If you want to soar, you must cut what weighs you down. You can take your cue, once again, from Alinea. Achatz explains that when he and Kokonas opened the restaurant, “one of our creative roads was to look at a dish on paper or in front of us and ask, ‘What else? What else can we do? What else can we add? What can we add to make this better?’”52 But over time, they reversed their approach. “Now,” Achatz says, “we find ourselves constantly asking, ‘What can we take away?’” Michelangelo approached sculpting in the same way. As he explained, “The sculptor arrives at his end by taking away what
...more
