Now Appearing in Chicago, a Restaurant in Footlights (Published 2011)

CHICAGO

THE wild catfish in Thai caramel sauce had been devoured and the elegant metal plate holding it whisked away, a gin-clear watermelon consommé tossed back in a short fit of excitement. Coconut would follow, accompanied by Sicilian sweet wine, and dragon fruit with rosewater and a glass of rum, then small transparent bags filled with cold Thai tea sweetened with palm sugar and lightened with milk, straws emerging from their rubber-banded tops.

Customers lingered, handicapping early courses: a green papaya salad; a kind of pad Thai. They debated. Was this a better meal than the last one they had had here, only a few weeks ago, when there had been lamb with tomato béarnaise, and a whole duck put through a press in the grand style of La Tour d’Argent? Was the pork-broth tom yum better than the turtle soup from that first magical evening?

It was. It was not! They pushed back their chairs and walked out the door into the inky night. There was no check to pay, no tip to figure. Dinner was over, and that was that.

At least until the next one.

A challenge and temptation to ambitious chefs across the country has arisen here on Chicago’s near west side, south of the train tracks on a block thick with idle meatpackers’ trucks. In a plain and narrow space that evokes a black-box theater, Grant Achatz, the celebrated modernist chef, and his business partner and patron, Nick Kokonas, have opened a restaurant, Next, that offers a new model of fine dining. Service has become theater at Next, right down to the price of admission.

You cannot make a reservation. But you can buy a ticket. And what you get in return changes four times a year.

The restaurant opened in April under the command of the chef Dave Beran. “Paris, 1906” was its first iteration, an exploration of the grand cuisine Auguste Escoffier served at the Ritz hotel in Paris at the turn of the last century. “A Tour of Thailand” is currently playing. Future productions, say Mr. Beran and Mr. Achatz, could bring a meal inspired by a children’s book, or an account of life in Italy after World War II.

As at the Steppenwolf Theater down the street from Mr. Achatz’s first restaurant, the much-lauded and science-mad Alinea, which opened in 2005, Next requires a willing suspension of disbelief: in this case that great cooks can embody any role, cook anything well, from any larder, at any time. It rewards that conviction with giddy excitement, real passion and occasionally with art. It is a daring conceit that far less talented chefs and restaurateurs may try to copy, in return for the regular bursts of attention it ensures.

It is not easy to eat at Next. The restaurant has only 62 seats and no phone number: Mr. Kokonas has designed the business so that the tickets are sold only through the Web site, nextrestaurant.com, where they are generally snatched up the moment they are released. Prices are variable, as on Broadway. Two seats at Next on a Wednesday night at 9:30 p.m. are $130. On a Saturday night at 7 p.m., they are $220. (Wine pairings run an extra $75 a person regardless of time or day. A nonalcoholic pairing is $38.) Tax and a service charge are built into the cost.

In this, too, other restaurants may discover a model. There are no slow nights at Next, as every seat has been sold in advance, and thus no issues of cash flow. Tickets are nonrefundable, just as at the opera or the ballpark.

Customers create an account on the restaurant’s Web site and ask to be notified by e-mail when new tickets are available. When they are, the buyers return to the Web site to choose a date, time and table price. Then they pay.

If tickets are still available, that is. They go in seconds. Some customers are lucky, fleet of finger and mouse. Some increase their odds by using multiple browsers set with homemade ticket-bots to refresh the screens and grab tickets automatically. Others sigh in frustration, and turn to secondary markets that have arisen on Craigslist and Facebook to serve those not nimble enough to secure seats on their own.

Scalping is not uncommon (“Looking for 4 tickets to Next Restaurant on August 17,” read a Craigslist ad in early August. “Willing to pay. Let me know”). But Mr. Achatz said in a telephone interview that diners are increasingly using the restaurant’s Web site to sell tickets at face value, helped in part by a “transfer tickets” tool.

With the help of a Chicago-area reader who had been one of the first to sign up on the restaurant’s Web site, I managed to eat at Next for both the Paris menu and the Thai one. I paid him face value for both tickets. We ate together under his name.

In addition, I had drinks both odd and marvelous in the Aviary, the luxe, radical cocktail bar that Mr. Achatz and Mr. Kokonas have established adjacent to Next, as well as in the Office, a tiny windowless, deeply comfortable version of a speakeasy they have set up in the basement.

The partners’ cocktail chef, Craig Schoettler, is a gastronaut of the first order. (Try his Peach cocktail before peaches disappear: wheat whiskey and white port flavored with maple sap and ice balls made of Angostura bitters. Have a bite of lobster on a cracker with it, topped with comté cheese.) Time passes in the Office as if on the wind. It is possible to imagine yourself returning daily.

I ate very well at Next and sometimes simply well, and always more enjoyably than at Alinea. Next is more casual in its service and more daredevil in its concept, if less aggressively modernist. At Alinea the dishes rarely fail. They are polished to the highest sheen. That does not make it a perfect restaurant; indeed, it can make it a cold one. At Next, the food may sometimes wobble, but never so much that it does not engender laughter, close attention and learning. Next makes you want to return.

MY first meal at Next was on a dank evening in June, the city breezy, coming off a rain. I arrived on foot. There were skateboarders shredding a high curb near a fish wholesaler as I moved west through the neighborhood, and a big, lively crowd at the Publican, Paul Kahan’s beery farmhouse restaurant down West Fulton Market Street. Otherwise the sidewalks were empty save for parked trucks marked Nealey Foods and El Cubano Wholesale Meats.

Next was buzzing as a theater buzzes before the curtain goes up. The dining room sits plain and unadorned beneath a ceiling that manages to suggest both a theater’s lighting grid and the city’s elevated train tracks. It derives liveliness from the people in its seats (some dressed in foppish Edwardian period costumes, as if just out of hansom cabs to eat at the Ritz) and from the servers and the food they place on the tables. But it is otherwise unremarkable and is clearly meant to be: its primary function is as a stage.

Players soon flooded it, Belle Époque dishes largely unseen on American tables for generations, nine courses in all, served by teams of waiters well schooled in the history and lore of the menu, eager to talk about it, eager to please.

Hors d’oeuvres included a beautiful torchon of foie gras encased in brioche as well as truffled egg custard with salt cod and caviar, and a sphere of quail egg topped with anchovy, red onion, tarragon, chervil and a strand of lemon zest, the lot of them served on a wide platter meant to evoke the grand-buffet style that Escoffier developed along with his own Nick Kokonas, the hotelier César Ritz.

There was turtle soup to follow, a consommé as rich and honeyed as liquid gold, with hints of Madeira behind the meat (this was paired sublimely with dry and lightly oxidized wine from the Jura). The waiter said the turtle was thought to have medicinal qualities, and the soup was meant to gird our stomachs for the coming feast.

Certainly girding was needed. Sole arrived on the table next. It came accompanied by baubles: crayfish stuffed with a mousseline of crayfish and sole; a mushroom stuffed with crayfish; a tab of fried sole roe. The entire plate was napped in fragrant sauce Nantua, a simple affair of béchamel, cream and crayfish butter. The dish might have appeared in an A. J. Liebling dispatch for The New Yorker. Surely ortolans and claret would follow.

Instead: a quadrangle of silken chicken cooked sous-vide and painted with a blanquette sauce run through with foie gras, accompanied by poached cucumber rounds stuffed with chicken mousse and wrapped with house-cured pork belly. Instead: roasted lamb over lamb rillettes, topped by lamb sweetbreads, topped in turn by onion rings, accompanied by rosy choron sauce and a sticky pool of lamb demi-glace. Instead: duck à la presse, with buttery dauphine potatoes, as if served by Mr. Ritz himself.

The effects of all this were almost numbing, though a charming nasturtium salad, as well as some Sauternes whisked into sorbet via the magic of liquid nitrogen, did much to restore clarity. The meal rounded out with a chocolate bombe filled with coffee semifreddo, a glass of port, some mignardises (the petits fours of the age), and a cumulative sense that something crazy had happened, something intense.

My notes from the evening concluded in block letters, hastily written before sleep, a testament to the power of the menu and its spectacular execution: “TIME TRAVEL.”

NEXT’S second menu, “A Tour of Thailand,” made its debut on July 8 and I ate it a few weeks later. In midsummer, the streets near the restaurant were thick with humidity and blood funk. “Tour of Thailand is our homage to an amazingly varied and rich cuisine,” read the note on a card placed on each table at the start of the meal, along with a couple of Thai-language newspapers (still useful!) to serve as tablecloths for the first few courses.

But it was not that journey precisely. Tour of Thailand was sneakier and in some ways more interesting: a tour not so much of Thai cuisine as Thai takeout, of the American-friendly dishes so common to corner delivery shops in big cities and college towns from Los Angeles east to New York, and most certainly in Chicago.

“This is a dish you may be familiar with,” said one of the waiters, dryly pausing before coming to the point. “It is a pad Thai.” And it was, straight down to the mouth-feel of the slippery rice noodles and the soft crunch of the peanuts mixed in with them, the tamarind-sour dressing, more sweet than spicy, with water spinach for snap. It was exactly the sort of dish you might eat once a week for six months, if your deliveryman had a Maybach instead of a rusty Schwinn.

There had been a muted and beautiful green papaya salad before that, which a waiter brought us into the open kitchen to see prepared with theatrical charm by Mr. Beran, almost as if he were making it on a street corner in Bangkok. (“We watched these old ladies doing it on YouTube,” he said.) He flavored it with salted blue crab rather than pungent dried shrimp, delicate and strong. An iconic tom yum came later, reinterpreted as a hot-and-sour pork broth with soft pork belly in place of chicken, along with a thin slice of heirloom tomato and a zip of ginger.

So did that catfish in caramel sauce, shocking in its moist excellence, with celery and coriander root for texture, color and an underscore of delicacy. And, finishing the entrees, there was a thick, riotously good beef-cheek curry, a Penang takeout curry for the ages, spicy but not really, the best Thai food ever for Midwestern university professors, Wicker Park dudes, Lutherans passing through town. It was absolutely delicious, fork-tender, layered with flavors, a caged tiger yawning, just great.

Desserts trended Alinea-ish: that watermelon consommé with lemon grass, the color of water (“Science!” exclaimed the waiter, before explaining the preparation at incredible length); whole coconuts containing rich treasures of corn pudding and coconut ice, candied lime, licorice tapioca, saffron-hued egg strands in star-anise syrup; and, last of all, a single rose and half a dragon fruit, scented with rosewater.

A waiter said this final dish came out of a sense memory for Mr. Beran: flowers near his childhood home. To me it recalled Chinatown pharmacies, that smell of plastics and paper and herbs. My guest remembered, with some suddenness and a flood of emotion, a scented rosary he had purchased for his mother when he was very young. All art is confession. We drank our tea and walked out into the Chicago night wondering what would come next.