Perfect Menu. Now Change It.

When this new restaurant, Next, serves its first customers on April 1, its menu will be painstakingly reproduced from the classical French repertoire: whole lobes of foie gras baked in brioche, clear turtle soup with Madeira, duck pressed and sauced with its own blood and marrow, as served at the Tour d’Argent in Paris for more than 200 years. These dishes, which Mr. Achatz has been refining for a year, will be served for all of three months. Next will then morph into an entirely different restaurant, and again three months after that. Just to set the bar a little higher for himself, and make the creative process more invigorating, each menu for Next will draw from a different place and time. So, rather than the earthbound categories of Japanese, Italian or Peruvian, the food will evoke cloudier concepts: Kyoto in springtime; Palermo in 1949; Hong Kong in far-off 2036. A menu might be designed around a single day — say, the Napa Valley on Oct. 28, 1996, the day Mr. Achatz started work at the French Laundry, where he remained until 2001. Now 36, he is at the top of his profession, having achieved his lifelong ambition last fall when Alinea was awarded three Michelin stars. He has the sober perspective and what-the-hell attitude brought on by a near-death experience. His food at Alinea is already highly inventive; now, Mr. Achatz has set out to reinvent the restaurant itself. The idea for Next was planted on the grim night in 2007 that Mr. Achatz learned that he had an advanced form of oral cancer. Doctors told him he would have to have his tongue amputated, which would mean losing his sense of taste. Numb with shock, he pulled together a dinner of seared duck breast, morels, peas and stock from the walk-in at Alinea: comfort food for Nick Kokonas, his business partner, first groupie and close friend, who was devastated by the diagnosis. Mr. Kokonas, determined to appear upbeat, said it was the kind of strong and simple dish that they could build a new restaurant around when Mr. Achatz recovered. But Mr. Achatz dismissed the idea as not challenging enough, saying that he would be bored after three months. “Well then, every three months we’ll change it,” promised Mr. Kokonas, flooded with emotion and enthusiasm. The two of them — the spare, driven artist and the comfortable, fluid patron — evoke a modern Michelangelo and Medici, bonded by mutual trust and now locked into a very public artistic endeavor. With Next, Mr. Achatz is operating at a level of creative and financial freedom enjoyed by very few artists and only a handful of chefs in history. In the event of a Grant Achatz biopic, Mr. Kokonas, 42, a wealthy former derivatives trader and golf nut with flowing hair and interesting eyewear, could be played by a cleaned-up Johnny Depp. Mr. Achatz himself is a ringer for a red-haired Christian Bale. Mr. Kokonas also edited the massive Alinea cookbook (Ten Speed, 2008), and he and Mr. Achatz wrote the forthcoming book “Life, On the Line” (Gotham), which tracks Mr. Achatz’s history up to the advanced age of 34, when doctors declared him cancer-free. (Eventually, he found an oncologist who agreed to treat him with chemotherapy and radiation instead of surgery.)