Alinea

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!  Did you hear my scream from where you live??  After trying for 15 minutes, I finally got through to Alinea in Chicago to make a reservation for our 5-year anniversary dinner!!!!!!!!  On the first day of every month, they open reservations up for 3 months out which means they began excepting reservations today for June.  After my disappointing call to Volt, I wasn't getting my hopes up especially as the minutes ticked by this morning and I kept hitting redial.  Volt was going to be awesome but Alinea is (I hope) going to be even better. 

Alinea was named the 10th best restaurant in the WORLD by S.Pellegrino in 2009.  I will admit, I have no idea what qualifications S.Pellegrino has to make such a bold statement but I'll take it.  They were also named to the top 40 US restaurants by Gayot magazine for 2010.  (I always find it interesting when "best ofs" come out at the beginning of the year.....how do they know already?)

For dinner we're doing the Tour which is currently 23 courses of yummy goodness (last time I looked at the menu it was 27!).  Many of the courses are only amuse-bouches (single, bite-sized) which I think is a good thing.  I read that if you drew a vertical line between the farthest circle on the left and the farthest circle on the right, circles that fell to the left of the line indicated a more savory dish and those to the right are sweeter.  Also, the bigger the circle, the bigger the portion.  I also read on Chowhound (an excellent site/resource if you haven't checked it out already) that this cartoon is actually a very realistic description of the dinner.  I'm so excited I can't stand it!