The person with the hammer treats every little thing as a nail, the saying goes. One thing like that appears to be afflicting Eleven Madison Park in its new vegan incarnation. The restaurant’s chef and proprietor, Daniel Humm, is utilizing the abilities he dropped at meat and seafood to whack away at greens.
Nearly not one of the predominant components style fairly like themselves within the 10-course, $335 menu the restaurant unwrapped this June after a 15-month pandemic hiatus. Some are so clearly standing in for meat or fish that you simply nearly really feel sorry for them.
We should always have seen one thing like this coming when Mr. Humm announced the animal-free policy in Might. Eleven Madison Park is without doubt one of the most carefully watched eating places on the planet, drawing press protection even for its minor changes. This one, not minor, made headlines around the world. Many articles quoted a line from Mr. Humm that gave his resolution a tender glow of social accountability: “The present meals system is solely not sustainable, in so some ways.”
Buried in his announcement was a less-noticed passage that foreshadowed issues to return. “It’s essential to us that regardless of the components, the dish should stay as much as a few of my favorites of the previous,” he wrote. “It’s an incredible problem to create one thing as satisfying because the lavender-honey glazed duck, or the butter poached lobster, recipes that we perfected.”
In tonight’s efficiency, the position of the duck will probably be performed by a beet, doing issues no root vegetable ought to be requested to do. Over the course of three days it’s roasted and dehydrated earlier than being wrapped in fermented greens and stuffed right into a clay pot, as if it have been being despatched to the underworld with the pharaoh.
The pot is wheeled out to your desk, the place a server smashes the clay with a ball-peen hammer. The beet is cleaned of pottery shards and transferred to a plate with a red-wine and beet-juice discount that’s oddly pungent in a means that will remind you of Worcestershire sauce.
They used to do a similar beet act at Agern, a New Nordic restaurant in Grand Central Terminal, roasting it inside a crust of salt and vegetable ash. That beet tasted like a beet, however extra so. The one at Eleven Madison Park tastes like Lemon Pledge and smells like a burning joint.
I believe that the summer-squash dish that seems midway via the menu someway descends from the butter-poached lobster. I don’t know what else accounts for the viscous liquid that appears and kind of seems like browned butter, however clearly isn’t. It tastes of vadouvan and one thing else, one thing harsh and sharp that overpowers the nugget of sesame-seed tofu hidden inside a squash blossom.
Repeatedly, delicate flavors are hijacked by some harsh, unseen ingredient. Marinated wedges of heirloom tomatoes have a pumped-up, distorted taste, like tomatoes run via a wah-wah pedal. Rice porridge beneath crisp, pale-green stems of celtuce has a tangy, sharp undertone that one other restaurant may get from a grating of aged pecorino. A tartare of minced cucumbers, honeydew melon and smoked daikon is suffused with an acrid depth.
The servers supply few explanations for the doctored flavors, and no warnings, both. The components look regular till you’re taking a chew and notice you’ve entered the plant kingdom’s uncanny valley.
Mr. Humm used to get purer, deeper outcomes out of greens earlier than the restaurant went vegan. Perhaps he ought to carry again the celery root steamed in a pig bladder.
His cooking has all the time been process-intensive, however there appears to be one thing new at play, most certainly an effort so as to add umami with fermented liquids wealthy in glutamates. Eleven Madison Park now employs a “fermentation sous-chef,” Brock Middleton, following the lead of different yeast-loving eating places, together with Noma, in Copenhagen, which retains home-brewed garums and different magic juices round to offer an invisible carry.
At Noma, these sauces are administered so subtly that you simply don’t discover something bizarre happening; you simply suppose you’ve by no means tasted something so extraordinary in your life. At Eleven Madison Park, sure dishes are as refined as a grimy martini. It’s potential that a number of the particular sauce is so concentrated that an additional drop or two can push issues excessive. This might clarify why a half-eggplant by which glazed slices of pickled eggplant trip like passengers in a canoe had an intoxicating richness the primary time I ate it and a cloying heaviness the following.
A few the kitchen’s efforts to get vegetation to imitate one thing else succeed. When it occurs, all doubts evaporate for a couple of minutes.
Tonburi, made out of Japanese summer-cypress seeds, arrives on chipped ice inside an vintage silver caviar bowl that appears as if it belonged to the Romanovs. The seeds, darkish and spherical and glossy, are generally stated to style like broccoli. At Eleven Madison Park, they’ve been seasoned with kelp. A chef may say the kelp provides umami. I’d say it tastes scrumptious, and I would add that its taste brings up deep, partly unconscious associations with the ocean. It’s a sleight-of-hand trick, however your style buds settle for it rather than the fishy brininess of sturgeon roe.
There’s a plant-based model of the restaurant’s fantastic bread, like a savory croissant rolled right into a crisp golden swirl. Initially kneaded with cow butter, the laminated dough has been rejiggered with butter made out of sunflower seeds, and it’s an unqualified success. So is the nonbutter that arrives with the bread, molded into the form of a sunflower, vivid yellow with a darkish eye of tangy fermented sunflower seeds within the heart.
If the pastry kitchen, beneath Laura Cronin, is straining beneath the problem of working with out butter and eggs, it doesn’t present. There’s a captivating two-tone pretzel — darkish chocolate on one aspect and toasted sesame paste on the opposite — that hits you want a a lot improved Reese’s peanut-butter cup. A fair lovelier duet comes within the last course, a coconut semifreddo beneath frozen elderflower syrup swirled with blueberry compote.
There could also be extra bartending ability and expertise at Eleven Madison Park than at every other restaurant within the metropolis. The brand new mission has spurred the bar to contemporary achievements, with a lineup of cocktails that make scrumptious and generally unbelievable use of vegetation. A distant relative of the old school incorporates purple bell peppers; for a drink known as merely Sesame they’ve even discovered the best way to make clarified milk punch with the “whey” from sesame tofu.
Eleven Madison Park has skilled its viewers to anticipate “limitless reinvention,” considered one of 11 touchstone phrases and phrases on an indication that hangs within the restaurant’s huge and exact kitchen. Every time the restaurant has overhauled itself — the cryptic grid menu, the magic tricks on the desk, the themed New York City menu — it has gone overboard, then pulled back to a much less excessive place.
Its expertise for overcoming its personal missteps was one purpose I gave it four stars in its final assessment in The New York Occasions, in 2015. (I’m not giving star rankings whereas eating places are nonetheless being rattled by the pandemic.) With time, Mr. Humm might cease overcompensating for ditching the animal merchandise, too. Beets aren’t excellent at pretending to be meat, however their capacity to style like beets is unequalled.
The nervousness, political upheavals, protests — even the boredom — of the pandemic interval have conspired to supply an pressing sense that folks with energy, within the restaurant enterprise as a lot as every other, must work for change or get out of the best way. Mr. Humm acknowledged this in his announcement in Might, writing, “It was clear that after every little thing all of us skilled this previous yr, we couldn’t open the identical restaurant.”
Up to now Mr. Humm, who says he’s a vegetarian, hasn’t advised us his objections to serving animal merchandise, if he has any. He appears to need us to suppose Eleven Madison Park is main the restaurant enterprise to a greater place, however how are we alleged to consider that this isn’t simply one other card trick when he hasn’t expressed an actual opinion?
Diners who don’t eat animals for spiritual or ethical causes will in all probability welcome the brand new menu. These whose chief concern is the environmental injury finished by livestock farming might have much less purpose to rejoice. Individuals have a tendency to think about manufacturing unit farms and feedlots once they hear about meat and sustainability. However Eleven Madison Park didn’t purchase industrial pork for its compressed brick of suckling pig. Because the servers have been all the time reminding you within the previous days, the pork, eggs, cheese and different animal merchandise got here from small, unbiased regional farms. Now, a lot of its greens are grown to order on farmland it leases in Hoosick, N.Y.
If each restaurant that helps sustainable native agriculture adopted Mr. Humm’s new path, these small farms can be in serious trouble. To call only one doubtless outcome, builders can be lining up on the barn door to make affords. Millions of acres of pasture and cultivated fields throughout america have been misplaced to suburbs, which produce half of the country’s household carbon emissions.
And whereas Mr. Humm not often talks in regards to the backside line, it’s apparent what occurs once you maintain charging $335 for dinner whereas eliminating a number of the most costly objects in your procuring listing, like caviar, lobster and foie gras. (It’s the identical factor that occurred in 2016, when the restaurant primarily halved the number of courses in the tasting without changing the base price.)
Eleven Madison Park nonetheless buys meat, although. Till the yr ends, the menu provided to prospects who e book a personal eating room consists of an non-obligatory beef dish, roasted tenderloin with fermented peppers and black lime. It’s some sort of metaphor for Manhattan, the place there’s all the time a better degree of luxurious, a secret room the place the wealthy eat roasted tenderloin whereas all people else will get an eggplant canoe.
What the Stars Imply Due to the pandemic, eating places are usually not being given star rankings.
