Grant Achatz: The Remarkable Rise of America's Most Celebrated Young Chef

Grant Achatz's career as a chef has been built on beating the odds, time after time. From humble Midwestern beginnings, he struck out into the culinary world and rose to super-stardom in Chicago, where his iconoclastic vision helped transform the American fine-dining experience. Along the way, he fought a dramatic battle with cancer that temporarily stripped him of his ability to taste. Over and over, Achatz surmounted innumerable obstacles to become and remain one of the world's most recognizable and respected young chefs.

This collection of Chicago Tribune articles from the past decade offer an up-close examination of Achatz's story from the journalists who've covered him from the beginning. Included are rare interviews treating Achatz's humble beginnings as a young chef, long-unseen restaurant reviews, and features on his innovative restaurants: Alinea, Next, and The Aviary, which all to different degrees treat Achatz's trademark vision of "molecular gastronomy" and explore the importance of presentation and memory in fine dining.

At the height of Achatz's triumph with Alinea in 2007, he was diagnosed with stage-four squamous cell carcinoma, a rare cancer afflicting the tongue. Told the cancer would kill him would die if he did not have his tongue surgically removed, Achatz tenaciously clung to the hope that he would not have to sacrifice the sense most vital to his extraordinary talent. While undergoing an experimental treatment to eliminate the cancer without losing his tongue, Achatz temporarily lost his sense of taste, Achatz continued to run Alinea, which flourished despite his debilitating condition. Miraculously, Achatz made a full recovery and regained his sense of taste, and in 2011 he went on to open one of the culinary world's most discussed new restaurants: Next, where an entirely new theme and menu is presented every three months.

Grant Achatz tells the remarkable story of this leading chef as seen through the eyes of the journalists who have covered his career since the beginning.