Get Ready To Leave This World With Chef Jordan Kahn's New Restaurant Vespertine

At Vespertine, Kahn’s diners won’t know if the produce is local. They won’t even know what planet it’s from, thanks to his avant-garde 20-something-course tasting menu with zero points of reference to familiar Earthly cuisines.

“If I were to say, ‘Oh, this comes from a local thing,’” Kahn told me as we walked through the still-unfinished building last month, “that would be very adverse to our mythology. [The food] doesn’t come from local—it comes from a place that doesn’t exist.”

“The music might be the most important part of the whole experience,” Kahn said. “The sound and the space [are] the transportive mechanism."

the last track will play in the 22-seat dining room where you will ultimately eat your spaceship food while sitting on a surprisingly comfortable steel-and-wool banquette, attended by servers dressed in custom, androgynous uniforms that are very Rick Owens-does-Lord of the Rings cosplay.

The idea [for Destroyer] came about after Kahn began working on Vespertine and saw that the surrounding offices had no nearby lunch options. “I said, ‘Oh, these people don't have anything,’” he remembers. “Great. We’ll open something for them.” Destroyer thus became the avant-garde Panera Bread stand-in for Nike and Alejandro Iñárritu, whose offices Kahn plans to eventually cater.

The building...“is a machine artifact from an extraterrestrial planet that was left here like a billion years ago by a species that were moon worshippers.” The labels on your fancy wine glasses will be etched off, because “those are all markers that remind people that they’re still on Earth.” Vespertine has a feminine energy, and the general manager has her own unique dress and a custom-made ceramic cuff for her arm, which Kahn gushes over. He tells me the building "has its own gravity."

“This is my life’s work,” Kahn tells me matter-of-factly. “This is the most important thing I’ll ever do other than having children.”

Vespertine will certainly be a far cry from New York’s Eleven Madison Park, reigning best restaurant in the world according to San Pellegrino and critical darling where the service is so attentive you wonder whether someone might offer to accompany you to the bathroom. In training his staff, Kahn says, he teaches them to exist as little as possible: “I want you to appear as a ghost, and I want you to disappear. I want you to take Eleven Madison Park and make it the opposite.”