Photo: City Foodsters via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0, cropped.
Eleven Madison Park, the New York restaurant once named the best in the world, is ditching meat and seafood. When it reopens on June 10 after more than a year closed, its whole menu will be plant-based.
This is about as high-profile as fine dining gets. Eleven Madison Park holds three Michelin stars, four stars from The New York Times, and in 2017 it was named the World's Best Restaurant. Until now it was famous for dishes built around meat.
Chef and owner Daniel Humm says the pandemic changed everything. In a letter announcing the decision, he wrote:
We have always operated with sensitivity to the impact we have on our surroundings, but it was becoming ever clearer that the current food system is simply not sustainable, in so many ways.
He continued: "It was clear that after everything we all experienced this past year, we couldn't open the same restaurant."
The new menu will celebrate "vegetables, both from the earth and the sea, as well as fruits, legumes, fungi, grains, and so much more". The tasting menu stays at $335, and every dinner bought will fund five meals for New Yorkers facing food insecurity. Cow's milk and honey will still be offered with tea and coffee, but the food itself is free of animal products (the restaurant says "plant-based" rather than "vegan", but we'll happily use the word for them).
He's honest that it's a gamble: "at times I'm up in the middle of the night, thinking about the risk we're taking abandoning dishes that once defined us". We think he's on the right side of history.
Humm is right about the food system. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization estimates livestock are responsible for 14.5% of human-caused greenhouse gas emissions, and Oxford University researchers calculated that a global switch to vegan diets would save 8 million lives and cut food emissions by around two thirds. When one of the most celebrated chefs in the world agrees, it's hard to argue.
Top chefs are leading the plant-based revolution Google predicted. In January ONA became the first vegan restaurant in France to win a Michelin star, and just last week Epicurious stopped publishing beef recipes for the planet. Last year the Golden Globes served a 100% plant-based menu, and back in 2017 a London cafe completely ditched dairy after watching a YouTube video.
From a corner cafe to the best restaurant in the world. The future is looking brighter.