Alinea Las Vegas Residency at Bellagio, April 2026
Alinea is bringing its 20th anniversary tour to Las Vegas, Nevada, with a limited residency at Bellagio Resort and Casino from April 16, 2026, through May 31, 2026. Chef Grant Achatz and his team will take over Michael Mina at Bellagio for the run, positioning this as a finite, ticketed dining window rather than a typical reservation cycle.
Tickets are scheduled to go on sale Tuesday, February 24, 2026, at 900 a.m. PST. For travelers, the key decision is timing if this dinner is the anchor for a Las Vegas weekend, it should be treated like a concert or fight night on the Strip, you lock the seat first, then you build lodging, flights, and backup dining around it.
The Bellagio stop is described as the final leg of Alinea's anniversary tour after sellouts in cities including Brooklyn, New York, Miami Beach, Florida, Beverly Hills, California, Tokyo, Japan, and Big Sky, Montana. That matters because it signals demand behavior, the tour has already proven it can move inventory fast in multiple markets, and Las Vegas adds a high concentration of destination diners and special occasion travelers.
Alinea Bellagio Residency, What Changed for Las Vegas Diners
This is not Alinea "opening" a second permanent restaurant in Las Vegas. It is a time boxed residency staged inside Michael Mina at Bellagio, with Achatz and the Alinea team in residence and collaborating with Bellagio chefs and local purveyors. The on site element is the point, the meal is intended to respond to Las Vegas and the host venue rather than copy the Chicago menu straight across.
Operationally, that usually means two things for travelers. First, the booking pressure concentrates into a narrow set of dates, so availability risk is higher than a normal Strip fine dining plan where you can often shift by a day or trade one steakhouse for another. Second, this kind of residency tends to create a second wave of demand for adjacent experiences at the same property, pre dinner bars, post dinner lounges, and other "only in Vegas" add ons that get snapped up once the main event is locked.
If you are flying in for a single dinner, Harry Reid International Airport (LAS) is the obvious gateway, but the bigger constraint is not the airport, it is the seat. Build the trip like a fixed time appointment with very little substitution value.
Who This Dinner Window Fits Best, and Who Should Skip It
This is best for travelers who actually want the Alinea style of dining, a highly structured, modernist tasting experience where the meal is meant to produce surprise and emotion, not just great ingredients and technique. Achatz has been explicit that the work is about how a restaurant functions inside culture, which is a signal that the experience is designed as theater as much as cuisine.
It is also a clean fit for milestone trips where the dinner is the centerpiece and you are willing to design the weekend around one fixed time slot. If you are already paying peak weekend pricing for rooms, shows, and transportation, the incremental pain of committing early is lower, and the upside is higher because you avoid the "we came to Vegas and missed the one thing we cared about" failure mode.
You should probably skip it if your Las Vegas plan is fluid, budget sensitive, or built around spontaneous dining. A ticketed residency removes flexibility, and it can force expensive rework if flights slip, if you decide to change weekends, or if you are traveling with a group where one person's schedule changes. The tradeoff is simple: certainty on the headline experience versus flexibility for everything else.
What Travelers Should Do Before They Book
Treat February 24, 2026, at 9:00 a.m. PST as the real decision point. If you want this dinner, plan to buy tickets first, then book the rest of the trip around the confirmed date and time. Bellagio's announcement says tickets can be secured online, or via Bellagio Concierge by phone, which gives you a fallback path if one channel is overloaded at launch.
If you are building a broader Vegas itinerary, protect your downside with refundable lodging and a second dinner plan. Even if you land the tickets, you still want a contingency if a flight misconnect forces a same day arrival change. If you do not land tickets, you do not want to be stuck with a nonrefundable weekend that was priced as if you already did. For hotel timing and demand signals in 2026, these are useful baselines to keep open while you plan: Las Vegas World Cup Hotel Deals and Promo Codes and Drink Las Vegas Festival At MGM Resorts Sep 2026.
Set a personal threshold for how far you are willing to shift dates. If your only viable travel window is one weekend in late April or May, you should act fast because the ability to move later is limited. If you can flex across multiple weeks, you can try for your preferred night, then pivot to a different date if your first choice is gone, but you should still expect the best slots to disappear first.
Finally, plan the day like you would plan a high consequence reservation. Give yourself buffer time between arrival and dinner, avoid tight airport to hotel turnarounds, and avoid stacking another timed commitment right after the meal. The cost of "running late" in Las Vegas is not just the missed seat, it is the domino effect of rebooking flights and rooms at peak pricing.
Why This Residency Is Likely To Sell Out Fast
The mechanism is scarcity plus destination demand. Alinea is widely recognized as a special occasion restaurant, and a limited run residency compresses that demand into a short calendar window. Bellagio adds a constant stream of travelers who already arrive primed to spend on dining as entertainment, which increases the share of guests who will treat the ticket like an event, not like a meal.
First order effects show up as immediate ticket sell through and a faster shift from "which night do we want" to "what is left." Second order effects hit the rest of the trip: prime time tables at neighboring venues tighten, lounges and pre fixe options become harder to walk into, and refundable room inventory at center Strip properties can get repriced once demand signals become obvious. Even travelers who do not book the Alinea dinner can feel the demand spillover if they are trying to dine in the same corridor during peak weekend windows.
There is also a branding logic at play. Bellagio is positioning this as a capstone culinary event, and Achatz is framing Las Vegas as a city willing to take creative risk at scale. That pairing is designed to create cultural gravity, which is exactly the kind of story that drives high intent travelers to commit earlier than they otherwise would.