Latest news with #GrantAchatz
Axios
7 days ago
- Axios
Alinea brings fine dining pop-up to Montana ski country
Lincoln Park's three-Michelin-starred restaurant Alinea is taking its culinary theater to the Montana mountains this winter. Why it matters: A four-month pop-up aims to fuse a luxe dining experience with outdoor adventure, drawing food lovers to Big Sky Resort during its peak season. State of play: A concept called M by The Alinea Group will debut as part of a celebratory world tour marking the modernist tasting menu's 20th anniversary. Though short on menu specifics, the Montana residency, set in Mountain Village, will blend European technique with elements from the mountain terroir. What they're saying: "True luxury is finding the extraordinary in remote places," said chef Grant Achatz in a press statement. "That's what we're building here in Big Sky: something rare, fleeting, and deeply connected to nature." Zoom out: M is among a limited number of destinations on the restaurant's anniversary tour, along with Brooklyn, Miami Beach, Beverly Hills and Tokyo. What's next: Alinea's Big Sky outpost is set to open in mid-December — just in time for Chicagoans craving altitude with their fine dining. Reservations, which aren't live yet, are expected to sell out fast. Email to sign up for reservation notifications.
Yahoo
11-06-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Chicago Restaurant Closing June 28 After Opening 7 Months Ago
A Michelin-starred Chicago restaurant made way for a new open-fire restaurant in November when Fire was born. "There is nothing more captivating than a hearth ablaze… embers glowing, flames leaping, burning logs crackling… an unpredictable, mesmerizing display of energy unleashed in a rhythmic dance of glowing flames. It is from this element - and ancient cooking tool - that we draw inspiration," the restaurant said on its website. 'I've been wanting to create something new,' Alinea co-founder and chef Grant Achatz said at the time. 'In my travels, some of my favorite meals have been in restaurants that use the fire in a dedicated, focused way. It was time to try our hand at this level of commitment to the fire and explore its possibilities within the refined rusticity. We think a tasting menu format is best suited to experience the wide range of nuances the hearth provides.' Just seven months later, the restaurant is now closing, citing rising rental prices. Alinea CEO Jason Weingarten told Eater the decision to close on Saturday, June 28, was purely tied to real estate, citing that rents have increased 500 to 600 percent since the group moved into the space in 2016 when it opened Roister - the Michelin-starred restaurant Fire replaced. The tasting-menu only restaurant suffered from a large kitchen that dominates the space and takes away from space for seating customers. Despite its closing, Weingarten suggested a revival could be in the works in the future. 'You can see Fire as a concept that would work well in the Middle East, work well in Europe, it would work well in winter, or at a resort,' he Restaurant Closing June 28 After Opening 7 Months Ago first appeared on Men's Journal on Jun 11, 2025
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
New York Times
02-06-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
A.I. Is Getting Smarter Every Day. But Can It Cook?
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 résumé 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, Mr. 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,' Mr. Achatz said. As generative A.I. 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. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
