surmount disagreements, they could
look to the most successful creative
and financial restaurant partnership I
know: Grant Achatz and Nick Kokonas
of The Alinea Group, in Chicago. Achatz
and Kokonas have known each other for
18 years and worked together most of
that time; they’ve opened six restau-
rants, including Next and The Aviary,
and have several more in the works.
How do they keep their marriage
alive? “A lot of sex,” Kokonas shoots back.
(He’s married; Achatz is divorced.) The
secret is having, as Humm and Guidara
did not, similar ideas about how to sift
through the opportunities people call to
offer—“crazy stuff,” Kokonas says, and
all the time. But “mostly we prefer to do
our own crazy stuff.” They view dinner
at Alinea as a performance, with deliber-
ate theatricality they wouldn’t talk about
on spoiler-alert grounds. The idea of a
restaurant as theater goes with Humm’s
description of Eleven Madison Park as a
Broadway show—something you go to
once, maybe twice a year. It goes with
Flay’s prediction that fine dining will be
an infrequent, luxury-pricedexperience.KITCHEN CONFIDENTIAL
Humm confers with bar director Pietro
Collina during a staff meeting
before dinner service at Davies and Brook.“I’m very proud of Daniel,” says Daniel
Boulud, the revered and entrepreneurial
French-born chef. From the moment
Humm arrived in New York, Boulud
recognized his talent and ambition and
made him a special protégé. But Bou-
lud’s own next steps do not involve cre-
ating another fine-dining experience,
or at least not admitting to it. Later this
year, Boulud will open a restaurant with
the developer of One Vanderbilt, the new
Midtown Manhattan building, his first
that will not be solely financed by his
longtime investors, the Smilow family.
What kind of restaurant? “How do you
call when it’s serious but not pretending
to be fine dining? When you say fine din-
ing now, everyone thinks, Oh—fancy.”
Instead he’ll go with, maybe, “refined
dining” or “French actuelle.” Unless your
name is Daniel Humm, it seems, fine din-
ing dare not speak its name.
Flay points out how much more chal-
lenging any kind of ambitious restaurant
is for a chef today than when he started.
“When I was 25, it cost $280,000 to
open Mesa Grill,” he says of the restau-
rant that made his reputation. “Now it
could cost $10million. I don’t know how
you can do it.” As for fine dining, that’s
hard in an age when everything has to
be Instagrammable (“Are we tasting
the food anymore, or just taking pic-
tures of it?”) and delivery to your door,
not your table, is the norm. The second
you order in, “You’ve discounted the
quality by 30 percent,” Flay says. “It
won’t be cooked the way you want it, the
temperature won’t be right. But you
put up with it.”
Because fine dining in a restaurant
will be so much more expensive in
order to pay labor and real estate bills,
Flay says, the future will be “the people
who are too young to pay their own res-
taurant checks now” and who will think
of restaurant dining as another form of
high-end entertainment.
As costs and challenges mount, suc-
cessful business partners become not
just helpful but crucial for any chef. For
lessons on how pairs can flourish and