Star chef Daniel Humm
“Eleven Madison Park”: Chaos in what was once the best restaurant in the world – what’s wrong there?
Chef Daniel Humm from “Eleven Madison Park” announced on Instagram in May 2021 that he was making his restaurant completely vegan. A tremor went through the restaurant industry. What was then the best restaurant in the world now seems just a decal of itself. What happened?
© Instagram/danielhumm
Eleven Madison Park was once considered one of the best restaurants in the world. It was New York’s hotspot. But at some point between the pandemic and the chef’s creative freedom, something went terribly wrong. What a red pepper has to do with it.
Eleven Madison Park in New York City was where everyone wanted to be. Everyone wanted to work here. Everyone wanted to eat here. The tables were booked months in advance. The applications piled up. “Eleven Madison Park” has brought top gastronomy to life. It was once exciting to eat there, a life experience to be a guest there. In 2015, the “New York Times” wrote about the restaurant that it was a place of joy. Today you get a free table almost every day, there are endless jobs in the restaurant. What happened?
Chef Daniel Humm announced in June 2021, 15 months after the restaurant was closed due to the pandemic, that it would switch entirely to vegan food. It’s been a year now. Chandler Yerve’s dream came true back then, too, like him “Business Insiders” described in a detailed report. Ever since he was 14, he’s wanted to work at Eleven Madison Park. He finally had the chance and he was also allowed to launch the brand new vegan menu. It was every chef’s dream. Until the day he found himself running through the streets of New York City, pen in hand.
From the field to the garbage
A sous chef sent Yerves off and told him not to return until he had found enough peppers for the evening meal. The peppers had to be as long as the pen he was holding. It didn’t matter where the peppers came from. Yerves finally found what he was looking for after several attempts. Half of the peppers he bought ended up in the trash. You only needed a certain part of the peppers for the dish. Former employees described this approach as “Farm to Trash”, i.e. from the field to the garbage instead of from the field to the table.
From the start, the criticism of the new vegan concept was devastating: The “New York Post”, for example, wrote that veganism would possibly ruin Humm’s career. Restaurant critic Pete Wells of The New York Times wrote that the vegetable “represents meat or fish so obviously that one almost feels sorry.” Wells capped his criticism with a revelation that meat was still being served in the private dining room. “A secret room where the rich eat fried tenderloin while everyone else gets an eggplant canoe.”
Poor pay, pressure and lack of staff
You can’t blame the vegan menu alone for things going wrong in what was once the most prestigious restaurant. Although perhaps not everyone wants to pay over $300 for a luxury meal made entirely of vegetables. Former employees anonymously addressed a variety of problems to “Business Insider”: poor pay, unpaid overtime, pressure, chaos, poor care for employees and a lack of staff. Those who made Eleven Madison Park great are long gone. As for Humm, he would focus more on courting celebrities than showing off in the kitchen. Previously it was impossible to get a job in “Eleven Madison Park”, recently 16 positions were advertised. Whether Humm can turn things around remains to be seen. “It’s definitely not as good as it used to be,” a former employee told Business Insider. “Definitely not worth the price.”