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Of course I know the restaurant. I may be an old man, but I keep abreast of news. This Achatz fellow’s name kept popping up in my Google Alert, and I paid it no mind until my dear wife, Delphine, showed me the article in Le Monde. After that, I watched with much interest. The menu is a love letter to me, non? I had no choice but to rouse my bones and see if Next warranted a letter back.

No, I did not want preferential treatment. My name had been on the list for tickets since last fall, and Delphine and I waited like everyone else. She relished the challenge of beating out 20,000 others with the same goal, although I fail to see how a computerized ticketing system serves the diner. Restaurants are a hospitality business, and there is nothing hospitable about asking patrons to spend a month hitting refresh—qu’est-ce que c’est?—on their web browsers. Yet what choice does M. Achatz have? He evidently commands an entire world vying for 62 seats. Even with half of Europe at my feet, I never confronted such madness. As it happens, a friend secured four tickets for $168 apiece and graciously extended an invitation. I packed my portmanteau for Chicago.

If the hostess who greeted me at Next realized that the ancient figure facing her had invented the kitchen brigade system and written the most important cookbook of the 20th century, she gave no indication. Neither did the manager, who seated us along a handsome brown banquette. Though the narrow room gleamed, each fold of the linens straight and true, my younger companions bemoaned the clamor. I, too, found the boisterous hum a notch too piercing and the setting prohibitively dark, but what do you expect? I am 164 years old.

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Feeling playful and my tongue loosened by tawny port, I asked Nick Kokonas, a proprietor, what old Escoffier would think of all this. “I think he would have a good time, marveling at the fact that 100-plus years hence we are still in awe of his talents,” Kokonas said. Just as I was preparing to identify myself, he added that Next’s access to technology had improved Escoffier’s recipes and “hopefully realized his vision even more fully.” Coming from a man whose kitchen team learned their craft at schools where the very curricula are based on my teachings, such a statement borders on blasphemy! Before I could issue a scathing riposte, Delphine dragged me out.

While I stewed on the flight home, my wife recalled something I wrote 109 years ago in the foreword of my book Le Guide Culinaire: “I wanted to create a useful tool rather than just a recipe book whilst leaving the reader free to decide on the way to carry out the work according to his own personal views.” Lord. Kokonas was right. For a century, I have watched chefs slavishly follow what was intended more as guide than gospel. At last! Here are modern chefs with the requisite respect for good ingredients and the imagination to use my book as a starting point rather than an end. If only the airlines maintained similar standards. That rubber mallet head they had the nerve to call poulet? I caught stray pigeons in the Franco-Prussian War that had more flavor.

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[F]or three months, starting in January, Achatz's ever-morphing restaurant, Next, will serve an Adria-inspired menu — a 20-course re-creation of the last 20 years of Adria's legendary El Bulli, which, until closing in July, was often called the finest and most fearless restaurant in the world.

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