Kitchenhacker Profile: Homaro Cantu

Chef Cantu and his Algae Photobioreactor
Image courtesy of moto.Homaro Cantu is the executive chef of moto and founder of Cantu Designs. Chef Cantu is a Le Cordon Bleu (Portland, Oregon) graduate who got his start on the West Coast. He moved to Chicago where he worked as Sous Chef at Charlie Trotter's before opening moto. While he is the chef at moto, he doesn't limit his innovation to his own kitchen. Cantu Designs is a business that consults on food technology, green kitchens, and restaurant concepts. It holds patents on various sorts of food technology, ranging from printed food to dinnerware. According to the Cantu Designs website, it has numerous spin-off projects not directly related to the restaurant business and is currently working in areas ranging from aerospace to famine relief.

Still, Cantu is best-known for his work at moto. It is his public face as well as a testbed for his inventions and innovations. Along with restaurants such as Alinea and WD-50, moto is considered one of the leading examples of postmodern cuisine inspired by molecular gastronomy. For those who aren't familiar with moto or its peers, Cantu does really weird things (often through the application of cool technological processes) with food.. Sometimes the food is fairly simple but looks like something it isn't. Other times, the food may be wholly transformed from its normal state into gels, foams, powders, or other things. While there is obviously an element of novelty to this, it isn't done for the sake of novelty alone. Cantu is an accomplished chef, and his dishes are composed skillfully and deliberately. Shortly after I ate there in 2006, Cantu was on Iron Chef where he defeated Masaharu Morimoto in a beet battle.

Moto is probably most famous for serving pictures of sushi made with edible inks and paper. One of the things that I most appreciate about Cantu is his willingness to break down barriers in terms of our preconceptions about food. It is something I aspire to do myself and a major theme of Kitchenhacker.net. The meal I had at moto may well have planted the seeds for this site in my mind.

Also, I met him briefly, and he seemed like a truly nice guy. That always wins you points in my book.

Before I went there, I'd read a few reviews of moto. While they were generally very positive, one complained that it valued style over substance. Another described it as a place where food and science intersect. I'd link to them, but it was a long time ago and I'm too lazy to try and go look them up.

Anyway, these two comments had an impact upon my expectations going in to the meal. After eating at moto, I wanted to respond to them.

Style vs. Substance

I was really confused by this comment. Restaurants are, ultimately, places that provide you with goods (notably food and drink) and services (table service, a nice environment, and possibly some form of entertainment). Other than quality ingredients in food and skill in preparation (both of which were as good at moto as any place I've been), the substance of a restaurant lies largely with its style. It is the stylistic flourishes in food preparation, service, and atmosphere that really differentiate restaurants of otherwise equal caliber in my mind. If moto emphasizes these flourishes to the point that they become a focus, is that a problem? It isn't as though they are ignoring substance in any way.

I think the problem that this reviewer had was a misidentification of substance as adherence to convention. This isn't unusual. We often dismiss things that aren't rooted in tradition as whimsical and unimportant. It is true that Chef Cantu doesn't seem to be big on convention. That's one of the things that I most appreciated about moto.

Food and Science

A number of reviews and such that I've read called Cantu's creations things like "Food Physics" and "Where food and science meet" and things of that sort. I think that, again, these writers are making a claim that contains an element of truth that is ultimately based on a misunderstanding.

The misunderstanding is that what Cantu does isn't, on the whole, science. You can clearly use science without doing science. We all make judgments based on scientific principles every day in the normal course of our lives. One of the things Cantu appears to be doing is looking at scientific principles and technologies that have not been used in food preparation and figuring out ways of using them in effective and interesting ways. That's cool, but it isn't science. I don't think that the quest he's on is really part of the scientific project.

Cantu's role, however, does have a really interesting analogous one in the history of science. If we conceive of the history of cooking as analogous to the history of science, then Cantu is part of a revolutionary movement.

In science, we occasionally see shifts in theoretical paradigms - from a Newtonian physics to a relativistic physics, for example. Between those periods, when one paradigm reigns, most of the work of scientists is to work within that paradigm and flesh it out, figuring out all the ramifications that they can. Cooking appears to me to be a lot like this. Different cuisines have different 'paradigms' and chefs tend to work within those paradigms, refining techniques and methods. There is a difference, of course, in that the paradigms of cuisines are not typically mutually exclusive, whereas scientific paradigms are typically incompatible.

I'm oversimplifying here, I know. Just take the basic point and run with it.
Chef Cantu and his Algae Photobioreactor
Image courtesy of moto.Homaro Cantu is the executive chef of moto and founder of Cantu Designs. Chef Cantu is a Le Cordon Bleu (Portland, Oregon) graduate who got his start on the West Coast. He moved to Chicago where he worked as Sous Chef at Charlie Trotter's before opening moto. While he is the chef at moto, he doesn't limit his innovation to his own kitchen. Cantu Designs is a business that consults on food technology, green kitchens, and restaurant concepts. It holds patents on various sorts of food technology, ranging from printed food to dinnerware. According to the Cantu Designs website, it has numerous spin-off projects not directly related to the restaurant business and is currently working in areas ranging from aerospace to famine relief.

I think that Cantu is demonstrating the incompleteness of current cooking paradigms. We can do things that don't fit within them, and these things can be really good. They can taste good. They can make you think. They can challenge your preconceptions. What Cantu doesn't do, however, is offer an alternate cooking paradigm. His work, so far, seems to be more about breaking down barriers than about developing a unique style. In history of science terms, it would be as if Einstein showed that there were a bunch of things that Newtonian physics couldn't explain, but which he could sort of figure out and make work - without creating relativity, a theoretical paradigm that unified those explanations. This would be more problematic in physics than it is in cooking.

Music might be a better analogy. Consider the state of music in the latter half of the 20th century. We had fairly solidified musical genres, but the late sixties taught us that music could be intensely political. Punk came along and challenged the very notion of what music was. Disco and New Wave introduced the use of new technologies. Moto tackles all of these issues with respect to food, without committing to a single genre. Ultimately, a meal at moto challenges the common conception of what food can be with a series of unrelated, yet very persuasive, arguments.

Be sure to join us later this week when I describe my meal at moto in befuddling detail!