The same night Dave Beran wins the James Beard Award for Best Chef: Great Lakes, Next restaurant reveals the trailer for the restaurant’s newest menu.

Dig that the size of that fortune cookie!

Next: Modern Chinese from next restaurant on Vimeo.

Ticket for Modern Chinese are now on sale.

I’ve been to five other Next iterations so far, and have enjoyed them all—yes, even Vegan—so I hope I can make it to Chicago before the restaurant morphs again in September.

As I told you earlier, I probably won’t get a chance to experience the new incarnation of Next due to a major life change … which means I’m counting on you to go and then let me know all about it.

Next released its latest video today, this one promoting “Chicago Steakhouse,” hoping to persuade us to check out its latest blink-or-you’ll miss-it menu. As you’ll see below, this time around it’s more about the mood than the food.

Next: Chicago Steak from next restaurant on Vimeo.

Sure wish I could be at that card table, though I don’t know that my bluffs would work on those guys.

Now where’d I put my double-breasted suit and that fedora?

While I was at the World Science Fiction Convention, Next restaurant sneakily uploaded a video touting its new Bocuse d’Or menu, which would have begun service on August 31 had not a power outage created issues with the opening.

But Next is up and running again, and this video will surely make you want to rush over as soon as you can obtain tickets. (Yes, tickets.)

What’s Bocuse d’Or, you ask? Let the video explain …

If you weren’t hungry before, you’re probably hungry now …

Back home from my second time experiencing Next restaurant’s Vegan menu, and what do I find? A sneak peek at what the restaurant has planned for us once it switches over to Bocuse d’or, which will run from August 31 to December 31.

Jenner Tomaska, Sous Chef at Next, tweeted (and Chef Dave Beran retweeted) a pic simply captioned, “Bocuse menu testing.” In case you missed it, here it is.

I’ve only been home a couple of hours, and now I can’t wait to get back to Chicago again!

I flew to Chicago last weekend for, of all things, a Vegan meal. Those who know me, and have either accompanied me or been repulsed by me eating spicy horse tartare, will wonder … why? After all, I’m the kind of guy who’s never eaten even a vegetarian meal (which I’ve surrendered to from time to time in order to go with the flow of a group) without needing to chomp into a bloody burger on the way home.

Scott eating Vegan? Has Hell frozen over?

Not quite. But Next restaurant, the chameleon-like brainchild of Grant Achatz, Nick Kokonas, and Dave Beran, where I’ve previously eaten cuisines built around Sicily, Kyoto, and The Hunt, had this time reinvented itself as a Vegan restaurant … and so I had to be there.

What could chefs operating at the level of Achatz and Beran do with only Vegan ingredients? Would the menu rise above the unsatisfying level of vegetarian food I’d experienced up until then, meals which always left me hungering for more?

This note awaiting us at the Kitchen Table made a promise …

… and that promise was fulfilled. (more…)

I have been remiss.

I experienced The Hunt at Next restaurant seven weeks ago, and have so far failed to write about it here the way I did earlier for both the Sicily and Kyoto menus.

And I’ve run out of time—because I’m heading back to Next tomorrow night for its Vegan menu! (more…)

Next restaurant, which reinvents itself three times a year, releases a video to promote each new menu. Sometimes, as with its video for The Hunt, you get a good idea what you’ll be eating while there. But the just-released video for the new Vegan menu, which launches tonight, is a bit more … enigmatic.

Enigmatic … but hilarious.

After having watched that, I have absolutely no idea what Next will have in store for me when I sit down at my Kitchen Table at the end of the month.

One thing I do know, however—it makes me want to go on a heist with those guys!

Yesterday, I shared with you Next restaurant’s menu for The Hunt, which was served for the first time Wednesday night.

Today, Next released a video which gives a more visceral (and I mean that both metaphorically and literally) idea of what the chefs have planned for you should you make it there before the cuisine’s final seating on April 28.

And before anyone clicks … consider this a possible trigger warning for the vegetarians out there … or for anyone who might be bothered by scenes of a guy with a shotgun walking across a snowy landscape.

As for me, the only things triggered were my salivary glands!

BTW—here’s how Next promoted its Kyoto menu, which I was privileged to experience back in November.

As those of you who’ve read about my visits to Chicago for Next’s Sicily and Kyoto menus know, the restaurant is not only unique—completely reinventing its cuisine three times each year—but also extremely difficult to get into. Thousands more people want to dine there than can. As Eater quoted co-owner Nick Kokonas back in February:

” … the queue reached 1,500 within 10 seconds of turning the sales page on … so in reality you had to be there within 8-10 seconds to have a shot at season tix.”

I very much wanted to be part of Next’s Brigadoon-like magic again next year, and through careful (and sometimes exhausting) attention to the restaurant’s updates on its Facebook page, I managed to become a season ticket holder for 2013.

So here’s what I’m in for: (more…)

So three weekends back (yeah, it’s taken me awhile to find the time to get to this), I did one of the craziest, most extravagant things I’ve ever done. I flew to Chicago. For a meal.

Oh, I’ve gone to extremes for high-end dining before, such as my meals at Astrid y Gaston in Lima, Momofuku Shoto in Toronto, and Alinea in Chicago, among others. But all of those meals were a side dish to a pre-existing trip—our visit to Machu Picchu, and my attendance at the World Fantasy and World Science Fiction conventions, respectively.

But this was a trip with the meal as its primary focus. My Sicilian dinner at the ever-changing Next restaurant impressed me so that I wanted to take part in its follow-up offering, Kyoto, and so booked tickets back in September the moment they became available.

Even as I did it, it felt wrong somehow. Fly to another city … for a meal? How decadent!

And yet …

If I had a chance to see Nijinsky dance one more time, or Olivier act again, I’d fly across a continent and feel no shame, but when it comes to food, there’s somehow a twinge of guilt, of … should I really be doing this?

The answer is, when it comes to chefs operating at this level of art on a menu which will be offered for a limited period only to vanish and never return …

Yes. Yes, I should. (more…)