Eleven Madison Park, the world’s first Michelin three-star vegan restaurant, is celebrating its twenty fifth anniversary with a retrospective, all-vegan menu for the month of October.
While EMP didn’t start off plant-based, the roots were there — and sometimes, because the late Steve Jobs once said, one can only look back to be able to connect the dots to the current.
Chef Daniel Humm — who recently released his fifth cook book, “Eat More Plants. A Chef’s Journal” — is serving up a retrospective menu that features a carrot tartare that’s, essentially, flavored like steak tartare, with mini ingredients diners mix on the table.
Because the meal progresses — from $195 per person for the bar menu as much as $365 per person for 9 to 10 courses within the dining room — diners can taste the evolution in Humm’s cooking that eventually lets plants shine on their very own.
The dishes also include bread and sunflower butter, white truffle tortellini with chestnut and ‘ricotta’ tonburi with avocado and cucumber and a grilled maitake mushroom skewer with juniper and pine.
Eleven Madison Park is celebrating the launch of Chef Daniel Humm’s fifth cook book, Eat More Plants. A Chef’s Journal.Brian Zak/NY Post
“This restaurant has been my life,” Humm tells Side Dish. “There’s no place on the planet where I’ve spent more time. I never thought 19 years ago, moving to Latest York, that this is able to be my only job. It’s been a winding road, with ups and downs and twists and turns, but that a restaurant could possibly be relevant for 25 years — I feel blessed to have this energy, passion and interest within the work we’re doing.”
Restaurateur Danny Meyer launched EMP in 1998. Humm and Will Guidara, who operated the front of the restaurant, put their stamp on it in 2006, and acquired it outright from Meyer in 2011, earning praise because the world’s best restaurant, known for extravagant dishes like lavender duck.
By 2019, Humm bought out Guidara. The restaurant was humming along until the pandemic, when EMP shut down during lockdown. It changed into a commissary with ReThink Food, which was founded by an EMP alumn and where Humm is a founding board member.
Humm reopened EMP in 2021 as a plant-based superb dining eatery. After a rough patch, it soared, receiving three Michelin stars last 12 months. Fans over time have included Madonna, Angelina Jolie, Questlove and Trevor Noah.
The retrospective menu features a carrot tartare that’s, essentially, flavored like steak tartare, with mini ingredients diners mix on the table.
“There have been many chapters, from French Brasserie and contemporary European cooking to digging into what’s Latest York City cuisine and its traditions,” Humm said.
The ultimate plant-based shift “didn’t occur overnight,” Humm said. “We were pushing forward towards plant-based cooking all along, nevertheless it wouldn’t have been possible before the pandemic. By then, the restaurant industry was at such a low. We lost our team and we felt like there wasn’t that much left to lose, so we had the courage to begin something latest,” Humm said.
Humm has also proven that a plant-based menu could be economically viable.
“The menu has attracted an enormous shift in our audience. This offers us hope that a plant-based menu has a spot within the canon of superb dining. Change is all the time gradual and takes time,” Humm said.
He adds that food is commonly repurposed to chop down on waste — produce trim can find yourself in cocktails. A pop-up bakery, Bake It Nice (a play on Humm’s Make It Nice hospitality company), incorporates items like sunflowers and carrots into the pastries, and has worked with ReThink to offer meals to communities facing food insecurity since 2020.
“We aren’t anti-meat but we’re pro-planet and the one strongest thing we are able to do as individuals for the betterment of our planet is to decide on what’s on our plate,” Humm says. “All the things matters. Each meal. That’s a part of the means of change. It won’t be perfect, you’ll be able to’t get all of it right, but we must always all inch our way towards this latest reality and now we have to be happy with learning to try latest things as individuals and business owners because without that, no change will ever occur.”
Humm’s latest book, published by Gerhard Steidl, is a group of drawings and handwritten thoughts as he transitioned EMP to vegan fine-dining — an concept that he developed through the pandemic.
Humm and Steidl are slated to debate that radical conversion on the 92nd St. Y on Dec. 13.
