Good morning. Andrew here. This Saturday we take a look at a new way the wealthy are spending their money: on rock-star chefs that are now going on tour. DealBook contributor Matthew Kronsberg takes us inside this world. Also, DealBook’s Sarah Kessler talks with the man who first defined the experience economy about his latest idea. And make sure to take our quiz. (Was this newsletter forwarded to you? Sign up here.)
Chefs on tour
The biggest Las Vegas residencies are reserved for apex celebrities, performers that can pull in new audiences week after week. This year will bring Phish and Metallica at the Sphere, as well as Kelly Clarkson and Dolly Parton at Caesars Palace’s Colosseum. Then there’s the much-anticipated arrival of Alinea at the Bellagio. Alinea is not the latest spectacle from Cirque du Soleil. It’s the name of the groundbreaking Chicago restaurant where the chef Grant Achatz fuses technically sophisticated cooking with (literal) flights of fancy: think edible helium balloons and dessert that’s served drizzled and splattered on diners’ tables, Jackson Pollock-style. The temporary presence of the Chicago restaurant in Las Vegas is the latest example of a trend sweeping the world of fine dining: Chefs and restaurants are undertaking rock star-style residencies, even tours. And foodies with cash to burn are jockeying to land reservations. At a time when high profile chefs command global audiences, and a K-shaped economy has the wealthiest consumers spending confidently, these roving restaurants add an additional element of spectacle to dinners that are priced like big ticket concerts. In a 2025 global survey of people who earn at least $50,000 a year by American Express Travel, 60 percent of respondents said that they planned to book a trip around entertainment or sporting events that year. Dining experiences increasingly fit into that category. For six weeks this spring, Achatz will take over the restaurant Michael Mina in the Bellagio for a stint nearly as eagerly anticipated — and in some cases pricier — as Metallica’s. Dinner at the Alinea x Bellagio residency, the final stop on the restaurant’s 20th anniversary tour whose stops included Brooklyn, Tokyo, Miami Beach and Beverly Hills, costs $595 per person, before wine, about four times the starting rate for Metallica seats.
Deconstructing artichoke tartsDie-hard diners can find food by Daniel Humm of New York’s Eleven Madison Park at Charleston, South Carolina’s Charleston Place hotel; creations from the visiting Spanish chef Ferran Adrià at the restaurant Mirazur, in the Côte d’Azur town of Menton, France; or cuisine from Copenhagen’s Noma in Los Angeles (a temporary stint that began shortly after an explosive report on Noma’s founding chef’s past abuse of employees prompted several of its sponsors to back out). These months- or weekslong ventures are an evolution of the popular pop-up dining experience, which usually lasts just a night or two. The longer timeline offers chefs the opportunity to be more ambitious, and to recoup costs. Take one of this year’s most hotly anticipated tickets, “M20: 20 Years of Mirazur.” For the 20th anniversary of his Michelin three-star restaurant, Mirazur, chef Mauro Colagreco invited Adrià to create new interpretations of some of its best known dishes. For one course, Adrià deconstructed the restaurant’s famed artichoke tart, reimagining it as an elaborate savory pastry. Also on the menu is the famed chocolate box from Adrià’s El Bulli, which closed in 2011, but is still considered to be among the most influential restaurants of the last half-century. Preparation for the residency, which runs from April 1 through mid-May, began more than nine months ago, said Colagreco. “It has already mobilized the entire Mirazur ecosystem — from the kitchen to research, creativity and support teams.”
Daunting logisticsWhile Mirazur already has a world-class facility and staff capable of realizing Adrià’s vision, most residencies come with a slew of expense-adding logistical challenges. For Noma’s $1,500-per-person Los Angeles residency, which started on March 11 and runs until June 26, roughly 130 employees relocated from Denmark to California. For others, expenses can include shipping custom service ware, and even remodeling. “We spent close to $400,000 on the build-out,” said Achatz of Alinea’s engagement at the Maybourne Beverly Hills last summer, adding, “We hired a Hollywood production team.” The 19-course menus were presented as screenplays. Diners — 110 of them per night, or about 2,000 over the course of the residency — shuttled between eight locations, inspired by iconic films, during the evening. Some diners shuttled even farther: Achatz knows of a few who have attended each of Alinea’s residencies so far. As high-profile dining experiences have become travel destinations, hotels have become eager supporters. The Wyndham Grand Barbados Sam Lord’s Castle Resort is bringing Caribbean chefs who have made their names around the world back to the region for a residency series called The Navigator’s Table, running through the end of the year. The Nimb Hotel in Copenhagen will be hosting seven Michelin-starred restaurants for roughly monthlong residencies in its 20-seat pagoda this year. During Daniel Humm’s residency at The Charleston Place hotel, other star chefs including Sean Brock and James London are scheduled to create their own pop-ups within the pop-up.
Real-time auditionsResidencies can help chefs expand their footprints. After a pandemic-induced contraction in his restaurant group, “we’re in this phase now where it’s time to grow a bit,” said Achatz. Setting up shop with a potential hotel partner for several weeks can serve as a “real-time interview,” he added, with ample opportunities to “meet the executive management, see how their ops work, and see if it would be a good fit.” That’s not to say he sees residencies as just a stop on the way to more brick-and-mortar restaurants. Along with new restaurants, said Achatz, “we’re absolutely working on right now a completely different concept that travels consistently all the time.” It’s something Achatz has been talking about since at least 2002, when he presented the idea at Madrid Fusion, a culinary gathering. “I remember being onstage, and at the very end I asked everyone why a restaurant had to have a permanent address. Why couldn’t we be like a circus troupe or a rock band that went on tour?”
A judge temporarily halted the Pentagon’s labeling of Anthropic as a security risk. The move by the Department of Defense to end Anthropic’s work with the federal government stemmed from a dispute over the company’s limits on using its technology for surveillance and autonomous weapons. Judge Rita F. Lin of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California stayed the Pentagon’s action, writing in her ruling that “nothing in the governing statute supports the Orwellian notion that an American company may be branded a potential adversary and saboteur of the U.S. for expressing disagreement with the government.” Investors are losing patience with the war in Iran. The S&P 500 slid for its fifth straight week, its worst weekly losing streak in about four years. Oil prices have remained elevated and mortgage rates have climbed since the start of the war. On Thursday, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development raised its inflation forecast to average 4.2 percent this year. Meta and YouTube lost a landmark social media addiction case. A jury found that the companies harmed a young user with design features that were addictive and led to her mental health distress. Meta and Google plan to appeal. More big deals: SpaceX lifted its I.P.O. expectations. OpenAI shuttered Sora. Wall Street workers had another bang-up year. And for the first time ever, the president’s signature will appear alongside that of the Treasury secretary on U.S. paper currency. Beyond the ‘experience economy’In a 1999 book coauthored by B. Joseph Pine II, “The Experience Economy,” he argued that customers increasingly desired not just goods or services, but memorable experiences. Now, Pine says, consumer expectations are shifting again: “People increasingly desire, not just memorable experiences, but transformative experiences.” DealBook’s Sarah Kessler talked with Pine about the shift, which he covers in his latest book, “The Transformation Economy,” and what it means for businesses. Why is it no longer enough to be a part of the experience economy? You can continue to sell whatever you provide today, including experiences, and there’s a ready market for those. But the increasing opportunity is to go beyond that. Is the difference between a transformation versus an experience mostly about how you frame it? Experiences engage you and they leave a memory. If you didn’t create a memory, it wasn’t an experience. Transformations, however, last through time. That is when there is some specific outcome that you achieved, generally not through one life-changing experience but a series of experiences. You can think about going to a fitness center. You want to become more fit. You may define that as having washboard abs or as losing 20 pounds or gaining muscle tone — however you want to define it. That is your aspiration and you’re hiring that fitness center to help you achieve it over time. Are gyms by definition transformational? Or is there a version of a gym that is part of a transformation economy and a version that is not? Any business that’s in the business of helping people be healthy, wealthy, and wise is in the transformation business. But not all businesses recognize that. And fitness centers actually charge at the experience level, right? They charge you a membership fee. They charge for time. How do you charge for transformations? You want to charge for the demonstrated outcomes that your customers achieve. All the activities you do — the services, the experiences, the goods, whatever — doesn’t matter unless they achieve those outcomes. McKinsey just announced in the pages of the Harvard Business Review that it is increasingly charging for outcomes because people are unsure of what they’re really going to make of A.I. So you think A.I. is part of what’s driving the trend toward the transformation economy? I think A.I. will push people toward the transformation economy because it will be a factor in commoditization. It will allow companies to do things with higher productivity, with lower costs, and therefore be able to out-compete you with higher margins or lower prices. And that will tend to commoditize you. At the same time, it can supercharge you. Because it enables you to customize your offerings. Customization automatically turns goods into services, services into experiences. It’s an experience that’s so appropriate for a particular person, exactly what they need at this moment in time. That’s where you can’t help but deliver a life-changing experience — a transformation. Quiz: In high demandThis question comes from a recent article in The Times. Click an answer to see if you’re right. (The link will be free.) War in the Middle East has scrambled trade as Iran has effectively shut down the Strait of Hormuz, a critical waterway, and production sites for key materials have become targets. As chip makers scramble to meet demand for artificial intelligence, they’re keeping a close eye on potential shortages of which material that’s critical for manufacturing semiconductors? We hope you’ve enjoyed this newsletter, which is made possible through subscriber support. Subscribe to The New York Times. Thanks for reading! We’ll see you Monday. We’d like your feedback. Please email thoughts and suggestions to dealbook@nytimes.com.
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