Homaro Cantu, science-minded Chicago chef, dies at 38

Homaro Cantu, a Chicago chef who kept a Class IV laser as a cooking tool and dreamed of eradicating hunger with nutrient-soaked edible paper, was found dead Tuesday on the city’s North Side. He was 38.

The Chicago Tribune reported that Cantu appeared to have hanged himself inside a brewery he had been building.

His blend of science and dining put Cantu among a small vanguard of U.S. chefs who used chemical-laboratory techniques to coax food into novel and sometimes peculiar forms. After four years in the kitchen at the Chicago restaurant Charlie Trotter, he was hired for his first job as chef, having impressed the owner by cooking fish at the table in a small polymer box, among other feats.

The restaurant, Moto, opened in 2004 and has held a Michelin star since 2012. Cantu eventually took over most of the ownership.

In his early days, when Moto served synthetic Champagne squirted into a glass by a large black medical syringe, Cantu sometimes seemed as if he was out to shock. Eventually, though, critics and diners began to pay more attention to the quality of his cooking. And as the number of his patent applications grew to six, he revealed a more serious purpose to his fascination with gadgets.

Customers may have giggled as they ate a picture of a cow that tasted like filet mignon, but Cantu said that his technology for flavoring and fortifying edible paper could help feed soldiers at war, astronauts in space and people in refugee camps.

“My goal with this is to deliver food to the masses that are starving,” he said in an interview with the magazine Fast Company. “We give them something that’s healthy, that has an indefinite shelf life and that is supercheap to produce.”

Born in Tacoma, Washington, in 1976, Cantu was homeless between ages 6 and 9. He traced his interest in helping people through technology and his skills as a chef to that experience.

More recently, his ideas about ending hunger shifted to a berry that temporarily makes sour or bitter foods taste sweet. He called this “flavor-tripping,” and it was the inspiration for his second restaurant, iNG, now closed, as well as a coffee shop, Berrista.

Last month, Alexander Espalin, an investor in iNG and Moto, sued Cantu in Cook County Circuit Court. Espalin, who claimed that he had never received a share of Moto’s profits, alleged that Cantu had misused restaurant funds to promote his own businesses, including a book he had published, “The Miracle Berry Diet Cookbook.”

Cantu lived in Chicago with his wife, Katie McGowan, and their two young daughters.

The Chicago police said an autopsy was scheduled for Wednesday.