Eleven Madison Park is the only Michelin three-star restaurant whose menu is exclusively vegan. Before the pandemic, it was not vegan and was considered by many to be the best restaurant in the city. It was number one on the World’s 50 Best Restaurants list. In 2020, chef Daniel Humm closed the restaurant and devoted his energy to preparing over a million meals for frontline pandemic workers and underserved communities, distributing them to churches, shelters, and food banks.
Eighteen months later, he reopened with an entirely plant-based menu. It would be understatement to say critics didn’t like it. Scathing reviews in the NY Times and many other publications nearly drove it out of business. But Humm and his team persevered, and today EMP has kept its three stars and is thriving. When we arrived on a mid-week evening, there was not an empty table in the place.
First impression: the room is spectacular. If there is a more beautiful dining room in New York, I’ve never heard of it. Soaring ceilings, enormous multi-paned windows and gorgeous lighting set off generously spaced tables with white tablecloths freshly ironed for each party.
Our servers clearly shared Humm’s passion for exquisitely prepared vegan dishes. They spoke with a genuine depth of knowledge and love for the food. Beyond that, each exhibited an intelligent understated joie de vivre that cannot be faked or trained. It must have been a lengthy labor of love to assemble this team.
Some of those early negative reviews criticized the food for trying to imitate meat dishes without the meat. Chef Humm must have taken this criticism to heart: no dish resembled or tried to recreate meat in any way. Each one celebrated vegetables, some familiar and some unfamiliar, but always with respect for their unique qualities.

The meal began with a three-part amuse bouche they introduced as a celtuce celebration. Celtuce is a variety of lettuce grown as much for its tender stem as for its leaves. These stems were displayed on top of a thin corn wafer. The celtuce cocktail’s intensity and complexity of vegetable flavors was impressive given its watery appearance. The bites of baby lettuces were among the most enjoyable greens I’ve ever tasted.

Next was tonburi with badger flame beets and finger lime. Tonburi, sometimes prepared as “mountain caviar,” is the seeds of Japanese summer cypress, an annual grass of the rhipiceid genus. The seeds are pealed and repeatedly rinsed in spring water until they develop a wet interior encased in a thin skin, not unlike caviar. They have a flavor calling to mind new mowed grass. You can learn more about it here. The tonburi and the finger lime each popped differently in the mouth, an enjoyable counterpoint to the surprising sweetness of the beets.

Making vegan butter and croissant-like layered rolls without any dairy product would seem challenging if not impossible, but the EMP pastry chef managed impressively. The flaky rolls were delicious, and they brought us two different kinds of non-dairy butter, one sunflower-based and the other topped with a morel puree.

The buckwheat soba noodle dish with shiitake mushroom and wasabi was beautifully presented and remarkable for the depth of flavor of the mushroom-based broth. The noodles themselves are prepared in house according to a meditative practice taught by chef Shuichi Kotani. Chef Humm brought him in for a two-day workshop just to teach the EMP team his method of noodle-making as spiritual discipline. You can learn a bit about this here. In texture, flavor and mouth-feel, they were indeed the epitome of soba noodles.

The artichoke with green garlic and alyssum blooms was a delicate tempura. An artichoke heart was poached, then filled with an artichoke masa before being tempura fried and topped with a confit artichoke veil. The green garlic harmonized pleasingly with the artichoke composition.

Next came peas with brown rice, coconut and nepitella, a delicate and subtle combination of flavors and textures. Nepitella is an herb that tastes like a minty oregano.

The asparagus and spinach were brought to the table in a little ceramic smoker. The asparagus were candidates for the best I have ever had. The deeply flavored coriander reduction complemented the vegetables beautifully.



Dessert consisted of rhubarb mochi with sakura leaf and strawberries with koji cream. Sakura, the Japanese cherry blossom tree, has leaves that carry a subtle cherry flavor. They are traditionally eaten around cherry blossom time, which corresponded to the May date of our meal.
The strawberries were exquisite examples of the Japanese appreciation of fruits with the most perfect flavor and appearance of their type. I would guess that they were imported from Japan.What, you may ask, is koji cream? Koji is the variety of mold that is responsible for umami in shoyu and miso. I think the cream was coconut based and lightly fermented by the koji. It was a delightfully umami-rich enhancement to the berries.


As a mignardise, chocolate sesame pretzels hung from a metal stand seemingly designed for just this purpose. If you like Reese’s peanut butter cups, you’d adore these pretzels.

Many of EMP’s remarkably flavorful vegetables and fruits are grown for them at Magic Farms, a small organic farm in upstate New York near the Vermont border with which they have an exclusive partnership. It’s interesting to learn about this farm partnership here: https://www.magicfarms.org/

What to drink with all this? Many of the ingredients were either unfamiliar or challenging to pair with wine: asparagus, artichoke. We put ourselves in the hands of EMP’s sommelier Erica Lauer and opted for the wine pairing. A glass of vintage Krug to start was predictably excellent.
With the celtuce celebration, she poured a 2018 Sommerberg Riesling from Albert Boxler. Its minerality and floral top notes played nicely with the delicate lettuces.

To accompany the tonburi/finger lime/beet dish, she brought out a bottle of Le Puy Rose-Marie rosé. It’s among the most complex rosés I’ve ever tasted, layered and rich. I though it was a fine choice.

Newfound Placida vineyard chardonnay, a very small production Sonoma wine, accompanied the deeply mushroomy soba noodle/shiitake dish. I thought it was pleasant enough but not particularly memorable. Maybe its subtlety escaped me.

What should we drink with an artichoke heart? Erica brought a 2019 Stephane Montez Condrieu. Fruity, fragrant and only slightly sweet, it managed to avoid being overshadowed by the pleasant astringency of the artichoke.

With the smoked asparagus / spinach / coriander, we drank a weighty 2008 Canalicchio di Sopra Brunello di Montalcino, to me a surprising choice, but after a few sips I saw the point. Plummy and darkly intense, it underscored the smokiness of the veggies.

For the desserts, Erica poured a glass of 2016 Klein Constantia, a muscat from South Africa. Botrytis doesn’t occur there, so they rely on individual selection of overripe grapes to produce the high level of sweetness, something like a trockenbeerenauslese. It is a wine of historical importance. It was a favorite of George Washington, for whom it was delivered to Valley Forge, and John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and Luis XVI. Napoleon insisted that cases of it be brought to him in his exile on St Helena, where he drank a bottle a day. He said it made exile almost tolerable.

After dinner, I had the chance to chat in the kitchen with Executive Chef Dmitri Magi. He worked at Noma before coming to EMP as chef de cuisine to help Humm win three Michelin stars in its earlier non-vegan days. Then he served as culinary director of Claridge’s, before Humm asked him to come back as managing partner.

Dmitri is charmingly passionate about EMP’s commitment to veganism. Both he and Humm took huge risks and abandoned highly successful positions to try to make EMP the flagship of high-end vegan dining. Their inspiration is both gastronomic and ethical. Despite the much lauded creativity of EMP’s menu in its pre-vegan days, Humm says that he felt constrained by the limited palette that animal foods impose. He believes that he has much more room to innovate when using the vast variety provided by plant-based foods. He also feels strongly that the quality of animal products is declining world-wide, due to growing human population. He considers high-end meat-based dining unsustainable and approaching the end of its glory days.

I loved my meal at Eleven Madison Park. Even apart from the food, it ranks near the top of dining-as-theater experiences anywhere in the world. That said, some may find it hard to understand.
Often, we rank individual dishes by how they stack up against others we have had of the same type. We may say a risotto, or a bowl of gumbo, or a molten-center chocolate cake were among the best we have ever eaten. Some national cuisines feature standard vegan or vegetarian dishes against which we could compare examples of the same type. But the creative offerings of EMP defy comparison, and intentionally so. They aim for unique preparations of excellent but often unfamiliar ingredients.
It requires thought and discernment on the part of the diner to appreciate the extreme level of attention to detail that the kitchen has put into every component of every dish. I believe those willing to do this will be richly rewarded and will find their experience here well worth the cost.
I know. But, those strawberries are NOT ripe.