The Perfect Menu. Now Change It.
Testing oeufs Bénédictine for Next.
By JULIA MOSKIN
Published: February 15, 2011
CHICAGO
Multimedia
Sally Ryan for The New York Times
The chef Grant Achatz, right, with Dave Beran, who will be Next’s executive chef, at the restaurant site.
WHEN a chef has nothing to prove and nothing to fear, what does he cook?
Next month, Grant Achatz will open a restaurant here that, if all goes according to plan, could be the most difficult, ephemeral and stressful in culinary history. “My idea of fun seems to be more work,” he said; he will remain in charge of Alinea, his acclaimed restaurant nearby.
When this new restaurant, Next, serves its first customers on April 1, its menu will be painstakingly reproduced from the classical French repertoire: whole lobes of foie gras baked in brioche, clear turtle soup with Madeira, duck pressed and sauced with its own blood and marrow, as served at the Tour d’Argent in Paris for more than 200 years.
These dishes, which Mr. Achatz has been refining for a year, will be served for all of three months. Next will then morph into an entirely different restaurant, and again three months after that.
Just to set the bar a little higher for himself, and make the creative process more invigorating, each menu for Next will draw from a different place and time. So, rather than the earthbound categories of Japanese, Italian or Peruvian, the food will evoke cloudier concepts: Kyoto in springtime; Palermo in 1949; Hong Kong in far-off 2036. A menu might be designed around a single day — say, the Napa Valley on Oct. 28, 1996, the day Mr. Achatz started work at the French Laundry, where he remained until 2001.
Now 36, he is at the top of his profession, having achieved his lifelong ambition last fall when Alinea was awarded three Michelin stars. He has the sober perspective and what-the-hell attitude brought on by a near-death experience. His food at Alinea is already highly inventive; now, Mr. Achatz has set out to reinvent the restaurant itself.
The idea for Next was planted on the grim night in 2007 that Mr. Achatz learned that he had an advanced form of oral cancer. Doctors told him he would have to have his tongue amputated, which would mean losing his sense of taste.
Numb with shock, he pulled together a dinner of seared duck breast, morels, peas and stock from the walk-in at Alinea: comfort food for Nick Kokonas, his business partner, first groupie and close friend, who was devastated by the diagnosis. Mr. Kokonas, determined to appear upbeat, said it was the kind of strong and simple dish that they could build a new restaurant around when Mr. Achatz recovered.
But Mr. Achatz dismissed the idea as not challenging enough, saying that he would be bored after three months.
“Well then, every three months we’ll change it,” promised Mr. Kokonas, flooded with emotion and enthusiasm.
The two of them — the spare, driven artist and the comfortable, fluid patron — evoke a modern Michelangelo and Medici, bonded by mutual trust and now locked into a very public artistic endeavor. With Next, Mr. Achatz is operating at a level of creative and financial freedom enjoyed by very few artists and only a handful of chefs in history.
In the event of a Grant Achatz biopic, Mr. Kokonas, 42, a wealthy former derivatives trader and golf nut with flowing hair and interesting eyewear, could be played by a cleaned-up Johnny Depp. Mr. Achatz himself is a ringer for a red-haired Christian Bale. Mr. Kokonas also edited the massive Alinea cookbook (Ten Speed, 2008), and he and Mr. Achatz wrote the forthcoming book “Life, On the Line” (Gotham), which tracks Mr. Achatz’s history up to the advanced age of 34, when doctors declared him cancer-free. (Eventually, he found an oncologist who agreed to treat him with chemotherapy and radiation instead of surgery.)
Other chefs have regularly overhauled their menus, although few have taken it as far as Mr. Achatz intends to do. Park Avenue Winter/Spring/Summer/Fall, a restaurant in New York, has completely transformed its menu and dining room every three months since June 2007. Craig Koketsu, the executive chef, says that the changeover now takes just two days because every dish is minutely plotted on an Excel spreadsheet, a process that begins about six weeks beforehand. Making such major changes in a high-level restaurant depends on systems, not cooking skills, he explained. “A really good kitchen is a machine,” he said. “If all the parts move smoothly, you can do anything.”
At first, Mr. Koketsu said, many dismissed the quarterly makeovers as a marketing gimmick, but over time they have engendered both loyalty and curiosity among customers, some of whom eat at the restaurant four or more times a year. “For New York, that’s a lot of regulars, and a lot of meals,” he said.
Whether Mr. Achatz’s fans will be similarly loyal remains to be seen. Next will have a highly unusual online-only booking system that sells nonrefundable tickets, rather than accepting reservations. Once a seat for Paris 1906 is bought on line, if the baby sitter cancels or the girlfriend doesn’t feel like going out, it can’t be canceled. It can, however, be sold, scalped or bartered. “We are very interested to see what that secondary market might bring,” said Mr. Kokonas, who devised the system.
The first menu for Next was planned to be “Paris bistro,” a cuisine that, compared with that of Alinea, seemed highly accessible. “Everyone wanted to see him cook normal food,” Mr. Kokonas said. But the flavors weren’t elegant enough for the opening, Mr. Achatz felt — so he made it harder.
He decided to retreat to the golden age of French dining, and went to Paris on the assumption that some classic restaurants would still be serving old-school haute cuisine in which he would find inspiration. “We found food from the ’60s, prenouvelle cuisine, but nothing from before that,” he said. Mr. Achatz and Alinea’s chef de cuisine, Dave Beran, ended up drawing their recipes from a book: Escoffier’s “Le Guide Culinaire,” first published in 1903.
“We have played a lot of mind games with Escoffier in the last year,” Mr. Beran said. “What exactly did he mean by ‘reduce by half?’ How salty was his salt cod?”
A week ago, Escoffier sauces that have barely been tasted in living memory (Choron, normande, Nantua), multiple forcemeats, even old-school stuffed mushroom caps emerged from the Alinea kitchen for a tryout dinner. (The Next kitchen, which will have modular heat sources so that today’s broiler might be next week’s wok, is still under construction.) Fourteen minutely detailed courses — crayfish heads filled with crayfish mousse, poached leeks rolled around filet of sole — exhibited stunning flavors and craftsmanship, but it did not seem like all that much fun for Mr. Achatz and Mr. Beran, who will be the executive chef at Next. (Theoretically at least, Mr. Achatz will still spend most of his time at Alinea.)
Mr. Beran had the unenviable task of putting three duck carcasses though the heavy silver duck press, which had been located via Twitter and had arrived from a restaurant in Maine only the day before. “It won’t be so gory the next time I do this,” he said, mopping his brow as he turned the mechanism, sending bloody juices and marrow splattering across the white tablecloth.
Mr. Achatz is almost as preoccupied with the serving pieces as he is with the food that goes on them. The new restaurant, like Alinea, has a dedicated “polishing room.” The research and development budget for Next has been drained during fierce online auctions of era-appropriate silver and china, not to mention a six-team scavenger hunt across the antiques stores of the Midwest. A tray of silver egg cups, each one opening like the petals of a tulip, was bought on eBay from a British hotel.
At last week’s dinner, the cups were filled with oeufs Bénédictine, recipe No. 1311 in Escoffier’s grand scheme of haute cuisine, which in its Next form meant a savory parfait layered inside an eggshell: first, custard infused with black truffle stock; then lightly salted cod mixed with potatoes and thyme- and garlic-scented cream; then a thick, lemony sauce crème, all topped with a pinch of black truffle shavings.
The first tryout dinner, in January, inspired a spirited debate over whether Escoffier would have used an immersion blender, if he had had one — and whether it mattered.
“Are we talking about the replication of a recipe, or the replication of a philosophy?” Mr. Achatz said. “We can’t sacrifice deliciousness in favor of authenticity. Are we opening a good restaurant or a food museum?”
For now, workers are going flat-out at the site, in the industrial Fulton Market neighborhood. They are installing the S-curved counter adjacent to Next that will house a high-concept bar called Aviary, with five separate stations for “cocktail chefs”; huge curved girders that evoke Victorian train stations; and a sprawling basement kitchen that will include a dedicated work space for Aviary’s two full-time ice chefs. (The opening cocktail menu requires 18 different shapes of ice.) The main kitchen has vast sinks with built-in covers so that they can be converted to work surfaces, making room for specialized equipment that might be needed: antique pasta makers, say, or bamboo steamers for dumplings, or a rotary evaporator for extracting aromas.
All involved insist that Next will not be a kind of Disneyfied time-travel restaurant, but a serious exploration of culinary history and creativity, executed with the perfectionism that is entwined with Mr. Achatz’s intense personality.
Money is not a prime mover for Mr. Achatz. His share in Alinea, where dinner for two can easily cost $800, means that he and his two sons from a brief marriage in his 20s are well provided for. One modest car, one lightly furnished apartment and one lively girlfriend (Heather Sperling, the Chicago editor of tastingtable.com) seem to be enough. He says that replicating Alinea does not interest him.
“Alinea Las Vegas, Alinea Tokyo, Alinea on Mars,” he said, shrugging. It’s all been offered. New York has been the most tempting target, he admitted, because as a lifelong Midwesterner, “There’s always the desire to prove you can play on the big stage.”
Despite his micro-management of the first Next menu, the long-term plan is that the restaurant be more collaborative. Mr. Beran will be in charge of the kitchen for the menu that will go into effect in June. They have only just decided that Thai food will be its focus.
Mr. Achatz is reading up. He will be the Andy Warhol of this culinary Factory, providing inspiration but not necessarily execution.
“I will be the one who gets on a plane to Thailand, but I won’t be the one rolling the spring rolls every day,” he said.
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