• Just moments after Alinea was selected as the sixth best restaurant in the world, Steve Dolinsky was able to pull Grant Achatz aside for a four minute video interview. What do we learn? Besides the fact that it takes “immense collaboration” and “delegation” to pull off a successful restaurant, Achatz related that his mentor, Thomas Keller, isn’t bitter at all about his success. Keller actually told him, “If the protege never surpasses the mentor, that means that the mentor didn’t do a very good job.” [WBEZ]
• Eater teamed up with Sky Full of Bacon’s Mike Gebert for a series of in depth videos about both Next and Aviary. Currently, there are three videos up, with two more planned to be released later this week. Besides some amazing footage of Aviary, Achatz also drops some hints on when to expect the opening. [Eater]
• Calling the experience “almost flawless,” Bloomberg News is the latest publication to dish out a review of Next. Ryan Sutton thought the egg dish was like “getting hit by an ocean wave of brandade and bechamel.” That said, he did seem particularly worried about the death of each animal. He took great pains to point out the ducks “are not strangled to death,” and the turtles “are not boiled alive.” Still, he thinks that “sometimes the right way is the old way.” [Bloomberg]
• Writing for Time, Josh Ozersky goes on an epic rant against “gastrocasts,” who he claims are “driving everything that is bad about the top end of the restaurant business.” He actually uses the rumored $3,000 tickets to Next as one of his biggest arguments, writing, “paying as much for a meal as one would for a used car is just gross, even for a professional gastronome.” Perhaps he didn’t read our post that debunked those $3,000 ticket prices. [Time]
