Oh yes. [Twitter]

One of our investors took a trip to Amsterdam, well, just because. And he met these guys, Storz und Bickel, who happened to engineer the world's best "herbal" vaporizer, the Volcano. And while testing it out, he thought that it was the perfect solution to Grant's problem of finding a way to deliver the aroma of coffee or lavender to the guest, flavoring the dish through olfactory alone.

He was right—it is perfect for creating the aromas of herbs without also creating the burnt, acrid smell that would occur if you simply lit them on fire. It also made capturing the scents incredibly easy. Alinea has four or five Volcanos now, and uses them almost every day.

That is actually how Alinea helped Storz und Bickel prove a legitimate use for the vaporizer, for importation into the US. See, we really do use it for the herbs that are listed on their website. What do you use it for? You're welcome.

Pillow full of lavender vapor, providing aroma for a plate of elaborately prepared English peas:

Nick Kokonas co-founded Alinea with Grant Achatz in 2005, and works with the chef on Alinea-related projects, recruiting innovators to challenge and improve every aspect of the cooking and eating experience. A finance guy and web-oriented angel investor by trade, Kokonas got his start back in his teen years writing business software on an Apple II. You can grab the gorgeous Alinea cookbook here, or just visit Alinea's home page.

Taste Test is our weeklong tribute to the leaps that occur when technology meets cuisine, spanning everything from the historic breakthroughs that made food tastier and safer to the Earl-Grey-friendly replicators we impatiently await in the future.

Among the reasons a dinner at Alinea resonates on an emotional level with so many people is that Chef Achatz consciously tries to remind guests of their childhood. Nostalgia is a powerful emotion that gets a bad rap.

One of the most successful and beautiful dishes served at Alinea involved taking a twig of oak leaves that had turned red and orange in the fall, using the branch as a skewer for food, then lighting the leaves on fire just before bringing them to the dining room. Guests would smell burning oak leaves and—if they grew up in the northern US basically anytime before the 1990s—it would transport them back to an earlier time in their lives and evoke the feeling of fall: Cool crisp air, back-to-school, raking leaves and jumping in them. This didn't just work once or twice—nearly every night people were overcome with emotion when this was brought to their table.

When it comes to the winter menu, hearty foods are obvious choices in the cold Chicago weather. And holiday references such as pine boughs, cinnamon aroma, and goose are emotional triggers. But there is one more basic than all of those: Snow.

What kid has not reached down, picked up a handful of (hopefully) fresh snow and eaten it? Or looked up to the sky, squinting their eyes, and tried to catch snowflakes as they fall down? The question was, how do you make the stuff in the kitchen?

When we were building Alinea we wanted to buy a cost effective thermal circulator to precisely control the temperature of sous vide baths. I found one on eBay, noticed that the company, PolyScience, was nearby in Skokie, Illinois, and gave them a call. I explained that we would be using the circulator for culinary purposes, and was handed over to the CEO… who happened to be a fan of Grant's work at Trio and a die-hard foodie.

Thirty minutes later we were at PolyScience and Grant and Philip were talking about making a griddle that would freeze, not heat. From that first meeting, the Anti-Griddle was born, and a food-technology collaboration started.

When the snow idea came up, Grant approached Philip and asked him how they could make it in the Alinea kitchen. Shaving ice, even with a temperature-controlled precision blender like the PacoJet, did not produce snowflakes—it produced finely shaved ice. Grant wanted real snow that was puffy, crystalline and looked like the real thing. This is the kind of problem that Philip likes, so he said he would work on it.

About a week later he called us up. We headed over to his house—or more precisely his garage. It is not a typical garage—it is filled with hand-restored antique motorcycles and cars and tools of uncertain use and origin. There's a second-floor studio for good measure.

There in the studio, Philip had a tank of liquid CO2, a four-foot tall clear plastic tube, an air brush and compressor and a small vat of lemonade. The airbrush was mounted at the top pointing downward, the CO2 was piped in a few inches below that and a collection point sat at the bottom. Philip flipped on the CO2, turned on the compressor and started up the airbrush. Sure enough, a vortex of freezing lemonade ensued, a little tornado of freezing crystals. He shut down the rig and at the bottom there was, in fact, lemonade snow…of a sort.

As any skier knows, snow machines do not produce quite the same texture as the real thing. In order to produce the crystalline structure of snow, you need 10,000 feet—all of that falling time and the right mix of moisture and temperature. Philip had bought a book properly entitled Snow and explained the science of the problem to us. He got it, but despite his best effort, this initial foray into tabletop snow making yielded few actual snow flakes, and far more icy crystals that looked like hail.

Despite working for the next several months on variations of the rig, Philip never quite got a great powder snow. The best results were very good, but yielded enough snow for only one or two servings per night. Alas, our tabletop snow machine sits idle in Philip's garage, used perhaps for a dinner party or two. I can certainly imagine Philip after a few too many glasses of wine saying, "I'm headed out to the garage to make snow for dessert…"

Top image: Philip Preston with his table-top snow making machine, and a picture of himself skiing in Jackson Hole, for inspiration

Nick Kokonas co-founded Alinea with Grant Achatz in 2005, and works with the chef on Alinea-related projects, recruiting innovators to challenge and improve every aspect of the cooking and eating experience. A finance guy and web-oriented angel investor by trade, Kokonas got his start back in his teen years writing business software on an Apple II. You can grab the gorgeous Alinea cookbook here, or just visit Alinea's home page.

Taste Test is our weeklong tribute to the leaps that occur when technology meets cuisine, spanning everything from the historic breakthroughs that made food tastier and safer to the Earl-Grey-friendly replicators we impatiently await in the future.

Many culinary innovations come out of the Alinea kitchen after asking basic questions: How can we create a temperature contrast in the diner's mouth? How can we transform maple syrup texturally? How can we remind a patron of their childhood? What does "winter" mean to you?

One of the ideas that Chef Achatz had was to significantly flatten or fuse foodstuffs using a very high-pressure press. The goal would be much like that of tenderizing meat by pounding it, but in a far more controlled yet extreme manner. For example, what would happen to asparagus if you could smoothly press it between two sheets of steel, flattening it into a thin pasta-like noodle? Could sufficient pressure fuse meats together?

The answer, of course, might be that we just create a mess. But really there are only a few ways you can manipulate food—you can heat it or cool it, or cut it or beat it in some manner, or perform basic chemistry by combining ingredients that act upon each other. Chef Achatz posits that by applying significant pressure to foods, he can create unexpected textures and combinations.

But we don't know for sure, because we haven't built the rig yet. We would like Gizmodo's readers to help us out on this one. In return, we are prepared to serve the maker of a successful entry the feast of a lifetime, on us, at Alinea.

Here is what we need:

1) A table-top method to press foods with greater force than a typical manual vise or wine press (note: we have already tried both of those)

2) It needs to be safe, measurable, controllable and relatively fast, as we need to serve 85 to 90 portions of its results each night

3) It needs to press the food withing a contained six-sided box so that the food doesn't go all over the place—ideally, the box itself could be adjustable

Build it, test it and take some pictures and send it to tips@gizmodo.com with "Alinea Challenge" in the subject line. Don't worry about tasty yet... our chefs can handle that.

Nick Kokonas co-founded Alinea with Grant Achatz in 2005, and works with the chef on Alinea-related projects, recruiting innovators to challenge and improve every aspect of the cooking and eating experience. A finance guy and web-oriented angel investor by trade, Kokonas got his start back in his teen years writing business software on an Apple II. You can grab the gorgeous Alinea cookbook here, or just visit Alinea's home page.

Taste Test is our weeklong tribute to the leaps that occur when technology meets cuisine, spanning everything from the historic breakthroughs that made food tastier and safer to the Earl-Grey-friendly replicators we impatiently await in the future.

Let's bend history a bit and pretend it is 1948 and a 22-year-old Miles Davis is playing in a small club in suburban New York. He is well known, but not exactly famous yet. You are a jazz fan and have been to the great clubs in New York, Paris, Chicago and some crazy joint in Helsinki. You sit down, the music starts, and you are certain that you hear the future of jazz right there: Different colors, different cadence, the same yet somehow different—modern but still accessible.

That is not the history of Miles Davis—not even close. But that is how I felt when I first tasted the cooking of chef Grant Achatz. I went to Trio restaurant in suburban Chicago for lunch on a Friday, went back the following week for dinner on a Wednesday... then ate there about 15 more times over the next year. Grant was creating at a new level—not only was the food delicious, it was modern, innovative and intellectually stimulating.

In January of 2004 Grant and I spoke about possibly partnering to build a restaurant. When you meet Miles Davis at a young age, you gotta help to build him a world-stage right? If you didn't you would be kicking yourself in the ass for the next 50 years. On May 4th 2004, we held a dinner at my house to introduce the idea to potential investors, an architect and an interior designer. On May 5th 2005 we opened—exactly one year to the date later. My dad used to tell me that when you have a great idea, the world conspires to help you achieve it. It worked a bit like that. In October 2006, Gourmet Magazine named Alinea the Best Restaurant in the US. This year Restaurant Magazine in the UK placed us at # 10 in the world.

If you're wondering about the name, Alinea literally means "off the line." The restaurant's symbol, more commonly known as the pilcrow, indicates the beginning of a new train of thought, or literally a new paragraph. There's a double meaning: On one hand Alinea represents a new train of thought about food, but we are a restaurant, and everything still has to come "off the line."

Grant's background is in the basics and the classics. He grew up cooking in his parents' diner in St. Clair, Michigan, went to the Culinary Institute of America, then learned his haute cuisine chops from the best chef in the land—Thomas Keller. A trip to El Bulli restaurant in Roses, Spain under the direction of chef Ferran Adria let Grant know that you could take classical technique, apply equal measures of whimsy, intelligence, creativity and technology, and transform the dining experience. He spent a few days there, came home, and began to innovate in ways he could not have imagined at the time.

I am not a culinary professional, nor do I have a restaurant background. I have a BA in philosophy, spent my youth programming on a Apple II (including an accounting program for my dad's business that was in use until 1991), and the majority of my professional career trading derivatives and investing in small, mostly web-based tech companies.

We built Alinea to touch all the senses—not only taste. The menu is composed like a symphony or a play, provoking diners, challenging them, and making sure they feel... happy, sad, nostalgia, humor... the full range of human emotion.

Food and technology... not exactly the best of friends lately. With the books Fast Food Nation and Omnivore's Dilemma (both must-reads in my opinion)—and the documentary Food Inc.—there is the sense that anytime technology is applied to food bad things happen. Genetically modified vegetables, cows fed corn and a whole bunch of drugs to allow them to digest it, and whatever keeps a Twinkie around for 50 years—none of that can be good for us, right?

I am here to tell you that innovation when applied to food can be a good thing.... newer can mean better, more plentiful, more delicious. You can apply technology while still being respectful of the ingredients, the environment, and the consumer. It can also help take an ordinary dinner and make it artful. Grant's cuisine questions convention while honoring it. And when necessary, he uses technology and science to achieve new tastes and textures that align with the goal of making the dining experience the best it can possibly be.

Some food critics and foodies apply the "molecular gastronomy" label to the cuisine of Chef Achatz. [His name is pronounced like "rackets", as Wired's Mark McClusky once pointed out.] There is a lot written on that, but we don't like the tag... it seems limiting, short sighted, and in many cases just plain wrong. Much of the time, low tech is good enough—why use a laser to cut something when a knife will do the job just fine? Unfortunately, the molecular gastronomy of today often has more to do with the showmanship than it does with the original goals of the movement. When Herve This coined the term way back in the '80s, he intended for it to be, essentially, the MythBusters of the kitchen, a criticial look at how and why things work.

What the Alinea kitchen does have in common with MG is the desire to question everything, try new techniques, and make the dining experience better all the time. Alinea has a staff of 60+ people committed to that ideal. And those basic goals are much the same as the best products and technologies that are featured on Gizmodo everyday... The difference being, you can eat these.

I hope to show a few examples of what Chef Achatz and the Alinea team of 25 chefs does everyday, how they question and create, and the technological innovators we work with regularly to achieve these goals. We may touch on a few broader topics of concern to everyone who eats. But mostly, we want our Taste Test posts to be exactly like the experience at Alinea—fun and delicious.

Nick and Grant (center two) in the Alinea kitchen:

Nick Kokonas co-founded Alinea with Grant Achatz in 2005, and works with the chef on Alinea-related projects, recruiting innovators to challenge and improve every aspect of the cooking and eating experience. A finance guy and web-oriented angel investor by trade, Kokonas got his start back in his teen years writing business software on an Apple II. You can grab the gorgeous Alinea cookbook here, or just visit Alinea's home page.

Taste Test is our weeklong tribute to the leaps that occur when technology meets cuisine, spanning everything from the historic breakthroughs that made food tastier and safer to the Earl-Grey-friendly replicators we impatiently await in the future.

I did find one persistent crash though—every time I tried to look up my expired points, the whole app went own. Other than that though, it performed flawlessly. Sure, since you're doing this on your iPhone, you could almost as easily find a phone number and call. But who has time (or wants) to talk to actual people nowadays? This is faster, easier and yes, better, even if you can't slip the maître d' a Franklin or six to skip the line. Now if we could just get a Momofuku Ko resy app. [iTunes]

Related: Gizmodo's Essential Iphone Apps

Inamo's tables are also capable of running games and providing location-based services, like ordering a cab. Planned out by Blacksheep, Inamo also features state-of-the-art design that pays special attention to factors such as colors, spacing, and visual coherency. Sure, the tables may not render 3D models like some concepts we've seen in the past, but these ones actually exist in a public space. Here's the description straight from Blacksheep:

The ‘cocoon’ projectors are set at the same height throughout within the suspended high gloss black ceiling and come in three sizes to light 2-cover, 4-cover or 6-cover tables. When customers sit down there are white spots for plates and an individual ‘e-cloth’ for each table. Customers use a touch panel to order food and drink or change their table top to one of the seven other patterns available. ‘Serving staff are available at any time to help customers to navigate their menus or answer any other queries, but the menus have been exceptionally clearly designed and should be both intuitive and fool-proof for users!’ Project Designer Benjamin Webb commented.

Check out more photos over on Contemporist. [Inamo and Blacksheep via Contemporist]

OpenTable Unveils New Mobile Site for Booking Restaurant Reservations Online

Free Mobile Website Facilitates Last-Minute, On-The-Go Reservations

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. (June 30, 2008) — OpenTable, Inc. (www.opentable.com), the leading provider of free, real-time online reservations for diners as well as reservation and guest management solutions for restaurants, today announced the beta launch of the OpenTable MobileTM service, enabling consumers to find real-time table availability and book restaurant reservations through their mobile devices. Now it’s even easier for people who are away from their computers to enjoy the convenience and ease of booking their restaurant reservations online.

Users can access the mobile-optimized website by pointing the browser on their mobile device tohttp://mobile.opentable.com. The OpenTable Mobile site is designed to mimic the simple, streamlined reservation process offered on OpenTable.com®, enabling users to quickly identify restaurants with available tables and narrow their choices by neighborhood and desired times.

"With OpenTable Mobile, we can now deliver the convenience of online reservations to diners who are on the road or out on the town," said Jeff Jordan, chief executive officer of OpenTable. "Now mobile users can take the power of OpenTable.com with them wherever they go, to instantly find and book available tables at more than 8,500 restaurants."

OpenTable Mobile is currently available to book reservations at all OpenTable restaurants in the United States. In order to take advantage of OpenTable Mobile, users must have a web-enabled mobile device and subscribe to a data plan with their carrier. OpenTable does not charge users to access the site or book restaurant reservations; however, standard data and text messaging charges from users’ mobile carriers may apply. For more information on the OpenTable Mobile beta please visit www.opentable.com/mobile.

[Open Table Mobile]

There is no telling when this technology might make its way into restaurants, but my guess is that it won't be popular in fast food establishments. Seeing a perfectly constructed hamburger in 3D then being confronted with the cold hard reality moments later will not be good for business. [CScout Japan via The Raw Feed]

The Fat Duck, one of the restaurants in the celebrated UK gastronomic town of Bray, Berkshire, is to take its customers' enjoyment of food up a notch. Diners who choose a dish called Sound of the Sea, a mixture of seafood and edible seaweed served on a sand-like tapioca mixture, will listen to the sounds of crashing waves on an iPod in order to enhance the taste.

The man behind all of this is Heston Blumenthal, the Doctor Bunsen of the British cooking world, and the man who gave us Snail Porridge, Nitro-Scrambled Egg and Bacon Ice Cream and Mango and Douglas Fir Purée. "I did a series of tests at Oxford University three years ago which revealed that sound can really enhance the sense of taste," he told a magazine. "We ate an oyster while listening to the sea and it tasted stronger and saltier than when we ate it while listening to barnyard noises, for example." – Ad Dugdale

Fat Duck dons an iPod [Manchester Evening News]

Enough hate for a few seconds. You know what I do like about restaurants nowadays? A lot more restaurants and more specifically, bars, are ditching the traditional FM radio or repeat CD for satellite radio. It's great not having the commercials and great having genres that can accurately match the theme of the establishment. –Travis Hudson

I'll Take a Burger and Fries With my Ipod [Chip Chick]

The meal will be taken in this environment with the complete loss of vision. By starving one's sense, your other senses are stimulated to full alert - all so the theory goes - and your food will taste like it's never tasted before.

Dark Restaurant: Where one eats in total darkness [Spluch]

Jonathan from gamebang provided us with a very grammatically butchered review of the restaurant, but a review nonetheless. Every table has three touchscreen displays where the food/drink ordering and gaming is done. Upon entering the restaurant you are given an RFID card that tracks everything done and ordered. For the gaming, there were only six or so games that were mostly short little flash games, and they will soon be adding table-vs-table gaming competition.

Jonathan seemed most upset that there were no booths in the restaurant and that they charge extra for bacon and cheese. Even though Jonathan says it isn't close to being 100-percent finished, uWink still seems like an interesting place to at least check out. – Travis Hudson

uWhat [gamebang]