Dinner Review – addo and Alinea’s Grant Achatz collaboration

Introduction

I have a foodie friend here in Seattle who told me about a new popup restaurant named addo.  She invited us to the ‘family style seafood’ dinner in January, and it was pretty good.  A few weeks later, she told me that Alinea’s Grant Achatz was coming to do a collaboration with addo.  Apparently the addo chef Eric Rivera used to work at Alinea.  The collaboration would only be for 2 nights and 6 total seating, with each seating having capacity of about 25 people.  Sufficed it to say, demand for this was off the charts.  Luckily, my friend knows Eric and told me to become a newsletter subscriber.  She also told me when the newsletter would go out and be ready to reply back ASAP.  We wound up with a 7:00PM reservation.  We later learned that the ‘public sale’ only lasted for a few minutes and the waiting list was 500 deep.

 

Experience

We arrived at the restaurant 20 minutes early and was given a beer in a Solo cup.

The restaurant was being cleaned up for our seating, so it took a while.  I asked my wife what percentage of the Alinea experience she thought tonight would be; we settled on 50-75% of the experience.  Once we walked in, I knew it was going to be a memorable experience.

After those 3 items, we were led outside to have a molten cider (I’m probably wrong here) and a pastry while they redecorated inside.

Once we came back in, we had this at the table:

After that, they brought out some liquid nitrogen and poured it into the bowl of oranges, which gave an intense citrus aroma to your table and next course, which I have forgotten.

After that, the lights were turned off and they brought out bowls of salt, which they lit on fire.  To add to the ambiance, they played Johnny Cash’s “Ring of Fire” while lighting the bowl.

After a while, the fire went out and they brought out some cedar (sorry, forgot what the plant is) and some duck meatballs on top.  After a while, they took the leaves out and dug into the salt to reveal a config duck leg, which was DELICIOUS.

After that, we got served a very strong but delicious drink with some sorbet on the spoon.  Then, like at Alinea, they lined the tables with like Saran Wrap and that’s when all the chefs came out to “decorate” the table.  Then they gave you a spoon to scoop up your dessert.

Conclusion

All in all, I thought the dinner was great.  I’d say it was about 2/3 to 75% of the experience you’d get at Alinea.  For the price, you couldn’t go wrong.  Hopefully he comes back again next year.  Now I’m tempted to try the 15 course tasting menu at addo.