Grant Achatz: The extended interview

This week, Time Out's cover model is none other than chef Grant Achatz. Thank God he agreed to pose—for this issue, which covers what's next in food trends, there was really no other option. In this week's edition, we single out some innovators (a socially conscious coffee roaster among them), burgeoning concepts (kombucha CSAs) and trendy ingredients (cherry pits!). And to start it all off, my interview with Mr. Achatz. It only makes sense to start a package about what's next with the guy whose next project is, quite literally, Next.

Not everything Achatz had to say made it into the article, so I'm including a longer version of the interview below. (Note that this is still not the entire interview, and that it, like the print version, has been lightly edited for clarity.) As always, Achatz's thoughts are worth reading in full. But here's one tidbit I'll tease you with. It concerns the possibility of Achatz starting a food truck:

A lot of what we’re talking about in this issue of the magazine is alternative forms of the restaurant: food trucks, pop-ups, casseroles via bike. Have you ever considered doing something in any of these mediums?
I wish that food trucks could exist here in Chicago like they do in Brooklyn and in New York, where you’re actually cooking off the truck. One of the counterpoints to Next that was always in the business plan was to have a mobile unit. So imagine: The philosophy of the restaurant is that you’re going to go to Paris 1912, Japan 1950, Sicily 2010—whatever it is, you’re bouncing around. Well, it was always our intention to do a food truck that would reflect what was happening at Next but do it in a street-food way. Because every culture has street food, right? So the idea would be if we’re doing Thailand, or we’re doing Bangkok 2050, we would do Thai street food on the mobile unit at the same time. And when the menu switches to Italy, we’ll do Italian street food. And when the menu switches to France, we’ll do French street food. You know, so on and so forth.

Is that still in the plan, assuming the laws allow it?
Well, if the laws allowed it we would, but, you know, Chicago is—they’re handcuffing us. It’s unfortunate but it’s the way it is.

A Grant Achatz food truck. If you've got any chowhounders in your immediate vicinity, check that they're still breathing—this is probably more than they can handle. For other mind-blowing (or at least fairly interesting) thoughts from Achatz, check out the full interview, after the jump.

How do you think food trends happen?
Things have changed so much within the past ten years. The popularity of the Internet and using it as an available resource has really changed the way chefs kind of gather information and look for inspiration. To me, a food trend is potentially a lot of people following an idea. So, for instance, you have maybe what some consider the biggest food trend in recent memory, and I know it’s kind of cliche, but foam. So you have a chef in some obscure restaurant halfway around the world that comes up with an idea and says, "Hey, we think this is pretty neat," and he puts it out there. And it’s not even so much the print media but the food blogs and the websites [that report it], so that chefs can go online and go, "Okay, this guy Ferran Adria in Spain is putting whatever he wants in an iSi canister and making it into a foam—this is really cool. I’m going to do that." Trends are cycling really quickly now, and I think that’s good and bad. It’s just really difficult to stay ahead with the Internet and people being able to literally take 30 seconds and go online and figure out what every chef in the world is doing yesterday. Like, I guarantee you that if we went on the Web right now, there’s probably posts from several people—whether it be their personal blog or on eGullet or Eater.com or one of these forums—of the dinner they experienced at Alinea the last day we were open. So literally, as a chef, as somebody whose guiding philosophy is to try and stay ahead of the curve, if I’m doing my homework, I’m going to go online and figure out what the best chefs in the world are doing. I’m going to figure out what Heston Blumenthal is doing, what Ferran Adria is doing, what Thomas Keller is doing, what Wylie Dufresne is doing. And I can do that in real time now. That’s what really perpetuates a food trend.

Do you think that trends devalue the experience of going to a restaurant by diminishing originality? Since chefs are able to copy another chef, or emulate what’s happening in a restaurant so easily and so quickly...
Yeah, that’s kind of what I mean. It’s really hard for us to try to stay ahead of the curve. At the same time, if you’re really dedicated to that philosophy, it really forces you to be original. There are certain things that other chefs do that we simply cannot do. Okay, so you go back to the foam thing. Foam, to me, is a technique. It’s the same as sauteing a piece of fish. It’s simply a technique. But if I were to do something like Heston Blumenthal, [who] at the Fat Duck has this dish where he serves his little iPod tucked into a conch shell and you listen to what he calls the sounds of the sea while you eat a seafood dish,  so you’re listening to seagulls and waves crashing and that sort of thing—that is so signature Blumenthal, nobody else can do that. You simply can’t. There’s no way.

Because you'd be labeled a rip-off.
Right. You couldn’t do it. Now, you might be able to play with sound, and that may be an inspiration, but that will be anti-trend. Because it’s too closely linked to him. Let’s say Thomas Keller all of the sudden at Per Se started putting silicon tablecloths on the table and started plating a course on the table like we do at Alinea. He couldn’t do that. Because everybody now is going to associate that with Alinea. So that’s anti-trend, you know? In a way, it’s protected. But techniques, those are free game, and that’s what's trend-worthy.

Next seems to place a lot of value on looking back, whereas Alinea looks forward. Is this a shift in the way you’re looking at food?
Here’s the irony in what I do: When I go out to eat, I like classic French food. I like amazing Japanese food that has such a history that it goes back hundreds of years. And I also like really innovative food as well. At Alinea, that’s our kind of guiding light—we need to innovate, we need to be original, we need to try to push boundaries. But for me as a person and as a chef, I mean, I like to eat cassoulet. I like to eat really classic Italian food. And...I always found that somewhat limiting at Alinea that I couldn’t cook a really nice beef rocini, because people would go: What is he doing? We’re coming here for molecular gastronomy and he’s giving us classic French food!

It would, in a sense, be the craziest thing they had all night.
Exactly. And that’s where Next came from. At one point, when we were looking at the menu at Alinea critically, we said: What are we not offering? Well, we’re not offering classic food. So we interjected an Escofier course midway through the meal, where we cook a course from Paris 1912, and we put it on antique china and antique silverware and antique glassware. And it was that one course where we said: We should make a restaurant like this. We can do Paris, we can do Italy...we can do whatever we want. So Next will be kind of fulfilling that, scratching that itch.

But you’re also doing some innovative things at Next in terms of service, with the ticket system. Did that come from frustrations you had with the way reservations are taken now?
I wouldn’t say frustrations as much. A big part of that came from my business partner, Nick [Kokonas]. It’s a really interesting dynamic that him and I have, because I’ve lived my entire life in restaurants. Growing up as a young kid I was in a restaurant. So, you know, I always had a very good understanding of the nuances. And in a way, that was a bad thing. Because it kind of programmed me to believe that if you’re going have a restaurant, this is what you need to do, and this is the way it’s going to be run. And when [Nick] and I became friends and ultimately started Alinea together, he would always ask me: Why do you have to do it like this? Why do we have to do it like that? Sometimes I’d just be like: ‘Cause that’s just the way you do it. Like, I didn’t really have a good answer for him because I’d never even thought about it—it’s just the way we did it. And one day he said to me: Why do we have to take reservations by the phone? And why do we have to pay four reservationists 30 or 40 grand a year to work all day long to simply say: I’m sorry, we’re full, I’m sorry, we’re full. He’s like: Basically we’re paying people to tell people that they can’t come to our restaurant. That’s ridiculous. That is a bad business model. And I’m like, yeah, I can’t argue with you, but that’s just the way it is, that’s the way restaurants run. And he’s like: Why? Why can’t we change that? And, you know, I thought about it, and it made a lot of sense and so we said, you know, why don’t we change it? Why don’t we try to change it? And if it works—and we’re not sure that it will—but if it works, it will be a game-changer for the restaurant industry. I mean, every other thing—if you buy an airplane ticket, if you go to Steppenwolf, if you go to a Bulls game—you buy the ticket. You pay in advance. You pick your seat. If you’re going to a Bruce Springsteen concert and you want front row, you pay for it. You pay your three, four hundred dollars and you get your front row and you’re good. Or if you want to be in the nosebleeds you pay 25 bucks and you go to the nosebleeds. It’s nothing new, but it’s innovative to the restaurant industry. It just makes sense. And why it’s never been done, I’m not really sure. I think people are scared of it. I think there was a New York Times quote three years ago from Danny Meyer that said there is no way that guests will pay in advance for dinner. He was very adamant about that. Because I think somebody said, why don’t you go to a ticketing system? And [Meyer] was like: Nobody will ever do that. I don’t know. Hopefully we will. And if we fail, if it doesn’t work, if people don’t want to pay for their dinner in advance to get their table, we’ll just switch back to the normal way. But at least we tried, you know?

But the tickets at Next are going to be different prices based on what time and day you eat, right? For the same meal.
It’s demand-based pricing. So if you say, okay, I want Saturday at 7pm, I’ll pay $200 bucks for it—it’s the same as sitting in the front row of the Springsteen concert or the Bulls game or whatever. Or you can eat the exact same meal Wednesday at 8:30pm—it’s the same as sitting further back from the front row. You see what I’m saying? So it’s demand based. It’s not like we’re—and I think this is a bit of a misconception so far—we’re not going to overprice Saturday at 7pm. We’re going to underprice Wednesday at 8:30pm. It’s not like we’re trying to gouge the people for the premium. We’re going to have that baseline price, which, like we’ve said all along, is trying to create a four-star experience at a three-star price. A hundred dollar meal Saturday at 7 might cost you 75 dollars Wednesday at 8:30pm.

According to the restaurant's website, Next will cost between $45 and $75 a meal. Do you think this is something we’re going to see more of? That, in general, restaurants are going to be getting cheaper?
I don’t think restaurants are getting cheaper. It’s kind of ironic, but people themselves are driving the cost of restaurants up. They don’t realize that. But the more educated, and the more food-aware that people get, their expectations are placed on restaurateurs and chefs for quality ingredients. And the fact is quality ingredients cost money.

At Aviary, you’ll be pushing the limits of cocktails.
We had the idea that cocktails were kind of stagnant. The trend in mixology, of course, is the speakeasy, and you have the bartender with the shirt stays and the vest. In the cocktail world, they’ve been looking to the past, back to the '30s. And we said, Hey, we can look to the future. I think it’s going to be a really interesting project that has excited me to a great degree. Alinea’s amazing, and it’s my baby, and I’ll never leave it, right? But Aviary to me is one of the more exciting things that I’ve dealt with recently. I think there’s a lot of potential there.

A lot of what we’re talking about in this issue of the magazine is alternative forms of the restaurant: food trucks, pop-ups, casseroles via bike. Have you ever considered doing something in any of these mediums?
I wish that food trucks could exist here in Chicago like they do in Brooklyn and in New York, where you’re actually cooking off the truck. One of the counterpoints to Next that was always in the business plan was to have a mobile unit. So imagine: The philosophy of the restaurant is that you’re going to go to Paris 1912, Japan 1950, Sicily 2010—whatever it is, you’re bouncing around. Well, it was always our intention to do a food truck that would reflect what was happening at Next but do it in a street-food way. Because every culture has street food, right?  So the idea would be if we’re doing Thailand, or we’re doing Bangkok 2050, we would do Thai street food on the mobile unit at the same time. And when the menu switches to Italy, we’ll do Italian street food. And when the menu switches to France, we’ll do French street food. You know, so on and so forth.

Is that still in the plan, assuming the laws allow it?
Well, if the laws allowed it we would, but, you know, Chicago is—they’re handcuffing us. It’s unfortunate but it’s the way it is.

Do you think there’s a limit to how far food—restaurants, food trucks, etc.—can be pushed?
No. There’s a limit in regards to time…so I guess the answer is yes. If we say, at Alinea, you’re not going to eat—you’re going to come in, you’re going to sit in the chair, we’re going to show you pictures of beautiful food, we’re going to make you smell beautiful food, you can touch it, but you can’t eat it—yeah, that would be outside of how far we can push. Eventually it might get to that point, where you create a virtual eating experience, where, you know, you don’t really ingest anything. You don’t really consume anything. Maybe you’re surrounded by the smells, the sights, the textures of food, but you don’t really eat anything. But that’s a long ways out. So everything is dictated by time, I think.

Is it possible that we’re moving so fast that we’ll get to the point that nothing’s original anymore?
Everybody’s trying to be original. Everybody’s trying to be creative. One of the things we talked about is, okay, one of the menus we’re going to do [at Next] is New York circa Mad Men. I don’t watch TV, and I’ve never watched the show, not one episode, but everybody tells me that that era has a certain romance, a certain glamour to it—the big marquees, the big steaks…you know, that sort of thing. When we put that menu out in six months, people are going to think it’s really cool because, first of all, there’s nowhere to go to get that right now. It just doesn’t exist. And second of all, old is the new new. You know what I mean? It's about showing people something they haven’t seen. whether it’s something new, or simply going back in time and bringing something back that people haven’t been exposed to in quite some time. Months ago, we went to the only remaining classic, uberclassic French restaurant in New York—Le Grenouille. It’s been there since, like, 1947 and it hasn’t really changed in 50 years and we got Dover sole cooked on the bone. The waiters took it off the bone at the table. Like, uber uber French classic. And it felt...original. It felt unique. Because I’ve never had that before and you simply can’t find it. There’s not a place in Chicago where you can find it.