Chicago Molecular Gastronomy Restaurant Moto

When a diner comes to Moto,

what we offer is a tasting menu experience.

That all starts with a taste of your tasting menu.

You actually eat the menu,

and tonight it tastes like an Italian panini sandwich.

And the reason why we do this is because we want to offer you a seamless experience

anywhere from two and a half to five hours long,

so we're basically grabbing your attention the entire time and telling you

this is our vision in gastronomy,

and we hope you like it.

I would describe the cuisine as shocking, yet tasty.

And also, working with NASA, you might wanna call it intergalactic cuisine.

But that might be a stretch.

Here at Moto, all of the chefs are actually servers,

and this is because you're gonna have many questions on how things are prepared.

If they're not patent pending technologies,

then we will explain exactly how things are done.

So they're very knowledgeable about the food,

because every dish requires an explanation.

One of the things that you might experience here we call pancakes made tableside,

where we take pancakes and puree them into a cooked pancake batter,

place that into a syringe, and then inject that onto a frozen plate, tableside.

So the pancake batter, which is cooked, actually freezes into a cooked frozen pancake.

We flip it over, place it on a spoon with maple syrup, and then you consume this.

Wow.

Another example is our printed food,

where I can print up a picture of, say, cotton candy, and we actually have this on our menu,

and it looks and tastes like cotton candy.

You know, your brain is telling you, "This can't possibly be food.

I'm about to eat a photo of cotton candy."

And then once you eat it, it's very intense.

ROCHE: This laser is a Class IV laser.

And what that means is that it's an infrared wavelength,

which is why we're wearing the sunglasses.

What we're gonna use this laser for is a food and wine pairing.

The food is gonna be a vapor extracted from a freeze-dried orange powder.

And the wine will go into the glass that the vapor is trapped in, and it's going to create

a very rich sort of caramel laserized orange quality in the wine.

CANTU: When I think of molecular anything, I'm thinking of subatomic particle analysis,

nuclear magnetic resonance machines.

The only place that I've ever seen that in the food world is our project with NASA,

where we're working on

a three-dimensional food printer.

I would say that this is more of just playful food.

When we start seeing things go to Mars, then we're getting into

molecular gastronomy, and breaking down food to its subatomic state.

ROCHE: Those are in no way, shape, or form anything like Dippin' Dots.

They're better.