Grant Achatz About to Open New Restaurant Called “Next” – Chicago

Kit Marshal — Fri, 25 Mar 2011 17:31:52 +0000

Culinary Tidbits . . . It sounds like an attention-getting scheme to me, although next month when Grant Achatz opens a new restaurant in Chicago called “Next”, if in fact it opens, could be the most burdensome ever 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, while he is refining the new menu, which 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, will be served for all of three months. Next will then morph into an entirely different restaurant, and again into something different three months after that.

Esquire’s John Mariani Opines About: The New Book “Modernist Cuisine” and “life, on the line” Grant Achatz’s Memoir – USA

Kit Marshal — Mon, 21 Mar 2011 08:52:12 +0000

by John Mariani

A brief encapsulation of this article:

Esquires Magazine restaurant features writer, John Mariani states that he finds the new six-volume, 2,438-page, forty-eight-pound, $625 book Modernist Cuisine written by billionaire scientist Nathan Myhrvold, “fascinating, but only in the way I would a manual for building one’s own atomic bomb or sports car from scratch.” There are many anecdotal mentions along the way of what Mariani calls “the insufferable Achatz”, referring to Grant Achatz of Alinea restaurant in Chicago. He does have praise for chef Thomas Keller of the French Laundry, where Achatz once worked and, by his own admission, first acquired his pissy arrogance. Mr. Mariani also has a gripe with Achatz’s partner Nick Kokonas, who he calls, a “burnt-out stock trader”, where co-author Kokonas accuses him within the pages of Archatz’s memoir life, on the line of deliberately writing on, and then stealing their expensive stainless steel bound wine list, which has been refuted by a few eye-witnesses privy to the encounter.

Take a look at the link to this article in its entirety below:

My Grant Achatz Problem — and Yours

Restaurant-Dining Critiques » Grant Achatz

Grant Achatz About to Open New Restaurant Called “Next” – Chicago

Esquire’s John Mariani Opines About: The New Book “Modernist Cuisine” and “life, on the line” Grant Achatz’s Memoir – USA