Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
“I mean, we’re two weeks into this [current menu],” he explains. “We’re going to start the dialogue—Chef [Achatz] is out of town, Nick [Kokonas] is starting the outline right now. We all have our ideas, and none of our ideas are the same. I think I’m the only one without any ideas.”
“I had a good run with it,” Beran says. “I picked kaiseki [Kyoto], I picked the Hunt, I picked Vegan. Chef picked Bocuse—well, he gave me the option of Bocuse or another one.”
That the menus got more conceptual as Beran came into his own as the executive chef is not coincidence. “I think they’ll always let me do at least one conceptual menu because I have so much fun doing it,” he says of owners Achatz and Kokonas. “It lets me have more of the voice. But moving into our fourth season, I think it would be good to bring back some of the time and place. I think that would be good to do, just to kind of reground ourselves in where it started.”
