This is one of those once in a lifetime opportunities that we wanted to take advantage of. This would be our first (and maybe last) trip to Chicago, and I wanted to go all out. The night before, we had gone to The Smyth, which was amazing. Tonight we will be going to Alinea, which is Grant Achatz’s restaurant, for The Gallery multicourse meal. We found out about Grant from Netflix shows and his cameo appearances on Master Chef.

I hadn’t done a lot of research for this restaurant other than two things: look for a nice restaurant in Chicago that is Michelin starred and the menu looks good. There were many other Chicago fancy restaurants I could’ve picked from, but looking at the example set menu, this looked like something up my alley. It wasn’t too strict on a direction, and it looked like one of those “we take ourselves seriously but not so seriously” type of restaurant, such as Blanca in NYC.