Sixteen S Summer Menu Actually Is A Day At The Beach

• Michael Gebert
• Either the new menu for Sixteen or a really big game of Risk

A few months back I wrote about the spring menu at Sixteen in the Trump Tower—if only there were an easy way to identify which building that is—and one of the things that was most interesting to me was how chef Thomas Lents, pastry chef Aya Fukai, and wine director Dan Pilkey are reacting to the desire for a higher degree of conceptuality and theater in fine dining. Restaurants like Alinea, Moto, and Next make fine dining a show as much as a meal, and Lents is at the forefront of chefs trying to tell a unique story through food—without, as he put it about a menu that was inspired by Chicago architecture, making it so literal it’s like you’re “eating Legos.”