Weird Science: Becoming Chef Homaro Cantu

From troubled teen to celebrity chef: before stepping foot inside the uber competitve culinary scene, Cantu had already beat the odds.




By Jennifer Reingold (Page 2 of 3)

To change the world for the better--not to mention run a restaurant that is quickly becoming a temple for science-based gastronomy--is a hell of an ambitious goal for a self-proclaimed screwup. Cantu was a troubled kid from the Pacific Northwest, with a mother who drifted in and out of homelessness. He narrowly avoided a trip to juvie for setting a huge fire in a field next to an apartment complex when he was 12. In school, he routinely slept through class. In fact, he had only one discernible passion: taking things apart. There was the lawn mower, the remote-controlled cars, the transistor radio. Although he took a job at a fried-chicken joint when he was 12 (he said he was 16), Cantu saw food more as sustenance than the source of a career until the owner decided to bring in a tandoori oven and Cantu realized that there was more to chicken than McNuggets.

As high school ended, Cantu found himself with no place to live. Fortunately, he connected with a couple named Bill and Jan Miller, who sometimes took in troubled teens. They offered him a couch in their living room on the condition that he go to culinary school. He did--and found his calling. "He came home with a Charlie Trotter [the famous Chicago chef] cookbook one day and said, 'One of these days, I'm gonna have a book just like this,' " remembers Jan. "You know what, he probably was the most ambitious, determined young man we have ever met." Says Cantu: "If it hadn't been for them, I'd probably still be struggling as a line cook somewhere."

Cantu determined that the only way to learn how to be the best was to work with the best. He decided to take the traditional "stage," the free internship most would-be cooks do for a few weeks or months, and turn it into a way of life. He spent about two years traveling up and down the West Coast, knocking on the back doors of some 50 bistros, organic cafés, and fusion restaurants that he thought could teach him something and offering his services for free. Through this hands-on form of benchmarking, Cantu began to develop his own style and became more determined than ever to open his own place.

In February 1999, when Cantu was 22, he decided that Trotter, whom he idolized for his beautiful presentation and use of the best ingredients, would be his next stop. Arriving in Chicago armed with nothing but a stereo and a backpack, he went straight to Trotter's and scored a meeting for the next day. Trotter told him it was rude to show up without an appointment. Cantu was unfazed. "Sometimes I just want to do things," Cantu responded, "and right now I want to work at this restaurant, and that's the only thing I want to do." Trotter hired him, and Cantu spent the next four years climbing the ranks to sous chef. "It was a tough kitchen," he says. "Some people call it hell. I call it a character-building experience."

All the while, Cantu spent his days off tinkering with his own creations, imagining startlingly original ways of presenting and reconstituting food. What his ideas had in common was the combination of the fresh and the familiar--the deconstruction of a comfortable, memory-evoking food and its resurrection in a totally different presentation.

In late 2003, Cantu heard about an opening for a chef at a new restaurant called Moto. The backer was a young restaurateur named Joseph De Vito, whose earlier food forays consisted of a burger joint and a classic red-sauce Italian spot. De Vito wanted something different, perhaps Asian fusion. Cantu wanted something really different. "This guy comes in with these little glasses, he looks like an accountant," laughs De Vito, "and started talking about levitating food. I walked away saying, 'Wow, that's a lot to take in.' "

Cantu then asked to cook for De Vito and his wife. The seven-course meal was unlike anything De Vito had ever tasted. It included a spring roll with a shot glass holding a ravioli--whose spring-roll-flavored liquid center just "exploded in your mouth"--and a piece of fish cooked at the table in Cantu's polymer box. "Maybe this could work," De Vito remembers thinking. "I always wanted a chef who was going to run with the ball. I think the key to success in this business is to find the right people and let them be creative."

Creative, yes, but what Cantu called creative other people called bonkers. There was the edible menu, a soy-based concoction with vegetable ink spread out to resemble a soft piece of parchment; synthetic champagne injected into your glass with a giant black medical syringe; and flapjacks sizzling on a "griddle" frozen to -273 degrees. When Moto--which in Japanese has many meanings including "idea," "taste," and "desire"--opened in January 2004 offering only a tasting menu with little explanation, people were confounded. "They would ask for sushi, and you'd hit them with this degustation menu," says De Vito, "and then they'd get up and walk out."

Those with the guts to stay were in for a bizarre-yet-tasty combination of food and science, of high and low culture, of the comfortable and the absurd. Case in point: Surf & Turf, which combined a Hawaiian sea bass and duck cooked sous vide (in a vacuum), with mushrooms, a foamy puree of foie gras, and apple butter. Accompanying the dish was a sketch inspired by M.C. Escher, the mind-bending surrealist, depicting a sea that morphs into a sky. "And please eat the drawing," a server would say. "It's flavored on the top like a bird and on the bottom like a sea."

Eventually, Moto was discovered by foodies, who came to admire Cantu's strange combination of childlike playfulness, all-American flavor, and haute cuisine. There is, for example, the Donut Soup, an elegant espresso cup containing a few ounces of liquid that tastes exactly like the inside of a Krispy Kreme doughnut, chemical aftertaste and all. Or the sweetbreads and cheese grits, served on a spoon over white-corn-and-goat-cheese grits. Next to the spoon is goat-cheese "snow," which has been zapped with liquid nitrogen. Diners were asked to abandon their preconceptions about food and just put themselves in Cantu's calloused hands. His only promise was that the food would actually taste good. "Wow, this is so much better than Chuck E. Cheese's," joked one recent guest. The restaurant began to turn a profit, helped along by Moto's cheap rent and high prices.

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