Turns Out People Are Willing To Spend $5000 To Eat At Next

By Anthony Todd in Food on Feb 17, 2012 3:30PM

Earlier this week, buried in an article about the luxury car ad that is the video for El Bulli, we mentioned that Next was going to start a Dutch Auction for charity. A Dutch Auction, you may recall, is an auction where the price starts high and comes down, and people buy whenever the price reaches a level they like. Tables for two at Next were going to start at $4-5000, and we joked about it.

The joke's on us: they're selling like hotcakes.

Check out the calendar. Of the 23 tables available in March, 14 have already sold at full price. For a weekend date, that's $5,000 for two people. 10 of April's 21 available tables have sold at full price. We don't even have a credit card we could put that much money on! If you want a table, you'd better buy it soon. Waiting for the price to drop is probably not a viable strategy.

Our instinctive reaction, given the current economic/political climate, was some variation on "this is why the terrorists hate us/they are the one percent/occupy Alinea." Until we remembered that this is for charity. Frankly, this is a brilliant move by Achatz and Kokonas to capitalize on their hottest-game-in-town status and do a ton of good with it. Rather than running a lame deal, such as donating five percent of one night's take or some other typical promotion, they are allowing people to spend a fortune to skip the line.

They could very easily do this, take the money and go to the Bahamas - and many restauranteurs would. We've occasionally complained (and raved, to be fair) about the Next/Aviary team before, but this is an amazing move. They have already raised $185,000 for the University of Chicago Cancer Center which treated Achatz. We dare any restaurant in town to match that.