Thai Food in Chicago's Meatpacking District: Next Restaurant

Cuisine: Thai (Until the end of September)

Location: 953 W Fulton Market, Chicago, IL

Price: $$$$

Food: ****

Service: *****

Overall: **** (These ratings reflect the Tour of Thailand menu only)

At the James Beard Award ceremony in May 2010, Grant Achatz announced that he would be opening his second restaurant, after the critically acclaimed Alinea – Next, a restaurant that would change cuisines, time periods, and menu every three months, so drastically that he would essentially run four completely different restaurants a year with no common thread between each, except perhaps for the staff and the brick and mortar that housed this radical concept. Over the next few months, the hype built up to unimaginable proportions – before it had even officially opened its doors to the public, Next was preemptively named one of the best dining locales in Chicago by some publications. As soon as the ticketing system was revealed and the tickets released in April for Paris 1906, Next’s inaugural menu, Next immediately shot to the top of the list for places where reservations (or tickets, here) were both coveted and considered unattainable for the mere mortal¹.

If doubters wondered whether Next could meet these wholly unrealistic expectations, they were silenced when Paris 1906 opened. Chicago Tribune food critic Phil Vettel gave it four stars (the highest accolade possible), heaping layers of praise on the restaurant. My taste buds would soon verify the truckloads of positive reviews from diners – each dish left me with a lasting impression, from the simple but elegant Salade Irma to the fatty, buttery, cheesy Gratin de Pommes de Terre a la Dauphinoise paired with the Caneton Rouennais a la Presse². Starting with the hors d’ oeuvres and closing with the mignardises, there wasn’t a single dish or wine pairing that disappointed. Each dish I had opened my eyes to a new level of refinement when it came to French classical cooking, and it instantaneously became one of the best meals I have ever had in my life.

The success of Paris 1906, of course, only caused foodies to clamor for more and expect even greater things for the next menu. When Tour of Thailand was announced, people began to speculate how Achatz would put his own unique spin on Thai food, a culture steeped in the ways of street food and cheap eats now being transformed into $150 haute cuisine.

I have always considered myself to be well versed in Thai food – for a more detailed discussion of Thai food as I saw it growing up, you can read my review of Sukhothai here. So for this menu to impress me, it would have to be far and beyond the best Thai food I had ever set eyes upon in order to match the standard that Paris 1906 had set.

And so it was, armed with an empty stomach and high expectations, I found myself dining at Next once again a few weeks ago.

Thai in Taipei: Sukhothai

Cuisine: Thai

Location: Zhongxiao East Rd. No. 12, Sec. 1 at the Sheraton Hotel

Price: $$$

Food: 3.5*

Service: ***

Overall: 3.5*

There are many places to eat Thai in Taipei, most prominently Thai Town, a massive chain restaurant in Taiwan that puts out some very good (if not totally authentic) Thai food. Growing up, it was always my go to restaurant for Thai food. Although the cuisine is altered for the customer base (more Chinese flavors, less Thai), I think that it helped give me an appreciation for traditional Thai food while I was still developing my palate and less willing to try funky tasting foods or items with names I couldn’t even pronounce.

That said, I’ve since been to Thailand a couple of times, and absolutely love authentic Thai cuisine. From the intense heat of the curries to the fresh seafood, whether it’s pineapple fried rice or shrimp cakes, the spices and flavors of Thai cuisine are so different from its Southeast Asian brethren. When my aunt suggested that we go to Sukhothai, a supposedly more authentic and classy version of Thai Town, I was happy to say yes and excited to try it out.

The Next Ticket Debacle

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.

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!

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^{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.↩}