20 Years Ago, Alinea Electrified Chicago Dining. Does It Still Matter?

They come with torches, lighting the lamps, great cast-iron bowls hung on chains above our heads. The table is tricked out with candelabra, creeping moss and a taxidermy mount of two pheasants at war, perhaps in honor of a dish from the restaurant’s early days, when such a bird — or at least a hunk of it — was skewered on an oak twig whose leaves were set on fire.

Tonight the first dish is less dramatic. Under a mini-cloche awaits a vol-au-vent, which proves as flaky and classically French as can be.

When the chef Grant Achatz opened Alinea in Chicago in 2005, it championed the kind of surrealist, experimental cooking made famous by Ferran Adrià at El Bulli in Spain. (Mr. Achatz apprenticed there one summer, alongside René Redzepi, who would go on to open Noma in Copenhagen.) The mission, then revolutionary, was to redefine — in flavor, texture, even molecular structure — what food could be. For the young Mr. Achatz, this meant the likes of edible rocks, langoustine paper and candied bacon draped on a trapeze.

He was not the only American chef of the time to deconstruct peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and deploy tools like the now-ubiquitous whipping siphon and immersion circulator. (Wylie Dufresne, of the sadly shuttered WD-50 in New York, I see you.) But where other explicitly avant-garde restaurants foundered, Alinea endured — and changed the city around it. The marathon tasting menu with spherified this and tweezered that has become the trademark of Chicago fine dining today. It is a straight line from Alinea to “The Bear.”

So on a recent evening, I was startled by that old-school vol-au-vent. It was a reminder that Picasso could paint like Raphael when he wanted to. But I came for Picasso.

This summer I made a pilgrimage to Chicago to see if Alinea, on its 20th anniversary, was still breaking new ground. In the last decade, Mr. Achatz has started to shift away from culinary provocations, making a more direct bid for diners’ emotions. No small part of Alinea’s triumph — it sells out almost every night, with about 100 guests paying $365 to $495 a head for a set menu — is the razzle-dazzle that surrounds the plates, as much if not more than what’s on them.

This can be fun when it’s not domineering. “Eat immediately,” I was warned in the blandly elegant Salon upstairs. “And keep your mouth shut.” Servers in the more intimate Gallery downstairs were gentler, recasting commands as helpful advice: If you don’t shut your mouth, the contents of the exploding raviolo will likely end up all over the table.

The raviolo? Delicious, with its gushy payload of truffles. Mr. Achatz came up with it pre-Alinea, adapting a method from xiao long bao. He used to be adamant about ditching hits to make way for innovation. (Alinea is a name for the proofreading symbol that marks a new paragraph.) Now, he told me in an interview, he wonders if his bigger responsibility as a chef is to give people what they want.

For this anniversary year, he and his executive chef, Douglas Alley, have obligingly dug into the archives. From 2006: a sphere of hot potato that drops at the pull of a pin — like a grenade — into a cold potato soup, to be drunk in a gulp, so you get the shock of both temperatures at once. From 2016: an unclouded cube of jelly that in one beefy, tangy-sweet mouthful awakens the memory of every baseball-game hot dog that leaked condiments down your fingers, with the Chicago requisites of mustard, onion, pickled sport pepper, neon-green relish, celery salt and tomato. (“Never ketchup,” a server intoned.)

The oldies hold up, especially against less-persuasive newer efforts. Caviar is a cliché, no less so when spooned into a bowl embedded with beads. A server put the bowl in my palm, saying, “It feels like caviar”; it was rigid and dry, and did not. Later, guests were called to rise, “make a spear” with one hand and puncture the paper top of an opaque cylinder, only to retrieve a vanilla bean stabbed into a tempura-ed knob of lobster so salty it might as well have been chicken.

A few elements channel the febrile energy of Alinea past: a crooked husk like a molted caterpillar skin that tastes of almonds spun into buttery air; a prawn cracker that is a literal prawn, smashed as flat as Wile E. Coyote under a boulder, a briny shadow; paella puréed and crisped, to mimic both socarrat — the scorched underside of the grains — and the starchy lace that forms around gyoza as it fries.

The engineered socarrat is combined with true socarrat, which guests witness being scraped from the pan during a field trip to the kitchen (a ploy that gives the staff five minutes to empty the Gallery and completely refurnish it). On my first visit, this was the most beautiful bite of the night, crunchy and musky with a whiff of ash. On the second, the paella had not cooked long enough to char. It was just rice.

At this price point, at a restaurant that has staked its claim in American history, I expect more. Beyond the technical fumbles, the meal is unmoored in time or place, a motley of culinary references without apparent connection. And for all the kitchen’s ingenuity, the arc of the menu remains conventional, with the inevitable climax of Wagyu.

Mr. Achatz wants to make us feel something. I wish he trusted the food itself to have that power — to reveal the alien in the familiar and help us see the world anew.

If I had money to burn, like the woman to my left with an enraged Labubu dangling from her Louis Vuitton purse, or a big enough reason to splurge, like the delightful couple across from me who drove two hours from South Bend, Ind. — happy 20th anniversary! — I might be more willing to just surrender to the zaniness. There are curious implements to play with, plates that flip to reveal hidden B-side dishes and food buried in flaming pots.

The staff is remarkably game. There are 30 people in the kitchen, and of the 50 or so working the floor — outnumbering diners at my Gallery seating by more than three to one — it seems that almost all stop by my table.

At the end, dessert is Jackson Pollocked onto a plastic pane, swaths of sweet sauces and shimmery purple powder, dotted with pickled blueberries and a rubble of ice cream stiffened by liquid nitrogen. I could’ve licked the acrylic clean.

Then servers usher in the fabled taffy balloons, white as ghosts. What is it about a balloon that makes your heart want to fly up to the ceiling, too? The first time, I take a nibble and it shrivels and congeals, chemically sweet on my tongue and tough as rubber.

Nevertheless, the second time, the balloon’s arrival is magic again, as if I’d never seen it before. Everyone shrieks with joy. Anything seems possible, and when the server hands me the string and whispers, “Give it a kiss,” I lean in.

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