When Executive Chef Tony Smoody does experiments, he gets tasty results.

For example, his sweet pea hummus. 

“There’s no garbanzo beans in it. It’s just a puree of peas, tahini, olive oil, garlic, lemon juice and served with garlic crostini. It’s just a little bit different but everyone’s loving it.” 

The chef tries to develop great flavor from local ingredients and keep it affordable. 

“We’re trying to really reach out to the students and get them in here as well as the professionals in the area, the faculty and foodies around the city.  

Inventive in the kitchen and the lab
Smoody’s culinary breakthroughs happen not far from the site of a ground-breaking scientific discovery more than a hundred years ago on the Case campus. 

His restaurant is named for the men who conducted that historic experiment: Albert Michelson and Edward Morley. 

Michelson had invented an optical device called the interferometer, and Morley, who specialized in high-precision instruments, helped his friend use it to measure the speed of light. 

It was a summer day like today on the Case campus in 1887 when the two discovered, contrary to the dominant paradigm, that light does not travel in space through a substance. 

Founding fathers of this field of science
By disproving the ancient concept of the “aether,” the Cleveland scientists made science history. 

“Everybody including Einstein acknowledges there would be no reason to believe in relativity if it was not for this experiment,” says Harsh Mathur, professor of theoretical physics at Case.

His field is cosmology. 

“We’re asking the same questions, I guess, that Einstein and Michelson grapple with, which is: "What’s the nature of space and time?'”  

How the Michelson-Morley experiment changed our understanding of light and gravity is marked on campus by an apple tree. 

It was donated to the university almost a decade ago by the National Science Foundation. 

“There was apparently a real apple tree that Newton used to watch apples fall off. And we have a shoot of that tree here.”   

First American Nobel winner in science
In the lobby of Case’s Physics Building, there’s also a replica scale model of the Michelson-Morley experiment. 

Mathur calls it the university’s biggest claim to fame. 

“Definitely. I mean we’ve had other great science done over here as well, in the 100 years since then. But Michelson was the first, and it’s still the greatest of course. He was the first American to win a Nobel Prize in science and this was the first significant piece of science I think done in the U.S.”   

At the restaurant that opened last fall, Chef Smoody’s culinary discoveries are a kind of homage to the creativity of Michelson and Morley.   

A point of pride
Beth Kretschmar of Bon Appetit, the company that manages food service at Case, says students take pride in the restaurant’s name and its food. 

“A little more sophisticated than you’d find on your typical college campus for sure. It’s geared towards the students but the surrounding community as well. We’re in University Circle area. It’s such a bustling, artistic, culturally wonderful community, and we really wanted a restaurant that could represent that.” 

Chef Smoody says international students especially like the fusion items on the menu at Michelson and Morley. 

“You get to do Asian and Indian and Middle Eastern and kind of bring it all together in America here.” 

Pasta and pizza
Smoody’s own Italian heritage emerges in his house-made pappardelle pasta. 

“A little fresh garlic here, we’ll grab our mushrooms, little bit of broccolini, fresh corn roasted and cut off the cob, fresh basil, slivers of pepper for some color, and we’ll hit it with some white wine.”   

He cooks four kinds of pizza on a stone slab in a wood oven replica that runs on gas. 

“A crisp, thin crust kind of flat-bread style pizza that’s kind of a rustic shape.”  

It can get pricey at Michelson and Morley. Sea scallops with potato-bacon risotto, asparagus and marinated grape tomatoes will set you back $17. 

Bacon in the middle
But burgers and sandwiches like the house porchetta won’t break the average student’s budget. 

“It’s kind of a reverse porcheta. I put bacon in the middle and roll that inside of a loin. But it is all made in house and served with sweet and sour kale and a pancetta marmalade with local provolone cheese on a ciabatta bun. At $9, that’s a pretty good price for all that scratch cooking.” 

Students have other options in two all-you-can-eat multi-station buffet dining halls as well as four cafes in the new Tinkham Veale University Center on East Boulevard and Bellflower. 

But cosmologists like Harsh Mathur prefer to dine at Michelson and Morley. 

“It’s actually one of our regular places to go when we have visitors to the department. We take physicists there and then we brag about being the kind of campus where you have the restaurants named after a physics professor. So it’s kind of fun, yeah.”