Grant Achatz’s Chicago restaurant, Alinea, is a temple to modern American cuisine and this cookbook is its bible. Achatz took the food world by storm when he opened his hyper-modern, beautiful space, with a constantly changing menu that has as much fun playing with familiar seasonal ingredients as it does with more esoteric, scientific ones like citric acid, agar agar and lecithin. In his first, self-published cookbook, Achatz presents seasonal recipes from the Alinea kitchen with beautiful photographs of his creations, each one as inventive and beautiful as a piece of modern art. Essays from Michael Ruhlman, Jeffrey Steingarten and Michael Nagrant.