Eleven Madison Park, the world’s first Michelin three-star vegan restaurant, is celebrating its 25th 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, as the late Steve Jobs once said, one can only look back in order to connect the dots to the present.
Chef Daniel Humm — who recently released his fifth cook book, “Eat More Plants. A Chef’s Journal” — is serving up a retrospective menu that includes a carrot tartare that is, essentially, flavored like steak tartare, with mini ingredients diners mix at the table.
As the meal progresses — from $195 per person for the bar menu up to $365 per person for 9 to 10 courses in the dining room — diners can taste the evolution in Humm’s cooking that eventually lets plants shine on their 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.
“This restaurant has been my life,” Humm tells Side Dish. “There’s no place in the world where I’ve spent more time. I never thought 19 years ago, moving to New York, that this would be my only job. It’s been a winding road, with ups and downs and twists and turns, but that a restaurant could be relevant for 25 years — I feel blessed to have this energy, passion and interest in the work we are 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 bought it outright from Meyer in 2011, earning praise as 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 turned 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 fine dining eatery. After a rough patch, it soared, receiving three Michelin stars last year. Fans over the years have included Madonna, Angelina Jolie, Questlove and Trevor Noah.
“There have been many chapters, from French Brasserie and contemporary European cooking to digging into what is New York City cuisine and its traditions,” Humm said.
The final plant-based shift “didn’t happen overnight,” Humm said. “We were pushing forward towards plant-based cooking all along, but it wouldn’t have been imaginable 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 start something new,” Humm said.
Humm has also proven that a plant-based menu can be economically viable.
“The menu has attracted a huge shift in our audience. This gives us hope that a plant-based menu has a place in the canon of fine dining. Change is always gradual and takes time,” Humm said.
He adds that food is often repurposed to cut down on waste — produce trim can end up 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 provide meals to communities facing food insecurity since 2020.
“We aren’t anti-meat but we are pro-planet and the single most powerful thing we can do as individuals for the betterment of our planet is to choose what is on our plate,” Humm says. “Everything matters. Every single meal. That’s part of the process of change. It won’t be perfect, you can’t get it all right, but we should all inch our way towards this new reality and we have to be ok with learning to try new things as individuals and business owners because without that, no change will ever happen.”
Humm’s new book, published by Gerhard Steidl, is a collection of drawings and handwritten thoughts as he transitioned EMP to vegan fine-dining — an idea that he developed during the pandemic.
Humm and Steidl are slated to discuss that radical conversion at the 92nd St. Y on Dec. 13.
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