Nashville — It was, to say the least, an odd way to make a dinner reservation at a four-star restaurant.

"You'll have to go to the chef's blog and look for his e-mail address," said the pleasant reservationist at the Hermitage Hotel in Music City USA.

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So I found the chef's blog, which showed a picture of him spraying olive oil, through something like a Miracle-Gro hose attachment, into liquid nitrogen. The oil emerged as a fine, frozen powder, which he then heaped onto a slab of chocolate mousse cake. Naturally.

Yet this was precisely what I was looking for. I didn't want to order a meal off the regular menu at the starchy Capitol Grille restaurant in this downtown hotel. I wanted the frozen oil, the hot gelled mushrooms, the 36-hour beef, the whole nine yards.

Chef Sean Brock, 27, has created quite a name for this Nashville restaurant by cooking dishes that sound like entries in a science fair.

Other chefs make custards with eggs and milk; Brock uses gellen gum calibrated to coagulate at precisely 190 degrees. Other Southerners smoke pork before serving it; Brock smokes the pork before your eyes.

Such is the front line of restaurant culture today. Chefs explore new technologies so they can surprise their dining guests, shake up their preconceptions of food and make them wonder if they're breaking any controlled-substance laws. The most extreme American example may be Alinea restaurant in Chicago, where chef Grant Achatz's current 26-course menu features duck with a "pillow of mace air" and beef with "smoked paprika candy." The best-known local example of this kind of cooking can be found at One Midtown Kitchen, where chef Richard Blais will pull out his bag of tricks for customers who arrange ahead of time.

Not everyone wants this kind of food, but I did.

Brock and I e-mailed back and forth a couple of times to establish that I wanted to try anything he'd throw at me. My only constraint was that I wanted to rise from the table after three hours. I remember reading about one meal at Alinea that lasted seven and a half. Nothing worse than bedsores to wreck a good food buzz.

I gathered a posse, drove to Nashville and descended into the formal basement dining room of Capitol Grille.

The meal started off not so strange. A yummy little Kumamoto oyster with bits of pears and a skewer of avocado and cucumber with caviar positioned upright for one pretty bite.

Then came the lobster: pieces of shellfish cooked sous vide (i.e. in a vacuum-sealed bag) for many hours so that it looked raw but tasted like heaven. The dish was nestled in a larger dish holding long ribbons of cara cara orange peel. The waiter poured hot water over the peels to release their sinus-tickling sweet fragrance and play with your head.

A piece of grouper next arrived alongside a dun-colored hockey puck that the waiter identified as "mushroom panna cotta." What a thrill it was to cut into this sturdy but silky-soft custard and watch a core of sautéed mushrooms tumble out. It was actually a hot gel rather than a custard, but since I didn't know, there was a feeling of "this can't be real" surprise.

Kitchen revolution?

The meal extended through 11 generous courses, of which the most memorable was a cube of Kurobuta pork belly resting under an inverted glass filled with wood smoke. It was nothing short of a barbecue bong. The waiter whisked off the glass, and I ate the melting cube of meat as the smoke rushed out. It tasted like the barbecue missing link — the precise moment between heady aroma and actual smoke penetration.

There were quite a few gels along the way, and I'd have to say they got progressively less interesting once the newness of sensation wore off. There were also a number of dishes cooked sous vide — from gorgeously tender lamb to weirdly wiggly foie gras, to fennel that tasted more essentially of fennel than any I had heretofore tried.

As more chefs get hip to this cooking method, it should likely change the way they organize and staff kitchens. All the skill goes into preparing the food ahead of time; the cooks need only reheat plastic bags in steamers or simmering water, cut them open and arrange the contents on a plate. Sous vide automation may be the enduring legacy of today's kitchen-tech revolution. (Or maybe not: Recently the safety of the technique has come under fire from the New York City health department.)

The meal at Capitol Grille left me feeling ever so slightly like I had been stewing in a sous vide bag for days. It was always interesting, often delicious and occasionally mind-blowing. And, man, was it a lot of food.

I'd recommend that you go right now, but you'll have to wait. Brock has quit his job at Capitol Grille and discontinued his blog.

Look for him to start in early April at McCrady's Restaurant in Charleston, S.C. Not only that, he promises "the tasting menus will be even more intense."

Bring it on.