Next, Ruxbin Make GQ Best New Restaurants List

By Chuck Sudo in Food on Feb 16, 2012 5:40PM

Image Credit: Anthony Todd/Chicagoist

The praise continues for Next. GQ magazine named the Grant Achatz "time travel" culinary experience, already the most-talked about restaurant in America as one of its best new restaurants.

The capsule review by Michael Paterniti eschews the hyperbole normally written of Next and gets down to brass tacks.

"(T)hrilling as it may have been to connect the dots of global cuisine and wormhole through culinary history, the restaurant seemed a work in progress, more clinically perfect than emotionally epiphanic, more broadly conceived than specific. Now that the kitchen and waitstaff have worked out some of the kinks, one begins to sense the fuller promise: the ability to recover lost food and tastes, and with them perhaps some satchel, too, of lost memories."

Next isn't the only local restaurant to make GQ's list. Ruxbin, which made our food and drink staff's list of favorite restaurant bathrooms, was given propers by Mike Benoist for its food.

"Time and energy take the place of overused, overpriced ingredients. Squid stuffed with sausage gets depth and heat from a chile paste imported from a farm in Tennessee. Cream of Wheat, enriched and amplified by lamb drippings and brown butter, is maybe the best thing I ate all year. But when a dish reaches near perfection—like the wildly popular chicken and waffles—it's cut from the menu and brought back on special occasions so the kitchen can defy the odds from scratch."

Ruxbin has only 32 seats, but it may be easier to dine there than the virtual rugby scrum that has become the demand for tickets to Next.