- Michael Gebert
- Majestic time-lapse views of day and night play over the real thing at Sixteen.
Once restaurants had floor shows full of dancers and strolling Gypsy violinists and waitstaff dressed like they were in the Habsburg army. Then suddenly such things were gauche, and dining was straight faced and serious for a couple of generations. In the last couple of decades this began to change again; the conceptual games of Alinea and the magic tricks of Moto and, more recently, the whole-meal concept dinners of Next were efforts to bring entertainment back into dinner, to make the table itself a show, art exhibition and personal vision and mind bender.
- Michael Gebert
- The “Night and Day” menus at Sixteen
Michael Gebert: So you’re doing conceptual themes with your menu now. How did that come about?
And yeah, there’s benefits to that in that people come in four times a year now, as opposed to just coming in on their birthday, for instance.
Do you actually have windows in the kitchen?
- Michael Gebert
- An amuse-bouche for day.
So going to the “Night and Day” theme—how did you differentiate the food between night and day? It seems like, the same things are growing at both times of the day.
I think we’re getting better at that. That’s one of the hard things about cooking, is that idea of trying to not use a sledgehammer to get your point across. We learned a lot in the “Chicago” menu because that was about storytelling, we were literally doing a dish that looked like the Mies van der Rohe building next door. If you make it too literal, it’s like eating Legos. That’s not right.
