A Twist on Fusion Cooking (1)
Viewing food in totally unexpected ways allows chef Homaro Cantu, Jr. to create startlingly original ways of presenting and reconstituting food

A few clues reveal that Moto restaurant in Chicago is not your average fine-dining establishment. Start with the Class IV Iaser, normally used for Surgery, on prominent display in the dining room. At Moto, it's an important cooking tool. Then there's the huge tank of industrial-use liquid nitrogen in the backyard, used to freeze things that are normally hot and to mold foods into wholly unnatural shapes.

In Japanese, "moto" has many meanings including "idea," "taste" and "desire"; and resident chef Homaro Cantu, Jr. loves to challenge a diner's assumptions about how food should look, taste and feel. "He's an inventor who accidentally ended up as a chef and is returning to being an inventor," says Wylie Dufresne, chef-owner of WD-50, a New York restaurant known for a similar approach. "But his food is good and tasty."

Method to his madness

Cantu's quirky search for the unexpected-the desire to push the culinary envelope by combining flavors, textures and temperatures in previously unimagined ways-and his general irreverence for the accepted parameters of food and fine dining have suddenly propelled him into the role of the restaurant world's enfant terrible. And it's obvious that he is just getting started. "This isn't just [a] gimmick," he says. "There is a point to this."

The point, for Cantu, is simple yet starkly ambitious: He wants to change the way the world thinks about food. This has barely progressed, he says, while everything else has advanced at warp speed.
"What is cooking? ‘Cooking' is a loose term. It's understanding energy or the lack thereof," he says.

Vocabulary Focus 
   
reconstitute (v) to change food that has been dried back into its original form by adding water

push the envelope (idiom) to stretch the limits of what is normally done

propel (v) to cause someone to do something

gimmick (n) something which is not of real value that is used to attract people's interest temporarily, especially to make them buy something

Specialized Terms

fusion cooking (n. phr) 无国界料理a style of cooking that combines ingredients and techniques from different cuisines

Class IV laser (n. phr) 第4级激光a high-powered device that uses a laser beam for cutting, primarily used for surgery and research

liquid nitrogen (n. phr) 液态氮the liquid state of a gas that has no color or smell and is the main part of air

enfant terrible (n. phr) 顽童；特立独行的人 a person whose unconventional lifestyle, behavior or work is considered shocking by others (French)