It has been on my bucket list for years to dine at...

It has been on my bucket list for years to dine at Alinea. When we decided to visit Chicago for my birthday I jumped at the opportunity. Unfortunately, there were no available reservations. I kept checking the website daily for openings. Two days prior to our departure to Chicago, I saw an opening which was one hour prior to our flight back home. I proceeded to cancel our return flight, paid extra charges to rebook a new flight. Book an additional day at our hotel just to accommodate dinner at this supposedly remarkable experience. From the reviews I can see that this experience was amazing for others but for us it was nothing short of disappointing.
We were firstly greeted by a staff who is so accustomed to greeting four persons that he didn t even realize that we weren t a group of four. He warily apologized that it s been a long night. The staff came one after the other, all seemingly exhausted waiting to get over with the experience which we paid over $1000 for. We even had to ask for silver ware for one of our courses after waiting for about 15 minutes for someone to realize that they skipped that process.
All in all, after dining at so many amazing restaurants across the world and hoping that Alinea being among the top 50 in addition to paying such a hefty price for such an experience would at least leave us with a wow - the service sucked and the food was underwhelming - some of the flavors were really off putting - very disappointing experience.