The Willy Wonka of High-Tech Cooking Is Coming for Your Kitchen

Philip Preston is standing against a wall in the kitchen at the Aviary cocktail lounge in Chicago’s West Loop. Around him, the restaurant’s black-clad drinkmakers work with quiet intensity beneath operating-theater-bright lights, creating some of the country’s most innovative cocktails. A waiter rushes past, ferrying the In the Rocks, which appears to be nothing more than an orb of ice the size of a small fist nestled in a tumbler. With the drink, however, comes a slingshot designed to fit snugly over the rim of the glass. When a drinker snaps the elastic down against the sphere, the ice cracks and releases the cocktail held within, transforming the drink from In the Rocks to on the rocks.

Aviary’s general manager, Jeremiah Beckley, introduces Preston, 60, to the staff, who receive him with the deference typically granted a visiting dignitary. “It’s Hollywood light in the culinary world,” Preston says, laughing at the fuss being made. Dressed in khakis and a checked oxford shirt, pen in his breast pocket and phone in a holster attached to his belt, Preston has nothing Hollywood about him. And though he’s not a chef or critic, his fingerprints are on almost everything that leaves the kitchen here. It’s his lab-grade chillers that form the hollow frozen orbs at –17C (1.4F) and hold the drink separately at –15C, so it can be injected into the ice to order without melting everything before it reaches the table.