Alinea Group Is Replacing Roister With a New Restaurant After Eight Years

Roister, the most casual member of the Alinea Group family, will close this weekend ending an eight-year run in Fulton Market. The announcement comes a month after new Alinea Jason Weingarten took over after co-founder Nick Kokonas sold his ownership stake in the company.

The restaurant’s last day of service will be Saturday, November 16. Plans are to replace Roister with a new restaurant called Fire which should open on Wednesday, November 20. Fire will exclusively serve a tasting menu with seven or eight courses, says Weingarten. The new restaurant will celebrate different open-fire cooking techniques beyond the hearth cooking Roister was built around. When Roister opened, the trend of wood-fired cooking at restaurants had just begun to emerge. Roister’s team rode those flames in 2017 to numerous best new restaurant lists and earned a Michelin-star rating from 2016 through 2019.

In 2019, Alinea Group created a menu with prime rib and fried fish inspired by Michigan supper clubs which was served exclusively in Roister’s basement. Thus, the St. Clair Supper Club was born. Weingarten says St. Clair and its Midwest kitsch will remain in the basement after Roister’s closure. The main floor will be refreshed to make room for Fire.

“I’ve been wanting to create something new,” Alinea co-founder and chef Grant Achatz writes in an email. “In my travels, some of my favorite meals have been in restaurants that use the fire in a dedicated, focused way. It was time to try our hand at this level of commitment to the fire and explore its possibilities within the refined rusticity. We think a tasting menu format is best suited to experience the wide range of nuances the hearth provides.”

Alinea Group/Matthew Gilson

Achatz says they’ll use open fire “to transform the tastes, textures, and aromas of ingredients,” and calls cooking with an open flame a “constraint” that breeds imagination: “I’m excited to share that creativity with Chicago and the world,” he adds.

They’re treating fire and fuel — like wood — as seasonings. Fruit woods have long been used in barbecue, but Achtaz will use plant scraps from Alinea’s other restaurants — think banana peels, corn cobs, popcorn kernels, fennel branches, coconut shells, dried flowers, and more. Leather and burlap will also be used. The star chef will develop the menu with Roister executive chef Adair Canacasco: “Even dessert will be open flame,” says Weingarten.

Fire will use methods including ember cooking, ash-salt crusting, Patagonia-style asado crosses, spit roasting, coal searing, Flambadou fat rendering, different intensity levels of hearth dehydration, branding with different medieval style hearth tools, burnishing, singeing, alternative fuel sources, and iron presses. Achatz writes the new restaurant will show customers that cooking with an open fire extends beyond searing flames and heavy smoke: “While those will be present in some courses, we are utilizing many existing methods while creating new ones to compose a menu with layers of complexity derived from fire,” he also writes.

The Alinea Group

The Alinea Group

Fire will accept some walk-ins, keeping some of the casualness of its predecessor. The patio will also remain, giving Chicago a rare outdoor space that offers a tasting menu along Fulton Market.

Beyond Promethean myth, Weingarten speaks about fire’s importance in society. Not many people don’t realize fire allowed humans to feast upon a larger variety of foods which led to increased brain development.

“To chef Achatz fire is the tool,” Weingarten says. “If you think of an amazing artist, they need a paintbrush. If you think of a musician, they need — likely — a piano to compose. For chef Achatz, he wanted to do something really focused on the original tool, which was fire.”

Roister’s debut in March 2016 marked a departure for Kokonas and Achatz. They wanted to prove a casual restaurant wouldn’t lead to a ho-hum experience. Loud music would be pumped into the dining room. The restaurant provided a stage for chef Andrew Brochu whose gourmet fried chicken wowed guests, redefining what belonged on a fine dining menu in Chicago while forcing Alinea fans to question if they had antiquated standards.

Of course, this was the era when reservations for any Alinea Group restaurant would be instantly snatched up, with tables needing to be booked months in advance. Roister would hold back tables for walk-ins, something unheard of for Alinea. Roister was Alinea’s fourth venue, joining Next Restaurant and the Aviary which opened in 2011 down the street along Fulton Market.

Nick Murway/Eater Chicago

Weingarten says Roister could find life outside of Chicago as there’s interest in bringing Alinea Group restaurants to other markets. Roister could be scalable. On Roister’s opening night in 2016 at the restaurant, Kokonas would gush about the fried chicken, which was sourced from D’Artagnan. The chickens, almost mythically, were fed scraps from upscale restaurants like Thomas Keller’s Per Se. The new guy shares the same sentiments.

“Roister has — and I wasn’t biased previously — the best fried chicken that I’ve ever had,” Weingarten says. “Now that I’m biased I still think that.”

Alinea has never closed a restaurant in Chicago. A New York location of the Aviary closed in 2020 after a three-year run. Two announced projects in Chicago never progressed. Alinea had plans for the St. Regis Hotel, inside the space that now houses Lettuce Entertain You Enterprises’ Tre Dita. Alinea was also supposed to collaborate with Lettuce Entertain You to revive Ambria, a French restaurant. The pandemic impacted both those projects, and now chef Stephen Gillanders is poised to move S.K.Y. from Pilsen to the Lincoln Park space.

Fire is the first project from the Alinea Group since the pandemic started in 2020.

“The meaning of Alinea is ‘a new train of thought’ and we are relentless when it comes to creativity and innovation,” Achatz writes. “At Next, we bring three new concepts to life each year, but they are limited runs. I’ve been thinking a lot about fire. There’s something transformational about fire. It uses all our senses.”

Fire, 951 W. Fulton Market, planned for a Wednesday, November 20 opening, reservations via Tock.