Latest news with #Achatz
Boston Globe
2 days ago
- 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
2 days ago
- 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
