Grant Achatz currently holds a total of four Michelin stars, three for his flagship restaurant, Alinea, and one for his ever-changing themed restaurant, Next. Both restaurants are located in downtown Chicago, which is also home to Achatz’s high-concept cocktail bars, The Aviary and The Office.
Known for his innovative molecular cuisine and interactive, theatrical presentation, Grant Achatz remains one of America’s most original and exciting chefs after over twenty years on the culinary scene. He has won several awards, including The James Beard Foundation Award for Rising Star Chef of the Year, 2002, The Jean Banchet Award for Best Celebrity Chef, 2007, and the James Beard Foundation Award for Outstanding Chef, 2008, while his flagship restaurant, Alinea, was named Best Restaurant in America by Gourmet Magazine in 2006. It makes frequent appearances in the S. Pellegrino World’s 50 Best Restaurants, and topped the list of Elite Traveler’s Top 100 Restaurants in the World an impressive 6 years running, from 2011-2016.
Achatz began his culinary career working in his parents’ Michigan restaurant as a teen, before enrolling in the Culinary Institute of America, from which he graduated in 1994. His training was completed in some of the world’s best restaurants, including a spell at Spain’s El Bulli, under molecular maverick Ferran Adrià, and four years at Thomas Keller’s The French Laundry, rising to the position of sous chef after his first two years. Achatz credits his time at The French Laundry with teaching him ‘how to cook and how to live life,’ and even named his son, Keller, after his former mentor.
At the age of 26, Achatz became executive chef at Trio, in Evanston, Illinois, where his cooking caught the attention of future business partner, Nick Kokonas. In 2005, Achatz and Kokonas opened their first restaurant, Alinea, in Chicago’s Lincoln Park area. The name, 'Alinea' means ‘off the line’, which Kokonas explains is a play on words, referring both to the atypical, esoteric nature of the cuisine, and, more literally, to restaurant food coming ‘off the line’.
Achatz quickly gained attention in the culinary world, delighting critics and diners alike with his innovation and sense of spectacle. He has become known for creating iconic dishes that are part gastronomy, part theatre, such as the Table Dessert, an abstract artwork of different textures and colours, plated directly onto a tablecloth in a series of swirls, dots, sprinkled powders and aromatic puffs of alchemical smoke. Other ingenious dishes include Salad Centrepiece, a perfect miniature forest of green salad shoots still growing in soil, and Apple Balloons, edible apple-flavour balloons filled with helium.
In 2007 a cruel twist of fate saw Achatz diagnosed with stage four cancer of the tongue, which led to him briefly losing his sense of taste. For a while, the recommended treatment was amputation, but thanks to innovative new treatment from the University of Chicago, he made a full recovery and has been cancer-free since 2009. It seems particularly fitting that an experimenter like Achatz should be saved by embracing innovation, and he claims that recovering gave him renewed drive to succeed, telling interviewers that, ‘I was on fire with an amount of energy I never had before. I got a second chance and did not want to screw it up.’
In 2020, as the entire world faced challenging times in the form of the coronavirus pandemic, it seemed that Achatz, along with business partner Nick Kokonas, would persevere yet again. The ongoing crisis hit the hospitality sector hard, with many restaurants closing their doors to the public in order to protect staff and diners. But Achatz and Kokonas came up with an idea that enabled all staff, that are able, to return to the kitchens of Alinea - Michelin star takeaway. In May, the restaurant even prepared a special six-course tasting menu in honour of their fifteenth anniversary, featuring a version of the iconic Table Dessert, which diners were taught how to plate at home by Achatz himself, via Instagram.
Grant Achatz restaurants
Alinea
Achatz’s multi-award winning flagship restaurant, and Chicago’s only three-Michelin-star establishment, is housed in a modest gray brick building in Chicago’s Lincoln Park neighbourhood, with no external markings apart from its street number. Inside, guests are treated to an immersive, multisensory piece of culinary theatre in the form of a small-course tasting menu, comprising around eighteen courses.
Alinea aims to push the boundaries of fine dining. "The leading chefs in the world know they can make delicious food," says Achatz. "We have to take it a step further. At Alinea we are actually trying to curate an experience." With his menu of interactive, often surprising dishes, Achatz hopes to install a sense of wonderment and discovery that makes diners feel "like being a kid and opening a present at Christmas".
In 2008 Achatz and Kokonas published a coffee table book, also named Alinea, featuring 100 recipes from the restaurant. The recipes themselves are highly complex and often require expensive specialist equipment to complete, but the real fascination lies in Achatz’s descriptions of the inspiration and development of each dish, providing an intriguing glimpse into his unique creative process.
Next
Opened in 2011 and located in Chicago's historic Fulton Market, Next is the ultimate themed restaurant, but with a twist. The theme - menu, decor, everything - changes completely every few months. These seasonal menus are treated as events, like a concert or a show, with prospective diners buying tickets for their seats through Nick Kokonas’s purpose-built ticketing site, Tock.
Themes vary from historical moments to places or even homages to other restaurants. The inaugural theme was ‘Paris: 1906,’ and others have included ‘Childhood,’ ‘Ancient Rome,’ and ‘World’s 50 Best,’ the last of which featured Achatz’s take on the dishes that put other top chefs on the culinary map. Like Alinea, Next is offering gourmet takeaway during the Coronavirus pandemic, with the kitchen staff recreating some of their greatest hits from previous themes.
Perhaps due to the restaurant’s constantly-changing nature, the Michelin inspectors have seemed wary of bestowing any stars on Next in previous years. After all, by the time the award was published in the new guide, Next would be an entirely different restaurant to the one evaluated by the inspectors. On the other hand, the public had no such qualms, with tickets reportedly selling on Craigslist for anywhere up to $500 a head. In 2019, the inspectors were finally won over, and Next was awarded one star in the following year’s guide.
The Aviary
Adjoining Next in Chicago’s Fulton Market, The Aviary describes itself as ‘a cocktail bar, redefined.’ Like Alinea and Next, the focus is on innovation and spectacle, with fantastical cocktail creations served in bubbling tubes and beakers. Each drink’s preparation is performed at the table, like a magic trick, and guests are encouraged to take part in the process. A popular choice is The Rocks, which is served inside a golden ball of ice that diners must smash using a slingshot mounted around the rim of their glass. There is also a food menu, serving Achatz classics like Black Truffle Explosion and Octopus Croquette, with the option of ordering cocktails with food pairings.
In 2018, Achatz and Kokonas released The Aviary Cocktail Book, featuring over 100 unique recipes from the bar, plus insights and tips from Achatz, Kokonas and their Beverage Director, Micah Melton. The book is also filled with gorgeously-shot art photographs, courtesy of Allen and Sarah Hemberger.
The Office
A small, secret room hidden directly below The Aviary, classical, traditional speakeasy The Office is the counterbalance to the futuristic pizzazz of its showier twin. Intimately-lit and furnished with club chairs and antiques, The Office features reinvented classics made with the best ingredients.
Known for its ‘dusty bottle cocktails’, The Office also offers connoisseurs the chance to have their cocktail mixed using specially-sourced vintage spirits, many of them decades old. However, you may need deep pockets for this as some of the rarer vintages can get quite pricey.
The Aviary NYC
The Aviary NYC was opened in 2017 and is situated inside the Mandarin Oriental Hotel. The premise is similar to the original Chicago bar, but some new creations have been added in honour of the location, including Wake and Bake, a mix of rye, coffee liqueur, and vermouth infused with coffee and orange, all served in a transparent pillow filled with ‘everything bagel aroma’.
As with the first Aviary, the name of each drink is preceded by a small bird symbol to indicate how ‘out there’ your chosen cocktail is likely to be. The further your feathered friend has flown from the description, the more surprises you can expect. If you want to take a peek at The Aviary NYC menu, you can check it out here.
The Office NYC
You can’t have yin without yang, and you can’t have The Aviary without The Office. Just like the Chicago bars, The Office NYC is the secret speakeasy hidden beneath The Aviary. The Office NYC also features the same vintage styling, with antiques, parquet flooring and chairs upholstered in cowhide. There are dusty bottle cocktails here too, including an extremely rare 1835 bottle of Hector Romain cognac that costs over a thousand dollars an ounce.
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