Review of Eleven Madison Park’s New $335 Vegan Menu From Opening Night

The refrigerated circumstances in Eleven Madison Park kitchens are as soon as once more totally stocked. This time, as a substitute of flocks of hanging geese, there are rows of ceramic pots, every stuffed with growing old beets, with leafy inexperienced tops protruding. You possibly can be in a florist store.

However you aren’t. You might be in one of many most famous restaurants on this planet, and there’s a ready checklist of 15,000 to look at these pots get damaged tableside, earlier than the beets are carved up, wrapped in mustard leaf kimchi, and served with pink wine jus. The beets, which have been dehydrated, then rehydrated, smoked, cured, and in any other case alchemized over the course of three days, have a remarkably chewy, nearly meaty texture. Their soiled sweetness is remodeled right into a wealthy, roasted masterpiece of a dish, the thrill of which wafts alongside the charred aromas because the pots are wheeled all through the eating room.

After weeks of frenzy surrounding chef-owner Daniel Humm’s vegan reimagining of one of many world’s most revered menus, the doorways opened on June 10.

If there may be one dish that represents the precision, nuance, and, particularly the labor-intensiveness of the brand new menu, it’s the unassuming cucumber course that seems about 1 ½ hours into the meal. It seems to be like every outdated fish tartare. However it consists of minutely chopped, compressed cucumbers layered in a gradient with equally tiny bites of candy, crisp melon over a base of avocado cream—all punctuated  with threads of silky, smoky daikon. Powdered cucumber pores and skin is sprinkled on high. It takes two cooks all day, day-after-day to cut and prep, as a result of quick shelf lifetime of the recent cucumber.

In actual fact, time is the ingredient on full show all through the menu, due to 35 to 40 hardworking cooks within the kitchen.

The shortage of protein doesn’t sing out, maybe as a result of nearly nothing on the 11-course EMP menu makes an attempt to imitate meat or fish. There’s no lavender-roasted seitan to evoke the famed duck, which might have been a neater, much less eye-opening shortcut.

The exception is the caviar-styled tonburi, served on a mattress of ice in a silver tureen with little mom of pearl spoons. Humm cooks the tonburi—seeds from the Japanese Kochia tree—with seaweed so as to add umami and salinity, then serves it with lettuce adorned with pink sorrel leaves. Pea and miso puree, enriched with almond and lemon cream for dolloping on the “caviar,” took it excessive.

Making the lettuce wraps your self provides to the sense of meals theater, as one of many menu’s many welcome interactive moments. In one other, a fried candy pepper that evokes a jalapeño popper comes with 4 pepper-based condiments that showcase the vegetable’s vary.

The one greatest dish on the menu, although, will not be even an official course. After we dig into the sunflower bread, we aren’t embarrassed to ask for seconds. (That are fortunately provided.) Pastry chef Laura Cronin conjures chickpeas into baked items with the buttery flakiness of ones made with animal merchandise. The aromatic, crispy textured laminated rolls include extra nut butter on the aspect, molded right into a dramatic Artwork Deco flower that’s topped with a black miso glaze.

Chatting tableside as he works the eating room on opening night time, Humm admits that “as soon as we acquired the bread and butter, we knew all the things could be OK” with a full vegan menu. Actress Angelina Jolie, Chipotle founder Steve Ells, and the opposite business heavyweights and click-lucky foodie civilians who have been there to energize the venue appeared to agree.  

For all of the courageous new world discuss concerning the menu, some dishes provoke a robust sense of déjà vu.

A refreshing dish of celtuce, or Chinese language lettuce, with rice porridge has been on the menu earlier than. The celery-like vegetable was previously ready with dairy butter; now the kitchen makes use of extra of the sunflower butter to complement the damaged rice.  

Humm has additionally repurposed the ultimate entree: half an eggplant is roasted to be extremely candy and caramelized, with tomato and glazed radishes. It was beforehand flavored with bonito, the smoked tuna flakes now banished from the kitchen. Humm has performed with the quantities of mushrooms so as to add an underlying earthiness. 

It’s tremendously satisfying, maybe extra so whenever you study {that a} chef spends two days making ready it, together with making cuts with a razor blade. Alongside is a pile of crisp beans on a cocoa bean puree and a bowl of sliced summer time corn kernels which have an nearly tacky chunk, due to the addition of fermented almond cream, blended with grits. A lot of the deeper umami flavors come from probiotic cultures (e.g., a micro organism you’d add to dairy to show it to yogurt or cheese) sourced from Brooklyn’s Kingdom Supercultures. 

Every little thing could also be plant-based on the new EMP, however no one goes hungry. We left our five-hour meal (most clock in no less than 4, when you depend a go to to the kitchen) feeling like two ripe-to-bursting watermelons. It’s laborious to think about that anybody will go off seeking a Shake Shack burger throughout the road after they’re completed.

Now that Humm’s ingredient checklist is concentrated on objects much less expensive than imported langoustines and dry-aged veal, he calls time the brand new definition of luxurious. “A chunk of kobe beef is dear however not uncommon. A 100-year-old fermented sauce is uncommon,” mentioned Humm in a June 9 interview.

In preparation for the menu’s debut, two shojin cooks spent three months on the restaurant. The plant-based delicacies, which dates again to seventh century monasteries in Kyoto, is concentrated on rituals round cooking greens.

Among the many new prep duties launched by the shojin specialists is grinding sesame seeds. The pressed sesame makes up the bottom of marinated then grilled tofu that’s layered with three totally different squash pickles and two sorts of squash ribbons. A paste of toasted seeds flavors the chocolate pretzels served on the finish of the meal on a rack; these are one other of the meal’s highlights, together with the bottle of home made apricot vermouth poured free of charge.

The method of grinding the seeds takes about an hour every morning. The shojin methodology requires the prepare dinner to be seated on the ground, urgent in a counter clockwise movement. “You’re sitting in your knees for an hour. You’re in ache, but it surely slows you down,” says Humm.

One of many shojin cooks, Toshio Tanahashi, urged that Humm have Eleven Madison Park’s company grind seeds themselves. Humm laughs: “He additionally urged that company shouldn’t use silverware. We didn’t take into account that.”

Additionally with a view towards visitor consolation, Humm is permitting cow milk for cappuccino and honey for tea, the one non-vegan elements within the kitchen. Even household meal—the meals served to restaurant workers earlier than service commences—is plant-based.

“We’re not the meals police,” he says. Nonetheless, the chef doesn’t know what the restaurant will do if somebody asks permission to carry animal-based butter. “In all probability not,” he lastly says. (The restaurant has confirmed that it’ll proceed to have a resident “dreamweaver” to reply to company’ unconventional calls for and supply moments of enjoyment, comparable to doling out White Claws to 2 celebrants; a customized sticker positioned over the label reads: “Ain’t no foie, however Claw remains to be the regulation.”)

A six-course, $175 model of the complete menu is on supply on the bar. Just like the eating room, the bar is sold-out via July, though a few walk-in seats can be found every night time. For the primary eating room, the associated fee is $730 for 2 folks, together with tax and tip, earlier than you even order a drink. Wine pairings begin at $175 per particular person, and speciality cocktails vary from $22 to $27.

Eleven Madison Park’s cocktail checklist dispenses with seasonality and, just like the menu, focuses every drink on one key fruit or vegetable taste. There’s a Sugar Snap Pea vodka tonic, a Melon sherry bitter, and a Tomato margarita. 

The wine checklist has stayed the identical, regardless of the menu’s monumental modifications. Heavy hitting bottles comparable to a 2014 Alain Graillot Crozes Hermitage that paired nicely with meaty duck are actually being pushed with the aged beets in pink wine, which works surprisingly nicely. Wine director Watson Brown says the restaurant didn’t take into account promoting off the cellar and entering into an all-organic or pure route which may higher replicate the brand new menu. “We all the time have, and can proceed to champion scrumptious wines of every type,” he says. 

As for the potential lack of income from gross sales of big-ticket Napa cabs that went higher with protein-packed dishes, Humm is unconcerned. “It might be simpler to do duck if this was about cash.”

“A yr in the past, I didn’t know if there could be Eleven Madison Park,” Humm says, “I used to be shedding folks and taking a look at chapter.” Even two months in the past, after he determined to pursue a vegan menu, “It wasn’t clear if company would come. My staff mentioned: ‘Let’s do what we all know.’ ” As everybody now is aware of nicely, reservations have been snapped up in minutes. 

For many who don’t get a seat within the eating room, Humm confirms that when the Eleven Madison Park meal kit reappears within the fall, there isn’t any plan to incorporate animal merchandise.

The Menu 

TOMATO
tea with lemon verbena
salad with strawberry and shiso
yellow tomato dosa

CELTUCE
in variation with rice

TONBURI
with peas and child lettuce

CUCUMBER
with melon and smoked daikon

SUMMER SQUASH
with lemongrass and marinated tofu

SWEET PEPPER
with Swiss chard

BEET
with horseradish and herbs

EGGPLANT
with tomato and coriander
sides: summer time beans with inexperienced onion, corn with juniper

STRAWBERRY
marinated with thyme

BLUEBERRY
with elderflower

SESAME
chocolate pretzel