- Michael Gebert
- Black truffle explosion, from the Next Trio menu
From its opening in spring 2011 through the end of its third season in late 2013, Next was the wunderkind of Chicago restaurants, selling out all its seats well in advance, whipping out a radically different menu theme every four months, and pioneering a new model for how you get into hot restaurants. It replaced the old methods—i.e. knowing a guy or palming a $20 to the maitre d’—with a sternly technological, you’re-in-or-you’re-out ticket system. No run like that could last forever. Going strong for three years was pretty remarkable, and the fourth season, which ends in December, showed the wunderkind reaching middle age, more expensive and not as irresistible as it had once been. But the new season of menus, announced yesterday—consisting of “Parisian Bistro,” Tapas,” and “Terroir”—looks like a bid to recapture the excitement of Next’s beginnings, and not just because it kicks off, as the entire restaurant did, with French food.
Some people on Twitter found the new lineup a little lacking in ambition, even at a lower price ($70 or $80 for the first two, which can go up quickly with add-ons). It’s true that Parisian Bistro circa 1910 doesn’t sound as ambitious as Escoffier in 1906, that Spanish food is something you can already get in that neighborhood (at Vera or Salero), and that terroir as the organizing principle of a wine dinner is like, well, duh.
