Next charlie trotter menu
My New Year’s resolution for 2024 was to avoid dining at any of The Alinea Group’s restaurants. I almost accomplished it too. But FIRE, “Alinea’s first new restaurant in eight years,” just proved too tempting.
I dined there in late November—the night after the concept opened—and immediately regretted my decision. This halfheartedly rebranded Roister traded away its predecessor’s one virtue: the ability to order a substantive meal, à la carte, from a chef who otherwise locked his work behind pricier set menus. Of course, the place could be quite underwhelming in practice (never again reaching the heights it had attained under Andrew Brochu), but it represented something of a concession. It was part of the Alinea empire that Chicagoans could enjoy with more frequency, less pretense, yet some of the same guiding philosophy.
FIRE’s debut marked the final victory of style over substance within this famed group. (Let’s try to pretend, for all our sakes, that St. Clair Supper Club does not exist.) The experience reminded me exactly why I had made my resolution in the first place. A $115 tasting menu focused on “open fire cooking techniques” sounded like a perfectly fine idea. However
“It felt like I just stepped into a rodeo, and they shut the gate behind me.” That’s how Grant Achatz describes his first day of working in the kitchen of Charlie Trotter’s, then considered one of the world’s finest restaurants. The future 3-Michelin-star Alinea chef was just 21 in the summer of 1995 when he convinced Trotter to give him a shot at his namesake Chicago restaurant. But Achatz did not have a positive experience and left after a few months, moving on to a longer tutelage under Chef Thomas Keller at the French Laundry in Napa Valley. When Achatz returned to Chicago to run his own kitchen, he and Trotter had what Achatz calls an “aggressively competitive” relationship. Trotter closed his restaurant in 2012 and died from a stroke the following year at age 54. Now Achatz—who appears in Rebecca Halpern’s documentary about Trotter, Love, Charlie (as do I)—is presenting a lavish Trotter’s menu at his restaurant Next and reflecting on his relationship with the late chef, whom he thinks hasn’t received proper credit for all the innovative ways he changed fine dining.
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