Grant Achatz is serving up a delicious, high tech vision of haute cuisine. (How about a -30ºF mango palate cleanser, hot off the antigriddle?)

It takes about five hours to make your way through the 25-course Tour menu at Alinea. Item 11 arrives at hour three, stuck on the end of a foot-long wire. Your black-clad, impeccably polite server suddenly turns stern. "This is applewood," he says. "Please eat it without using your hands." The golf ball-sized morsel looms at mouth level; there's not a fork in sight.