page_title: Homaro Cantu
section_title: Cooking career
hierarchical_section_title: Homaro Cantu / Cooking career
caption_attribution_description: moto Chicago as used by Homaro Cantu
context_page_description: Homaro "Omar" Cantu Jr. was an American chef and inventor known for his use of molecular gastronomy. As a child, Cantu was fascinated with science and engineering. While working in a fast food restaurant, he discovered the similarities between science and cooking and decided to become a chef. In 1999, he was hired by his idol, Chicago chef Charlie Trotter. In 2003, Cantu became the first chef of Moto, which he later purchased.
  Through Moto, Cantu explored his unusual ideas about cooking including edible menus, carbonated fruit, and food cooked with a laser. Initially seen as a novelty only, Moto eventually earned critical praise and, in 2012, a Michelin star. Cantu's second restaurant, iNG, and his coffee house, Berrista, focused on the use of "miracle berries" to make sour food taste sweet. He was working on opening a brewery called Crooked Fork at the time of his suicide in 2015.
  In addition to being a chef, Cantu was a media personality, appearing regularly on TV shows, and an inventor. In 2010, he produced and co-hosted a show called Future Food.
context_section_description: Cantu graduated from the Western Culinary Institute (now a Le Cordon Bleu School) and spent the next two years staging on the West Coast.  After about 50 such two-week to one-month internships, he was ready for a paid job.  One day in February 1999, he decided to try to get a job with his idol, Charlie Trotter.  "I made it my life's goal to become a sous chef for Charlie Trotter," Cantu remarked. "I literally just flew out [to Chicago] one day with $300 in my pocket and no place to stay".  Cantu had no real plan to get employed – he simply showed up at Trotter's back door and begged him for a job.  Trotter agreed to an interview the following day, and was impressed enough to give Cantu a job.  Cantu worked his way up the ranks, becoming one of Trotter's sous chefs.  On his days off, he began to explore new ways to prepare and present food.
  In 2003, Cantu learned of a chef opening at a soon-to-open restaurant called Moto.  The restaurant's backer, Joseph De Vito, was looking to do something a bit out of the ordinary, perhaps Asian fusion.  When Cantu interviewed for the position, he pitched something really different.  "This guy comes in with these little glasses, he looks like an accountant," De Vito recalled, "and started talking about levitating food. I walked away saying, 'Wow, that's a lot to take in.'"  Cantu persuaded De Vito to let him cook a meal for De Vito and his wife.  The seven-course meal, which featured an exploding ravioli and a small table-top box that cooked fish before the guest's eyes, won De Vito over.
  When Moto opened in January 2004, guests were confused.  People would come in looking for sushi and leave when offered a degustation menu instead, De Vito recalled.  Enough people braved the menu, however, and soon the restaurant was discovered by foodies.  Cantu quickly earned a reputation for shocking guests.  For example, one feature was synthetic wine squirted into the glass with a medical syringe.  Other innovations included edible menus and carbonated fruit.
  Describing himself as a scientist at heart, Cantu emphasized unusual cooking devices and experimentation in his food.  He would keep a tape recorder by his bedside to capture middle-of-the-night random thoughts to turn into new inventions.  His kitchen included a centrifuge, a hand-held ion particle gun, and class IV lasers, among other science gadgets.  His menus too showed off his zany ideas, with descriptions such as "surf and turf with mc escher" and "after christmas sale on christmas trees."  At weekly brainstorming sessions, Moto chefs were prompted to come up with new takes on ordinary food by discussing how they could change foods they ate that week.  Prototypes were created, and failure was encouraged.  Within two years, Moto's crazy dishes had attracted the attention of The New York Times and Gourmet magazine, and Cantu had been asked to cook for Nobel Prize winners and molecular gastronomy pioneer Ferran Adrià.
  Cantu's edible paper – a corn flow and soy concoction, similar to material used on birthday cakes – in particular attracted a lot of attention.  In 2005, The New York Times ran a story on the paper.   Burger King sent a group of executives to Moto to explore Cantu's edible paper invention and other ideas.  Featured heavily in early Moto menus, the paper was fed through a Canon i560 inkjet printer filled with inks made out of food.  It was then brushed with powdered seasonings to give it whatever taste Cantu wished to convey.  In 2005, Cantu began experimenting with liquid nitrogen to flash freeze food and to give dishes unusual shapes and with helium and superconductors in an attempt to levitate them.  A profile by Gourmet talked a "floating course" with a specially made silicone cube that became lighter than air when heated and was imbued with smoke to give it a varying aroma.  Cantu purchased a class IV laser (the highest grade available) to cook the interior of fish while leaving the outside raw and to create "inside out bread" with a doughy exterior and crusty interior.
  Initially, food critics were not impressed saying M
caption: A rotary evaporator at the Moto prep station
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