This one, Ever, debuts Tuesday in Chicago with a pricey tasting menu and a world-class chef. But on the road to its creation, lofty visions have met hard reality.
The chef de cuisine was looking up mask prices online as the team at Ever discussed how to approach guests entering the new restaurant.
Under normal circumstances this would not be an issue. These customers would be paying at least $285 a head to be transported by peerless hospitality and the creativity of the chef Curtis Duffy, who is making his long-awaited return to Chicago’s high-end dining scene after he and his longtime business partner, Michael Muser, abruptly departed Grace in 2017.
Yet following a state recommendation, the restaurant would require diners to wear masks except when seated at their tables. So the team was contemplating providing each arriving diner with a tote bag containing Ever-branded personal protective equipment such as masks, gloves and hand sanitizer.
Days later, Mr. Muser reconsidered, and not just because the apparent $10-per-guest cost felt significant and most people carry their own masks now. If diners are supposed to “get lost in a world of food and wine,” he said, then maybe the restaurant shouldn’t greet them with: “‘Here’s your first-aid survival kit. Don’t die. Enjoy your dinner!”
In the best of times, building any restaurant from scratch is a fraught venture. But Ever is a hugely ambitious, high-concept dining room with an elaborate tasting menu, set to open Tuesday night in the thick of a public-health crisis that for many people has made the very notion of fine dining seem alien and scary.
As a result, preparations for the opening have become a series of lofty visions and constant, real-world revisions.
“If the world has taught us anything in the past three months, “ Mr. Muser said, “it’s that anything can happen.”
Grace received three Michelin stars for four consecutive years before Mr. Duffy and Mr. Muser left in a clash with the owner. In June 2019, after waiting for a noncompete clause to expire, the two announced plans to open Ever in a new office building in the surging West Loop district. Mr. Muser estimated that backers have spent close to $5 million “to deliver to the city of Chicago the greatest dining room it’s ever seen.”
Its layered plaster walls give the impression of an eroding canyon that leads into a modern room punctuated by vertical wood slats, sliding panels and widely spaced tables. In mid-March, though, with about 60 percent of construction done, Gov. J. B. Pritzker issued a shelter-in-place order that would prohibit restaurant dining for months in Illinois. When, weeks later, the two partners set a July 28 opening date, it was a big roll of the dice.
On June 11, Ever emailed its mailing list to announce that two months’ worth of reservations were now on sale via the restaurant-ticketing platform Tock. Chicago restaurants had been serving outdoor meals for just eight days, and Mayor Lori Lightfoot and Governor Pritzker had yet to announce a date when indoor dining could start. There was also no guarantee that a Covid-19 resurgence wouldn’t prompt another shutdown.
When the city did begin to allow indoor service, on June 26, it capped capacity at 25 percent. Ever cut its seating plan to 40 guests a night, not using all of the dining room’s 14 tables at once, but still: Would enough people feel comfortable spending $285 or more for a 10-course menu that would keep them indoors for about two hours? Is this kind of luxury dining still appealing and viable in the pandemic?
Ever might be the test case. Alinea, currently the city’s only restaurant with three Michelin stars, has been serving takeout comfort food since March, and has made no plans to reopen its Lincoln Park dining room. (AIR: Alinea in Residence, an outdoor pop-up on a West Loop rooftop, opened July 1, though it closed for three days after an employee, who had not worked in several days, reported testing positive for the coronavirus. AIR reopened after co-workers tested negative.)
Nick Kokonas, a co-owner of Alinea and the chief executive of Tock, said the Ever partners “probably don’t have much of a choice as to whether or not to open.
