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Eater
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- Eater
Why Alinea Is One of the U.S.'s Most Influential Restaurants
Maximalism and gastronomic creativity rule the day at Alinea, arguably one of the most famous (and most relentlessly blogged about) restaurants in the United States. Chef Grant Achatz, along with then-partner Nick Kokonas, opened the restaurant in May of 2005 in Chicago's Lincoln Park, and immediately intrigued an American food public weary of the routine fine dining choices. Since its opening night, meals at Alinea promised more than two dozen courses that featured wisps of smoke, bites hanging from tightropes, and all manner of flavors (milkweed pods! Dandelion roots and tobacco and lavender!) deconstructed, gelled, foamed, frozen, candied, microplaned, and all painstakingly grafted back together in wholly unexpected ways. Achatz was immediately vaulted into the echelon of the country's most influential chefs; later dishes like the apple taffy floating balloon and painted-table dessert became iconic. In addition to accolades — a 2007 James Beard Award for Achatz for Best Chef: Great Lakes, a 2016 James Beard Award for Outstanding Restaurant, numerous appearances on the World's 50 Best List, 3 Michelin stars — its mark is also felt in countless imitators who embraced the scientific, slightly gonzo approach to dining as an experience. The Alinea Group would expand to seven other concepts — including Next, which rotates its culinary focus every few months, and cocktail bar the Aviary. And many folks who spent time in the Alinea Group have gone on to make their own independent mark on the culinary world: Curtis Duffy, Dave Beran, John Shields, Alex Stupak, Jenner Tomaska, Jeff Pikus. In 2014, Ruth Reichl wrote: 'What makes Alinea such a fabulous experience is the sheer exuberant fun of the place. This is food as performance, food as surprise, food as you've never seen it before.' The restaurant still holds three Michelin stars. Today, Achatz reflects on 20 years at Alinea and considers what lies ahead. I had worked at the French Laundry and El Bulli, and felt there was a gap in fine dining, because prior to 2005, it was mostly [defined as] French cuisine: There were a few French culinarians in the U.S., like Daniel Boulud, but primarily it was showing up in Western Europe. In 2005, we're right at the peak of El Bulli, the Fat Duck — molecular kind of gastronomy. So we felt like it was an opportunity. With us and wd~50, it just migrated over the pond. In Chicago, the whole gastronomy scene was on a reset. Here, you had Schwa, which was basically a garage band doing highly, highly creative, well-executed food. You had a lot of older French restaurants, like Everest. You had Rick Bayless's places that had been around for a long time and were niche and Mexican-focused, and then you had Paul Kahan with Blackbird. An early but undated photo of the Alinea team shows, from left to right: John Shields (now chef-owner of Chicago's Smyth and the Loyalist), Achatz, and Curtis Duffy (now chef-owner of Chicago's Ever). Alinea It was ripe. Chicago was ready. Chicago was a town that embraces innovation and artistry with its history of architecture, music, and medicine. Our opening was really anticipated at that time, because I was blogging prior to the opening on eGullet, back when those forums were popular. That was the moment of the internet foodies. And so the anticipation was really high. We had a lot of attention right off the bat: We had Frank Bruni, then the restaurant critic at the New York Times, in the restaurant on opening night. Having a critic out of New York City at the time was unheard of, certainly on opening night. Achatz calls 'Hot Potato, Cold Potato' one of his favorite dishes served opening night: 'I felt it really embodied the spirit and the ethos of the restaurant at that time.' An elegant culinary game between hot and cold temperatures, it featured a hot ball of potato suspended over a creamy, chilled potato soup; the diner would sip all in one go and experience the same flavor in two temperatures at the same time. Alinea A brand-new 2025 dish called 'Fossil' invites guests to use an archeology toolkit to brush away 'debris' and uncover the food underneath. 'It's inspired by South American archeological finds, and my and the executive chefs' fascination with archeology,' Achatz says. 'We figured out a way to make a 'forest' that gastronomically fit into Argentina, which has the largest concentration of fossils in the world. It's pretty elaborate.' Alinea We were fortunate enough to be pretty popular off the bat. We just got super busy, and honestly, it never stopped. And then, in 2007, I got diagnosed with stage 4 tongue cancer. A lot of the guests weren't sure if they should even still visit. It was quiet for a bit while I was going to treatment. On the back end of 2008, we started to pick up some momentum. In 2010, the World's 50 Best named us Best in North America. And then in 2011, they did the same. And that really put us on the public diner's map. In 2016, after we were 10 years old, we renovated. With the downstairs dining room came this experimental menu. So that really catapulted our creativity further, and we just never stopped. I don't think we ever will. Thinking back on 20 years, there's an element of maturity that's hard to articulate. When you've had restaurants like Le Bernadin and the French Laundry, restaurants that have been around for 20 years or more, there's a certain intangible maturity. I believe that the employees and their guests can feel that. Looking back, I appreciate our resilience. The pandemic was disastrous for everyone, and the fact that we made it through that, that we kept everybody employed, I'm very proud of. Everything has changed. Wages have changed; rents have changed. There's a lot more reform to do. Here at the restaurant, it's changed tremendously. Back in 2005, there was a cliche of repression, toxicity, 17-hour days; nobody cared, nobody got paid. And now that has dramatically changed. Interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. Sign up for Eater's newsletter The freshest news from the food world every day Email (required) Sign Up By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Notice . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.
Observer
16-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Observer
This Year's Hot New Tool for Chefs? ChatGPT.
For four months in 2026, the Chicago restaurant Next will serve a nine-course menu with each course contributed by a different chef. One of them is a 33-year-old woman from Wisconsin who cooked under the pathbreaking modernist Ferran Adrià, the purist sushi master Jiro Ono and the great codifier and systematizer of French haute cuisine, Auguste Escoffier. Her glittering resume is all the more impressive when you recall that Escoffier has been dead since 1935. Where did Grant Achatz, the chef and an owner of Next, find this prodigy? In conversations with ChatGPT, Achatz supplied the chatbot with this chef's name, Jill, along with her work history and family background, all of which he invented. Then he asked it to suggest dishes that would reflect her personal and professional influences. If all goes according to plan, he will keep prompting the program to refine one of Jill's recipes, along with those of eight other imaginary chefs, for a menu almost entirely composed by artificial intelligence. 'I want it to do as much as possible, short of actually preparing it,' Achatz said. As generative AI has grown more powerful and fluent over the past decade, many restaurants have adopted it for tracking inventory, scheduling shifts and other operational tasks. Chefs have not been anywhere near as quick to ask the bots' help in dreaming up fresh ideas, even as visual artists, musicians, writers and other creative types have been busily collaborating with the technology. That is slowly changing, though. Few have plunged headfirst into the pool in quite the way Achatz is doing with his menu for Next, but some of his peers are also dipping exploratory toes into the water, asking generative AI to suggest spices, come up with images showing how a redesigned space or new dish might look, or give them crash courses on the finer points of fermentation. 'I'm still learning how to maximize it,' said Aaron Tekulve, who finds the technology helpful for keeping track of the brief seasonal windows of the foraged plants and wild seafood from the Pacific Northwest that he cooks with at Surrell, his restaurant in Seattle. 'There's one chef I know who uses it quite a bit, but for the most part I think my colleagues don't really use it as much as they should.' The pinball-arcade pace of a popular restaurant can make it hard for chefs to break with old habits. Others have objections that are philosophical or aesthetic. 'Cooking remains, at its core, a human experience,' chef Dominique Crenn wrote in an email. 'It's not something I believe can or should be replicated by a machine.' Crenn said she has no intention of inviting a computer to help her with the menus at Atelier Crenn in San Francisco. It is true that generative AI consumes vast amounts of electricity and water. Then there are the mistakes. According to OpenAI, the company that owns ChatGPT, 500 million people a week use the program. But it is still wildly prone to delivering factual errors in a cheerily confident tone. (The New York Times has sued OpenAI and Microsoft, the creators of ChatGPT and other AI programs, alleging they violated copyright law by training their chatbots with millions of Times articles. The two companies have denied that.) None of the chefs I interviewed takes the chatbot's information at face value, and none will blindly follow any recipe it suggests. Then again, they don't trust most of the recipes they find in cookbooks or online, either. Cooks, like other humans, are forgetful, distracted and hemmed in by their own experiences. AI has its shortcomings, but these aren't among them. Chefs who consult the big electronic brain when they're devising a new dish or dining room find it helpful for the same reason bands like working with producer Brian Eno: Some of its suggestions are so unexpected that it can jolt them out of a creative rut. 'You can get really hyper-specific ideas that are out of the box,' said Jenner Tomaska, a chef in Chicago. For the Alston, a steakhouse he opened Friday, Tomaska wanted a variation on the Monégasque fried pastry known as barbajuan. ChatGPT's earliest suggestions were a little basic, but as he fed it more demanding prompts — for instance, a filling that would reflect Alain Ducasse's style, steakhouse traditions and local produce — the fillings got more interesting. How about Midwestern crayfish, white miso and fresh dill, with pickled celery root on the side? 'It's a little bizarre, because I like to talk through these things with people, and I'm doing it with something that doesn't exist, per se,' Tomaska said. But arming himself with ideas from his solitary talks with ChatGPT, he said, 'does help bring better conversation to the creative process when I do have someone in front of me.' Visual renderings from AI helped chef Dave Beran talk to the architect and designer of his latest restaurant, Seline, in Santa Monica, California. He wanted a vibe that drew something from the shadowy, dramatic interiors of Aska in Brooklyn and Frantzén in Stockholm, but held more warmth. He kept prompting Midjourney to get closer to the feeling he wanted, asking it, for example, what if we had a fireplace that I wanted to curl up beside? 'That was the mood we were trying to capture,' Beran said. 'Not dark and moody, but magical and mysterious.' Midjourney's images looked like fantasy artwork, he thought. But the program acted as what he called 'a translator' between him and his designer, giving them a common language. At the moment, AI can't build a restaurant or cook a piece of Dover sole. Humans have to interpret and carry out its suggestions, which makes the dining rooms and dishes inspired by AI in restaurants less unsettling than AI-generated art, which can go straight from the printer to a gallery wall. True, some chef may put a half-baked idea from ChatGPT on the menu, but plenty of chefs are already do this with their own half-baked ideas. For now, AI in restaurants is still inspiration rather than the final product. Since Achatz's first serious experiments with ChatGPT, about a year ago, it has become his favorite kitchen tool, something he used to say about Google. Its answers to his questions about paleontology and Argentine cuisine helped him create a dish inspired by Patagonian fossils at his flagship restaurant, Alinea. Before opening his latest restaurant, Fire, in November, he consulted ChatGPT to learn about cooking fuels from around the world, including avocado pits and banana peels. It has given him countless ideas for the sets, costumes and storylines of a theatrical dining event somewhat in the mode of 'Sleep No More' that he will present this summer in Beverly Hills, California. Asked to evaluate how well Jill had integrated her training from Escoffier and Adrià in the dishes she proposed for Next, Achatz responded in an email. 'Jill knows or researched important chefs and their styles, which very few chefs under 40 process today,' he wrote. 'She is young, and while experienced, does not yet have the understanding of how to blend them seamlessly.' Years ago, he had similar blue-sky conversations at the end of the night with the talented cooks who worked with him at Alinea and Next, including Beran. He finds that batting ideas back and forth is 'not of interest' for some of his current sous-chefs. 'That dialogue is something that simply does not exist anymore and is the lifeblood of progress,' he said. ChatGPT, though, will stay up with him all night. —NYT
Boston Globe
11-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
This year's hot new tool for chefs? ChatGPT.
If all goes according to plan, he will keep prompting the program to refine one of Jill's recipes, along with those of eight other imaginary chefs, for a menu almost entirely composed by artificial intelligence. Get Winter Soup Club A six-week series featuring soup recipes and cozy vibes, plus side dishes and toppings, to get us all through the winter. Enter Email Sign Up 'I want it to do as much as possible, short of actually preparing it,' Achatz said. Advertisement As generative AI has grown more powerful and fluent over the past decade, many restaurants have adopted it for tracking inventory, scheduling shifts, and other operational tasks. Chefs have not been anywhere near as quick to ask the bots' help in dreaming up fresh ideas, even as visual artists, musicians, writers, and other creative types have been busily collaborating with the technology. That is slowly changing, though. Few have plunged headfirst into the pool in quite the way Achatz is doing with his menu for Next, but some of his peers are also dipping exploratory toes into the water, asking generative AI to suggest spices, come up with images showing how a redesigned space or new dish might look, or give them crash courses on the finer points of fermentation. Advertisement 'I'm still learning how to maximize it,' said Aaron Tekulve, who finds the technology helpful for keeping track of the brief seasonal windows of the foraged plants and wild seafood from the Pacific Northwest that he cooks with at Surrell, his restaurant in Seattle. 'There's one chef I know who uses it quite a bit, but for the most part I think my colleagues don't really use it as much as they should.' Goat sausage with butter beans and focaccia croutons at Houseman in Manhattan, May 29, 2025. Ned Baldwin, the restaurant's chef and owner, asked for ChatGPT's help in understanding the technical details of sausage-making. EMON HASSAN/NYT The pinball-arcade pace of a popular restaurant can make it hard for chefs to break with old habits. Others have objections that are philosophical or aesthetic. 'Cooking remains, at its core, a human experience,' chef Dominique Crenn wrote in an email. 'It's not something I believe can or should be replicated by a machine.' Crenn said she has no intention of inviting a computer to help her with the menus at Atelier Crenn in San Francisco. It is true that generative AI consumes vast amounts of electricity and water. Then there are the mistakes. According to OpenAI, the company that owns ChatGPT, 500 million people a week use the program. But it is still wildly prone to delivering factual errors in a cheerily confident tone. (The New York Times has sued OpenAI and Microsoft, the creators of ChatGPT and other AI programs, alleging they violated copyright law by training their chatbots with millions of Times articles. The two companies have denied that.) Advertisement None of the chefs I interviewed takes the chatbot's information at face value, and none will blindly follow any recipe it suggests. Then again, they don't trust most of the recipes they find in cookbooks or online, either. Cooks, like other humans, are forgetful, distracted, and hemmed in by their own experiences. AI has its shortcomings, but these aren't among them. Chefs who consult the big electronic brain when they're devising a new dish or dining room find it helpful for the same reason bands like working with producer Brian Eno: Some of its suggestions are so unexpected that it can jolt them out of a creative rut. 'You can get really hyper-specific ideas that are out of the box,' said Jenner Tomaska, a chef in Chicago. For the Alston, a steakhouse he opened last month, Tomaska wanted a variation on the Monégasque fried pastry known as barbajuan. ChatGPT's earliest suggestions were a little basic, but as he fed it more demanding prompts — for instance, a filling that would reflect Alain Ducasse's style, steakhouse traditions, and local produce — the fillings got more interesting. How about Midwestern crayfish, white miso, and fresh dill, with pickled celery root on the side? 'It's a little bizarre, because I like to talk through these things with people, and I'm doing it with something that doesn't exist, per se,' Tomaska said. But arming himself with ideas from his solitary talks with ChatGPT, he said, 'does help bring better conversation to the creative process when I do have someone in front of me.' Visual renderings from AI helped chef Dave Beran talk to the architect and designer of his latest restaurant, Seline, in Santa Monica, Calif. He wanted a vibe that drew something from the shadowy, dramatic interiors of Aska in Brooklyn and Frantzén in Stockholm, but held more warmth. He kept prompting Midjourney to get closer to the feeling he wanted, asking it, for example: What if we had a fireplace that I wanted to curl up beside? Advertisement 'That was the mood we were trying to capture,' Beran said. 'Not dark and moody, but magical and mysterious.' Midjourney's images looked like fantasy artwork, he thought. But the program acted as what he called 'a translator' between him and his designer, giving them a common language. At the moment, AI can't build a restaurant or cook a piece of Dover sole. Humans have to interpret and carry out its suggestions, which makes the dining rooms and dishes inspired by AI in restaurants less unsettling than AI-generated art, which can go straight from the printer to a gallery wall. True, some chefs may put a half-baked idea from ChatGPT on the menu, but plenty of chefs are already doing this with their own half-baked ideas. For now, AI in restaurants is still inspiration rather than the final product. Since Achatz's first serious experiments with ChatGPT, about a year ago, it has become his favorite kitchen tool, something he used to say about Google. Its answers to his questions about paleontology and Argentine cuisine helped him create a dish inspired by Patagonian fossils at his flagship restaurant, Alinea. Before opening his latest restaurant, Fire, in November, he consulted ChatGPT to learn about cooking fuels from around the world, including avocado pits and banana peels. It has given him countless ideas for the sets, costumes, and story lines of a theatrical dining event somewhat in the mode of 'Sleep No More' that he will present this summer in Beverly Hills, Calif. Advertisement Asked to evaluate how well Jill had integrated her training from Escoffier and Adrià in the dishes she proposed for Next, Achatz responded in an email. 'Jill knows or researched important chefs and their styles, which very few chefs under 40 process today,' he wrote. 'She is young, and while experienced, does not yet have the understanding of how to blend them seamlessly.' Years ago, he had similar blue-sky conversations at the end of the night with the talented cooks who worked with him at Alinea and Next, including Beran. He finds that batting ideas back and forth is 'not of interest' for some of his current sous-chefs. 'That dialogue is something that simply does not exist anymore and is the lifeblood of progress,' he said. ChatGPT, though, will stay up with him all night. This article originally appeared in .
Eater
10-06-2025
- Business
- Eater
Alinea Group Shutters Its Fulton Market Live-Fire Restaurant After Less Than a Year
Chef Grant Achatz and Alinea Group have decided to close Fire, the restaurant that replaced Roister in Fulton Market. The restaurant opened in November. It was Alinea Group's first new restaurant opening in eight years. A newsletter blast sent on Tuesday, June 10, to customers explains that Alinea Group is leaving the Fulton Market space with their lease soon expiring. Saturday, June 28 will be the restaurant's final service. Roister closed in November, and the St. Clair Supper Club, which occupied the restaurant's basement, followed. The changes came about a month after the Alinea Group announced co-founder Nick Kokonas's departure. Fellow tech entrepreneur Jason Weingarten has since stepped into Kokonas's role. Alinea Group maintains a presence in Fulton Market with Next Restaurant and the Aviary. Fire was a relatively affordable tasting menu that employed Roister's hearth with Achatz saying the food would be built around flames. It's been quite an eventful time for Achatz who was recently featured in a New York Times story about how chefs are deploying AI. Achatz's use of ChatGPT is reminiscent of a role-playing game where players invent a character. Achtaz created 'Jill,' a fictional cook and fed the platform details including work history and family background. In turn, the AI bot spat out recipes showcasing 'Jill's' personal and professional influences. The dishes will comprises a 2026 menu at Chicago chef who worked at Next, Jenner Tomaska, is also featured in the story. He's since gone on to open Esme, a Michelin-starred restaurant in Lincoln Par See More: Chicago Restaurant Closings
