Restaurant: Michelin-starred Tru is a progressive French restaurant on Chicago’s Magnificent Mile. Critically acclaimed, Tru offers luxury dining with décor like an art gallery.

Chef: Executive chef Anthony Martin builds works of art. An Ohio native, Chef Martin spends hours crafting “playful” presentations of elegant meals, working hard to continually surprise his diners. He creates plates so visually stunning that the Chicago Tribune’s restaurant reviewer commented, “It seems crude to disturb their perfection for something so prosaic as eating.”

Butter:  Chef Martin believes that we’ve been eating butter the wrong way for years. The perfect temperature to enjoy the real taste of butter, he says, is cold—much colder than we’re used to. The problem, of course, is that cold butter doesn’t smear easily across crusty bread. Enter Chef Martin’s “cold vacuum.” He locks a mix of cow and goat’s milk into a cold, vacuum-sealed cooker. The butter mix comes out airy and lush— “aerated,” he calls it—and very cold. On the plate, it looks almost like a cube of light yellow honeycomb. The technique allows the diners at Tru to spread cold butter and enjoy its taste and texture as if at room temperature.

Commentary: “I find inspiration from multiple sources; could be an ingredient, a season, a certain piece of plate ware,” Chef Martin says. “Then I create the dish on paper — sketching it out with all the key elements, until I have a clear idea of how I want it to look. Then I build it.”