Last week, Will and I had a moment of complete insanity and indulgence.

A friend was able to score 4 tickets to Next restaurant and invited us to go. And even though it was a total splurge (I’m pretty sure we could go on a weekend vacation for the amount we spent), it was absolutely worth it.

Have you heard of Next? It’s a Grant Achatz restaurant (of Alinea fame), but the cool thing is that it changes every three months. When we went, the theme was Sicily. Other concepts from the past include El Bulli, Childhood and Paris 1906. You have to buy tickets ahead of time–and they are NOT easy to get. So you understand why we HAD to go.

Everything I ate (and drank) was delicious. I even ate some swordfish, and I HATE fish. I would actually very much appreciate it if every single fish would disappear from the earth and never return because they are ugly, smelly, slimy, scaly horrid creatures. I don’t even care about the environmental ramifications that would result. But the swordfish did not make me gag, and that says a lot.

The very best thing we ate was the pork shoulder above. (Sorry for the blurry photos, I didn’t have my good camera with me.) It was served with a spoon – that’s how soft and melt-in-your-mouth juicy it was. So crazy. And amazing. Cray-mazing! See? It inspired me to create a whole new word just to describe it!

I honestly can’t remember everything we ate–there were a lot of courses, all of which included wine. But I do remember that this was a blood orange granita. Or taste bud heaven, as I like to call it.

And for dessert, they brought out some sort of insanely delicious cake that used to be made by Sicilian nuns, plus some other assorted treats.

Here’s what the menu looked like. But unless you can read Italian, it’s not super informative.

In addition to the amazing mouth party we were treated to, the service was also excellent. We got tons of information and history about each dish that came out, and our wine glasses were never empty.

Cray-mazing, I tell you. Simply cray-mazing.