The first two menus at Next this year were more modestly scaled, at-times-casual returns to territory already covered—Bistro returned to the French cuisine of Next’s first ever menu, 2011’s Paris 1906, and Tapas had aspects of 2012’s El Bulli menu. The one that’s promised to take us into new territory is the one that just went on sale yesterday, Terroir, the most conceptual menu that Next has done since the Hunt in 2013. Watch the trailer below, then we’ll try and figure out what it’s telling us.
With a couple of quotes from chefs Dave Beran and Grant Achatz, it starts out by either lowering expectations for a tightly concepted dinner about the connection between food and wine, or by giving up on the idea entirely. I’m going to go with trying to preemptively take the starch out of this being a fancy wine dinner only for oenophiles (though the tickets, which start at $295, are certainly at that level).
So what is the connection between wine and food they’re going to explore? We’re left to guess specifics. There’s no mention of what winemakers they’ll feature or even which regions will figure on the menu. The one thing we do see are a number of visual jokes—cracked mud cuts to what looks like the cracks in some kind of chocolate pastry; grapes cut to what look like a grape-flavored take on El Bulli’s spheroid olives; a barrel cuts to the inside of a mushroom. That’s a playful start very much in line with Next’s typical approach, and the trailer as a whole is as beautiful and spellbinding as any Next has put out. But for now we’re not really given any further clues as to how that interplay of wine and food, or the food of a region and the wine of that same region, will be explored.
Coincidentally, another trailer relating to food in Chicago was released yesterday, and it’s safe to say it’s about as different as any trailer could be. For one, it’s for an actual movie, not a dinner, and the movie is about breakfast, not dinner:
Breakfast at Ina’s Movie Trailer from Daisy May Films on Vimeo
It’s the story of the 2013 closing of beloved Chicago breakfast spot Ina’s and the life of its owner, Ina Pinkney; I told a bit of that story in words here (Ina tells me that my family and I are actually visible in the film—we happened to come in on one of the days they were shooting). Ina the Movie will have her premiere at the Chicago International Film Festival in October (precise schedule pending).