New York’s ‘Finest Restaurant’ Goes Vegan
The Three-Michelin-Star restaurant Eleven Madison Park is switching to a plant-based menu as its co-owner says “the current food system is simply not sustainable”.
Credit: Eleven Madison Park
One of New York’s ‘finest’ restaurants has switched to an entirely vegan menu as it reopens post-pandemic.
The Three-Michelin-star Eleven Madison Park is aiming to ‘reinvent what fine dining can be’ with its decision to remove meat, and put vegetables centre-stage. The move comes after the pandemic inspired a change-of-heart in chef and co-owner Daniel Hamm.
“In the midst of last year … we realized that not only has the world changed, but that we have changed as well”, Hamm said in a statement posted on EMP’s website. “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”.
“It was clear that after everything we all experienced this past year, we couldn’t open the same restaurant” - Daniel Hamm, Eleven Madison Park’s chef and co-owner.
As a result, Hamm has taken EMP in an entirely new direction by launching the restaurant’s plant-based menu, where every dish is now made from vegetables, as well as fruits, legumes, fungi, and grains.
“I’m not going to lie, at times I’m up in the middle of the night, thinking about the risk we’re taking abandoning dishes that once defined us”, Hamm admits.
“But then I return to the kitchen and see what we’ve created. We are obsessed with making the most flavorful vegetable broths and stocks. Our days are consumed by developing fully plant-based milks, butters and creams. We are exploring fermentation, and understand that time is one of the most precious ingredients. What at first felt limiting began to feel freeing, and we are only scratching the surface.”
The new menu is part of how EMP aims to “redefine luxury as an experience that serves a higher purpose and maintains a genuine connection to the community”.
Over the course of the pandemic, the restaurant prepared nearly one million meals for New Yorkers experiencing food insecurity, in partnership with nonprofit Rethink Food. This partnership to help the community will continue post pandemic, Hamm says. And now the meatless menu will help cut the restaurant’s carbon-footprint, and help bring a focus on the sustainable and health benefits of eating more plants.
“All this has given us the confidence to reinvent what fine dining can be. It makes us believe that this is a risk worth taking”.
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