Next: Terroir

Every year, one of the three menus at Next is their premium menu.  Well at least it's been this way for each of the last four years.  El Bulli in 2012, Bocuse d'Or in 2013 and Trio in 2014.  This year it was Terroir.  Terroir is a concept, not a cuisine and not even technically food.  Terroir is the concept in wine, where the environment in which the grapes are grown have an effect on the taste of the wine.

In theory, I believe this concept makes sense.  However, in practice I'm not sure the average diner can pick out the subtle differences the climate has on Chardonnay grapes grown in California vs Chardonnay grapes grown in California.  This however, did not deter the staff at Next from trying.

What was really different about this menu is that the chefs and beverage team decided on what whines they wanted to serve before they even considered what the food was going to be.  Challenging themselves culinaryly to pair the food with the wine.  Overall, this was extremely successful.

The initial place setting for the evening.  I love how Next always tries to tie how the tables are set with the theme of the meal.

Next always likes to challenge their diners and distort the rules of dining.  This meal that challenge started right away when they poured a red wine from burgandy as the first of the evening.  The picture is 2009 but we had the 2007 version.  The wine was paired with five bites to start our where were as follows:

This is a croquette of creme fraiche laced with char roe and dipped in a rye batter and deep fried.  A fun cheesy explosive bite.

This is a cornette with caramelized onion, chicken skin and chicken heart.  This was one of the early leaders in the clubhouse for bite of the night.

The third bite was a crostini that was topped with parmesan and a nasturtium leaf.  Overall this one didn't blow me away.

The fourth bite was a combination of brussels sprouts, beer and flax seed.  This was served on top of peanuts, which were not eaten at this point in time but were to be saved for a future dish.

The final bite was a fun playful dish of a prosciutto chip topped with a honey and lime cream dip.  The saltiness of the ham played very nicely with the sweet and sour of the honey and lemon.

                                                               

Right before we were going to start eating the waiter came with the second wine.  This time a white from Burgandy.  This is the 2009 vintage of St. Aubin 1st Cru Clos de la Cateniere from Domaine Hubert Lamy.  The waiter specifically explained to us that the red was to be consumer first completely before trying the white to avoid overpowering some of the flavors.

                                                                 






                                               



The next three wines is where the chef and beverage team really wanted you to taste the terroir.  Here they served three different white wines from three different regions but all made with the same grape, chenin blanc.  THe wines were from France, South Africa and California.  If I had to make a choice I would say that the French was my favorite due to its high acidity.

The second course was a piece of cold smoked sturgeon with charred scallions and various iterations of peanuts which included boiled and shelled peanuts on the bottom and the salted and roasted peanuts from the previous courses sprinkled on top.  This was a fun playful dish that I really enjoyed.





The sixth wine of the evening was an Italian red from the northeast region of the country near the Slovenian border.  This is a red that is really dark in color but extremely light in flavor.  Therefore to avoid your eyes playing tricks on the diner this was served in a dark glass that you were unable to see through to the wine.

The third course was barley risotto served with a barley chip and arugula that was then topped with a barley consomme.  I took a picture of the dish with the consomme in there but it was blurry.  I liked the flavors of this dish but I couldn't get over the chewiness of the barley risotto.  I love barley if its in beer but as an ingredient on its own, not so much.




The first of two rieslings on the evening.  This one is a sweet riesling that presented the second opportunity for the beverage team to play with what you previously thought you knew about wine.  That's because they served a sweet riesling with.....

Squab!.  That's right, Next served essentially a desert whine with a red meat game dish that was included the pigeon, beets, fennel and huckleberries.  Personally, I thought the squab got lost a bit wit the fairly assertive flavor of the huckleberry.

The riesling was also the only wine of the night designed to go across two courses.  The second of the two was the absolute home run of the evening.  The palate cleanser of pear juice in a blue cheese shell served over fresh moss (which you didn't eat) and a little dry ice and water for effect.  Just obscenely good.

At this point we had reached the approximate halfway point of dinner, and the third chance that the restaurant took to play with what you knew about wine.  Though this one ties into the first course.  The wait staff takes the granite slabs away and rolls out a fancy white table cloth for the rest of the meal and let's you know that the wine dinner is about to begin as you just finished the snacks.



This is where Next decided to bring out the champagne, rather than the traditional spot as part of the first course.  The team at Next loves this brand of champagne, it was good but after looking at prices online I'm not sure I could taste the nearly Dom Perignon type price for a bottle.

This portion of the meal started out with a trio of dishes plated within the same serving vessel.  The top is a play on chips and dip, which is something I've seen the French Laundry do, this is a combination of apple chips and potato chips with a creme fraiche dip.

The second portion of this dish I don't remember what all was is in, but I do know that it involved caviar.

The third dish was a popcorn soup.  I loved the chips and dip but the other two were sort of unmemorable dishes.  Good, but not anything that stuck out in my head.




This was the second riesling of the night, this one a dry riesling and again the team at Next decided to screw with your head a little bit because this white wine, while dry was served with a red meat.

So this dish is called, lion's mane, Bison and truffled soil, the big black thing on top is a bread meringue where the restaurant took sourdough bread dough and charred it.  Anyway, the bison was cooked perfectly, overall a fun and interesting dish.

                                 

This was by far the most unique wine of the night.  This is a gual from the Canary Islands in Spain.  This isn't a region you typically think of when you think about wine, but it was fun and tasted good, so it worked.

The gual was paired with a hamachi tartare, ginger and fermented gooseberries that was also topped with a few slices of thai chiles.  This dish was an absolute hit, the subtle fruitiness of the gooseberries played very well with the light citus notes of the wine.


                                                  

                                                        

This wine was the favorite of the night for both my brother and I.  While I typically prefer whites, especially a good sauvignon blanc, my brother and I both love really big and bold reds.  When talking about it at the table, I thought back to the red we had with the steak during the Chicago Steak Menu which was a huge open fermented red from Tennores in Spain.  That wine is easily one of the best reds I've ever had, this one comes pretty close.

Given the wine you'd expect that it would be served with another red meat, but they servied this one with snails, artichokes and pine aroma.  The food is the little cup in the middle that is surrounded by pine needles, very hot rocks to aereify the aroma of the pine needles and snail shells.  This dish was delicious, though I'm thinking the only actual snails in ti were the snail caviar.  Maybe that was the point.

                
The bottle says 1998, but the version we had was from 2009.  Overall, not a very memorable wine.

The course for this wine was a roasted lamb loan with olives, which was drizzled with a little bit of lamb jous.  A really nice way to end the savory courses for the evening.
                             
                            

 

A madeira is a classic way to introduce the desert courses for the evening, and Next outdid themselves this time serving this one from 1971, yes 1971.  Honestly, I'm not sure I could taste anything different in this one than a younger madeira, but it's still pretty cool to drink something 12 years older than yourself. 

 The first of two deserts was a molasses cake, cottage cheese and bayleaf with some candied oranges.  Obviously that description doesn't make you say yummy, but you would be oh so wrong my friend.  This was delicious. 

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The final wine of the evening, is the stereotypical way to end a meal, an extremely sweet wine.  However, what wasn't stereotypical was that this is from Hungary not France.  The premise is the same though, serve a sauterne.  

This is another dish that when I saw it I wasn't sure what to think.  THis is a tea cookie, flan with a caramelized white chocolate noodle and garnished with a little bit of saffron.  However, when I bit into this dish, holy cow.  What a wait to end.

So this is the fourth year that I've been to Next, I've now attended 12 of the 15 menus they've done.  I'm going to close this post with my power rankings.

1.  El Bulli - Former best restaurant in the world now closed, I was one of only a handful of people to experience those exact dishes again.

2. The Hunt - Classic no nonsense food reimagined for high end dining.

3.  Trio - The birthplace of Alinea, so cool to see those dishes again.

4.  Terroir - The restaurant managed to take a concept that I was skeptical about and make me think a little harder about it.

5. Kaiseiki - A cuisine that I'm obsessed with done so well, still waiting for my time to travel to Japan.

6.  Chicago Steak - A very standard menu, but executed very well with top notch ingredients.

7.  Vegan - A meal without meat just simply can't be higher than middle of the pack.

8.  Tapas - Another method of eating that I adore, but I think this fell short of what I would expect the experience would be in Spain.

9.  French Bistro - I liked the concept they were going for and I know why they structured this meal the way they did, but I would have much rather paid a higher price to get some of the upgraded courses in the standard menu.

10.  Modern Chinese - Again a place I'd love to travel to sometime and taste the real thing because this meal just didn't strike that chord with me.

11.  Boscuse d'Or - More bark than bite.  As a premium menu for one of the years this one left me wanting more.

12.  Sicily - I hate ranking this one last, but I just can't shake the feeling that the staff sort of mailed this one in.

Until 2016 Next, the menus should be released soon along with season ticket renewals and I can't wait to get my hands on them.