Hotly Anticipated Chicago Restaurant Next Opens
By: Anthony Adragna
Published: April 7, 2011

All-star chef Grant Achatz's hotly anticipated new restaurant, Next, opened Wednesday after months of buzz, and sixty diners got to sample the cuisine of 1906 Paris.
For those not familiar with Achatz's background, he owns another restaurant in Chicago named Alinea. In 2008, Food and Wine named that restaurant "Best in the Nation." He survived a serious bout of tongue cancer that nearly cost him his sense of taste, potentially derailing his career. Many consider him the gold standard for molecular gastronomy in the United States.
Well, Next changes some of those perceptions. For this new restaurant, Achatz will change the theme and cuisine of the restaurant every three months. The idea is to take diners on a journey around the world to a specific place and time, and give them an accurate representation of what it was like to eat there. For the first journey, Achatz selected Paris 1906. You can check out the sample menu online.
That is not the only innovation at Next, though. Achatz could change the way upscale restaurants work. For Next, Achatz will sell tickets on a first come, first served basis. More than 19,000 people are on a waiting list to buy tickets. The idea is that you reserve a seat and prepay for it like you would for a sporting event or theater performance. Even upscale restaurants suffer when not every seat is full. By selling tickets, Achatz hopes to eliminate that.
Yesterday, the first 1,000 people on that list received an e-mail alerting them that tickets were on sale. The server crashed with the number of requests. Long story short: you'll have to wait a while to snag a table at Next. That said, one customer told the Chicago Sun-Times, "It was worth the wait."
Photo by star5112