Chicago's best chef runs America's most insane bar

Grant Achatz has three big, shiny Michelin stars for his universally adored restaurant Alinea and a hard-won license to break all the rules at his restaurant Next. Which could explain why the two bars he owns, one stacked on top of the other, bear pretty much zero resemblance to any bar we've ever seen.

At The Aviary the hosts talk into earpieces when you arrive, call you a cab when you're taking off, and treat the time in between like kids showing off at a science fair. In one drink, scotch, ginger, lemon, and honey are boiled in what chef Micah Melton calls a “vacuum coffee pot," then cooled with dry ice. There is no “bar" at The Aviary, and there aren't really “bartenders," either; just a line of chefs in an open kitchen, churning out the kind of drinks that are complex enough to be their own course on a tasting menu. (There is, for instance, an Ice Chef.)

Downstairs, The Office offers a more personalized version of the same thing: The club is invitation-only (our advice? be friendly to everyone you meet), and the menus are little more than talking points to help you and the server figure out what you're going to drink that night. A typical first course, a kind of amuse-cocktail, is served in a flask tucked inside a hollowed-out leather-bound book. It sounds twee, we know, but it shouldn't go overlooked that the cocktail is straight-up great and that there's no other bar in the country so actively messing with the Way We Drink Now. Certainly there's no other bar that does it so successfully.

—M.B.