On Sunday, Nick Kokonas, the co-founder of Alinea and Next, took to Facebook to announce that the majority of tickets for Next Restaurant’s summer menu – a tour of Thailand – would go on sale on Monday around 3 p.m. in Chicago, or 4 a.m. Tuesday in Taipei. Since I have a complete disregard for any semblance of a normal sleep schedule, I decided I’d have no problem staying up until then and gunning for one of the 2,000 tables to be released.
I went to the first iteration of Next, Paris 1906: Escoffier at the Ritz, in June after being one of the unbelievably lucky few to secure tickets in the mayhem that was their first few days of operations and ticketing. The meal absolutely blew me away – it is definitely one of the two best meals I have had all year, with the other contender being my college graduation dinner at L2O, which lived up to its Michelin three-star hype. Despite Next being well out of my price range1, the meal was so good that I had no qualms about the opportunity to go back and experience Thai food under Chef Achatz’ creative vision.
It’s a good thing that Next is stellar not only in its food but also its reputation, because the patience of many hopeful diners was put to the test during the ticket release process, which started an hour late2. The process was slowed by the fact that the website was bombarded by so many auto-refreshing bots (and manual-refreshing fingers like my own, as I stared blankly into the screen and clicked refresh over and over again until I thought I was being hypnotized by the background on the page) as to overload the server. When Kokonas announced that tickets would not be released on Monday and would instead be released on Tuesday after server issues were handled, the vitriol and anger that poured out of the Facebook page where it was posted was unbelievable.
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| This screen will hypnotize you. Also the message that stares back at you simply says, "We are currently sold out. Please check back as we will soon be releasing more tables." |
To be honest, I was frustrated too. I don’t particularly enjoy staying up in the middle of the night to wait for tickets that I have a minute chance of getting. My frustration was buttressed by the fact that during the two-hour waiting period from 4 a.m. until when the postponement was announced, I was forced to refresh the Next Facebook page over and over as well in anticipation of an announcement. What frustrated me wasn’t the endless refreshing or the need to do it all again tomorrow, but rather that I was forced to read the veritable shitstorm of complaints that rolled over the website like the recent power outage did Evanston.
I cannot, for the life of me, understand why people found it necessary to make comments - some sardonic, some sarcastic, and others outright virulent – expressing how they had been inconvenienced by the tickets not being sold at exactly 3 p.m. on the dot on Monday. Some commented on how fifteen-year-olds could have built a server equipped to handle the traffic Next received on Monday; others essentially stated that Next was to blame for them not getting work done for two straight hours or for them pointlessly postponing a meeting at work. People, I hate to break it to you, but a restaurant that you are begging to dine at – not one that is begging for you to dine there3 – is not responsible for your being wildly unproductive at work.
This is as fucking asinine as me blaming the creators of Adobe Flash for preventing me from paying attention in class – maybe if I wasn’t so busy playing flash games in class, I could have redirected my energy to listening to the dynamically monotonic voice of my Economics professors and learned something that I would find wholly inapplicable once I entered the job market!
Like six-year-old children that can’t believe their parents won’t buy them a horse after they’ve gone to one horseback riding lesson, the Facebook page was overrun with what amounted to one massive online temper tantrum. I’m not sure at what point along the way these people decided that they deserved tickets (and I guess everyone else didn’t deserve shit besides being forced to listen to them turn bitching and complaining into an art form), but the sense of entitlement was appalling and enraging.
The next day, as 4 p.m. came and went and there was no announcement of a pending ticket release, people resumed their bitching about how it would be unfair for people to miss out because they were stuck in a commute home, or how they’d have to stay by their work computers until the tickets went on sale and how they’d prefer it to be now so they could go home. Luckily for the community of chronic moaners and groaners, tickets did indeed go on sale shortly thereafter, at 4:30 p.m., or 5:30 a.m. Wednesday in Taipei. By then, I had already woken up four separate times (in 45-minute increments) to make sure tickets weren’t about to be released, and then had spent an hour mindlessly clicking at the lovely Next website praying for a miracle ticket already. Suffice to say I was totally fried and exhausted at that point.
Luckily for me, this long post of my own complaints about other complainers has a happy ending in that I did indeed end up snatching a ticket to return to Next in August to experience a tour of Thailand.
However… I still wish butt warts upon the legion of entitled fine-whining diners (or are they fine-dining whiners?) from their computer chairs. Also I hope that they all failed miserably in their quest to get tickets. That will give them plenty of anger and negativity to stew in until October, when the menu changes again, the ticket frenzy starts anew, and they disdainfully announce that since they didn’t get to experience this menu they should be allowed to waltz into the restaurant and receive a reservation at their convenience. Oh boy, I can’t wait for that to happen!
1. An eight-course meal with six different wine pairings ran me about $180, with tax and tip included. The meal, while expensive, offers unbeatable value and quality – the same meal would probably run $300 or more at similar upscale French restaurants, I imagine.↩
2. Late, that is, in the eyes of the many Facebook posters, many of whom expressed anguish in setting aside a block of time to purchase Next tickets and then not having the tickets released. Kokonas had merely stated that tickets would be released “around 3 p.m.”, with an hour’s notice. Heaven forbid he try and run his restaurant on a schedule that doesn’t cater to each and every individual’s work schedule.↩
3. Next, with its unbelievably large Facebook following and unique ticket systems that makes seating 100% equal opportunity, is so difficult to get into that the Michelin Chicago Guide (via Twitter) opined about its lack of ability to experience the cuisine there.↩
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