was a me problem. I felt like I must be broken, like so many people tell me, I felt my standards were too high. But then, as I played back dish after dish after dish and looked at menu after menu after menu, I felt sure of my point of view.
I’m hard on restaurants, sure, but shouldn’t you be hard on the restaurant that is considered the best in the country? Shouldn’t it be judged by that claim to fame?
When I say things like this, chefs sort of act like who am I to say it, but honestly my answer to that question is that I ate at 400 restaurants in 2023 in over 40 cities and you can hate my opinions on food, but you can’t act like I don’t know anything about it–and lots of chefs do act like I don’t know anything about it especially when I’m talking about their food.
This blog? I started it in my hotel room the night I went to Alinea. Because Alinea made me feel that I had something to say that maybe other people didn’t feel or maybe didn’t have the guts to say.
Standing on the street with my car ready for me to hop inside, I went through photograph after photograph of meals that made me feel something in the past year while standing on the sidewalk and considered if I was wrong. I didn’t think I was. I was confident that I was right. Confident enough to say it out loud:
Alinea isn’t the best restaurant in the country or Chicago. Alinea is just fine.
I went back to Alinea on Easter. The N/A menu has been upgraded.
It’s gorgeous. It sits within the top ten of N/A pairings I’ve ever had. It’s current, it’s fresh. Because the team knows how to innovate and execute and is incredibly talented. If you go, you should get it.
My service upstairs was faultless. I was paced on my own this time.
But, and it’s a big but, someone from the front of house at Alinea was also watching my stories before I set foot in the restaurant and had read my last critique on service. So I can't tell you if they’ll pace you on your own–they probably won’t.
I think they also chose the service team they thought I would like the best. This happens when you know who is coming. They guessed right. The two men who I spent most of my time talking to were charismatic and someone, somewhere, after reading the last thing I wrote about Alinea must have said, “No theater,” because that’s what I got: no theater.
But the people around me–they still got it. And that’s the thing about me—I don’t pay attention to myself.
In an almost empty Easter dining room, there was a large group of people speaking French and a man and woman who were an odd couple. She likes money–he likes pretty women. They said this outloud into the dining room. I loved them instantly. The honesty and transparency of it. He wanted to take her somewhere nice. He read this was the best restaurant in the country and flew to take her there. He went on a special journey. For her! Which is so fucking romantic, oh my god.
They had no idea what Alinea was and it was a little glimpse of getting to see someone who didn’t know anything about this restaurant experience it. When my helium balloon came out, the man talked to me across the restaurant, something I’ve never seen anyone do at this level of dining and which endeared him to me. “Is that edible,” he asked. I told him it was. I thought maybe, just maybe, if I was going to see joy at Alinea it would be with someone like that. But I didn’t see it.
He said, “Seems hard to eat.” It is. It really fucking is.
I looked right at him while I popped it with a knife and said, “Pro tip.”
My time down in the kitchen was tense. One of the chefs in the kitchen pops into my stories from time to time to watch them, but doesn’t follow me, and he looked at me dead across the floor like I was his ex-girlfriend entering his workplace. One man who walked in front of me while I was in there locked eyes with me in a way I would describe as deeply unfriendly. Honestly: fair. After the first time I left Alinea, I wrote an Instagram post grilling it. I read that back now and I think I was fair—I still agree with everything I wrote in that first piece. Most of it is here.
As soon as I walked upstairs back to the dining room, more than one person from the kitchen appeared in my story watchers.
The fragility of the kitchen was on display to me. And you know where I don’t feel fragility? Most other kitchens who know I don’t like their food that much, because they believe in it so much they do not give a fuck and serve me the best food they’ve got and that’s the way they say, “Fuck your opinion.”
It works sometimes. There are times when I change my mind and I say so directly to a chef who knew I was wrong. Because there are nights that are worse than others—when you’re in the shits and forget to salt that one dish. But my first time at Alinea wasn’t that. I got their best both times I went. I believe that. And I don’t think their best is good enough for the title they wear.
The woman who took me down to the kitchen was nervous, her hands shaking while she poured me my cocktail, making a few mistakes while telling me what she was serving me. And I know she’s talented–I know that she has done this before. These are the things most food writers don’t write about–how people handle having them in the restaurant. I do. Because it tells me (and every other food writer) something about the restaurant and not writing about it is like not talking about the tone of voice of your interview subject.
It all felt fragile.
Flash after flash of Alinea staff watched my stories during and after I went (if I know you’re watching, I lock everything and post live in my close friends story). Here’s a glimpse for average diners who don’t know about food—this happens a lot. This is how food writers and influencers are treated and it’s why their service is better than yours. It’s also why sometimes your experience is bad when reviews are glowing. It was enough people in my stories (more than 10) that I sent a photo of my story watchers to a chef friend who told me I’m not established enough for anyone to give a shit about me and that I was probably just projecting what I saw in the kitchen.
“I wasn’t,” I said.
“Damn,” he said.
The food? I had two dishes that I remember, one of which I think about all the time. The first dish I remember was a hit of spring in my mouth with fruit and first of spring vegetables and so many elements–and it was so gorgeous that I forgot to take notes. I wish I could tell you everything that was in it, but I can’t–I was given a non-vegetarian menu to take home instead of the vegetarian one I had.
The second was truffle root beer. Which I think about all the time. I would buy it. I would drink it with dinner. I loved it. It was the first dish I had at Alinea that felt like what I was promised Alinea would be: mind blowing and creative and new.
It wasn’t enough.
It didn’t lob itself into a place I would recommend on that meal. Moments of glory aren’t things I recommend to average diners going out to these places once a year. No—it has to be more than that.
And it shouldn’t look like this, honestly. In the best restaurant in the country, it shouldn’t look like most everything is ten years old.
I’m on my way to Chicago. I hit send as I pushed out into the road after eating a really fucking good breakfast casserole at Honeypie. I’m going specifically to eat at Thattu and Indienne, a pair of restaurants I do think are worthy of a special visit. But more on that later.
I sat with my finger on the reserve button to eat at Alinea one more time before I published this, but even with two dinners every night, I don’t have that much time—and I have a lot of places I want to go.
I kept coming back to Alinea’s booking site almost booking it. I just really didn’t want to go back.
Even when I’m there in the city already, I don’t want to go to Alinea, though if you live in Chicago and care about food history and the classics, you should go once. Just don’t expect it to be what it once was.
Hey, look, honestly? I think I could go three more times and I know what my recommendation is going to be. If you’re making a four day trip to Chicago, a city with restaurants like Thattu, Indienne, Ever, and Kasama, I don’t think Alinea is worth a spot on your list.
By road, by air, by sea, in 2024, I think the Michelin guide is wrong. I don’t think Alinea is worth the trip.
Author’s note: I was offered publication for this piece and turned both offers down because a requirement of publication was to remove all narrative about other diners and my experience in the kitchen—a problem I think food writing, in general, should seriously address. I am deeply grateful to the food writers and chefs who believe in me and helped me edit this piece over the last five months, especially those who encouraged to turn those offers down.