Eleven Madison Park
Eleven Madison Park Review at-a-glance
Awards: Three Michelin Stars, #1 Worlds 50 best (2017)
+Beautiful plating style with very precisely presented dishes and lots of negative space
-All that negative space on the plate is partly due to the fact that the food is very minimalistic - there are just not that many components from the dishes
-The menu was heavily influenced by the seasons but perhaps too much so - many ingredients were repeated multiple times during the meal
Verdict: Based on my meal at Eleven Madison Park, it was clear Daniel Humm has a distinct style of cooking. Every dish followed a familiar pattern. The presentations involved some pomp and circumstance - think a tableside grill or a cart rolled to your table for some finishing flourishes. The food on the plate was then a complete juxtaposition from the theatrical presentations, carefully edited and starkly minimal. Every dish was in sync with the season, featuring some of spring’s finest seasonal ingredients to an almost painful degree - do I really need asparagus in 50% of my courses? The plating was uniformly stunning, showing off an incredible amount of precision. While Humm’s style was consistently and accurately represented throughout the meal, it didn’t resonate with me.
The part of Germany I live in celebrates Carnival in March with a long parade featuring a nearly endless amount of floats to the point where it takes almost 4 hours. At the start, it is a ton of fun. There are a few funny political floats and almost all of them hurl candy at the crowd. By hour two, you are mostly left wondering why you are still sitting there, watching “new” float after “new” float that are almost identical to the ones that came before it. I felt the same way about my meal at Eleven Madison Park as I do about the Carnival parade in Dusseldorf. Outside of his now-signature caviar cheesecake, the food was a repetitive parade in minimalism and ingredients. The technique was good and the ingredients impeccable but the meal left me wanting, both with individual courses and in totality. Leaving the restaurant, my wallet $400 lighter and my stomach moderately full, my overwhelming thought was everything was…fine.
Rating: 90/100
Visited: May 2018
Price I Paid: $315 for tasting menu w/tip
Value: 10/20
Eleven Madison Park & Daniel Humm Background
Along with the French Laundry, Eleven Madison Park is arguably the US restaurant with the most international acclaim, reaching #1 on the Worlds 50 Best list and earning three Michelin stars. Despite the success, the team behind Eleven Madison Park have never been ones to stay still, taking the restaurant through several iterations including transforming the original concept that earned it three stars in 2012 to the minimalist, seasonal approach I saw in 2018 which included a completely refurbished dining room. The restaurant is even going through a third transition in 2021, reopening after a long COVID-induced closure with an entirely vegan menu and yet another new dining room.
Chef and owner (after purchasing the restaurant from Danny Meyer of Shake Shack fame) at Eleven Madison Park is Daniel Humm. While Humm has been working at kitchens in the US since 2003, he originally hails from Switzerland where got his start at the then three-star Le Pont de Brent. After leaving Le Pont De Brent, Humm earned himself a star at only 25 years of age while running the kitchen at Gasthaus Zum Gupf. Humm then moved to California, heading up the kitchen at Campton Place in San Fransisco in 2003 before moving to Eleven Madison Park in 2007. Success in New York City was fast and furious with three stars coming only five years after Humm took up residence at Eleven Madison Park. Humm has a distinctive cooking style, highly focused on seasonal ingredients and simple presentations with great purity of flavors. His plating style is just as distinctive with lots of symmetry and carefully tweezed ingredients - you can tell a dish is a Humm plate just by looking at it.
When I visited, Eleven Madison Park used the Tock ticketing system where you need to pre-pay for your $315 meal (including tip) at the time of reservation with no cancellations. $315 is an awful lot of money but included tip so not completely out of line with European prices much less the sky-high cost of Michelin meals in the US. On my visit, the tasting menu was 6-courses with several courses giving you the option of choosing the dish. While 6-courses is typically plenty, I left the meal hungry enough to stop at Milk Bar for ice cream on the way home. If you compare this to the gluttonous feasts of Europe I would say the minimalism left me wanting (both in taste and sustenance).
What I ate at Eleven Madison Park
The meal started off with a series of amuse-bouches served at all once, each highlighting a different spring ingredient - asparagus with smoked egg yolk, spring peas with trout roe, quail egg tart with mustard greens, daikon with ramps and amaranth. This was an impressive start, showing off the best of the spring in a variety of small bites. Somewhat bizarrely, virtually every ingredient in the amuse bouche was repeated during the meal. The daikon was used in the duck and escargot, asparagus with the foie gras (and cheesecake if you count white asparagus), and peas and mustard greens with the duck.
The first dish was one of my favorites of 2018 - smoked sturgeon cheesecake with everything bagel crust and caviar. A stunner of a dish. There are times where chefs can get a little too cute with a dish’s concept, forgetting that taste is most important. This was not one of those times, the dish paying homage to two New York staples (Cheesecake and the Everything Bagel) in clever ways to create a distinctive eating experience. The cheesecake looked remarkably like the classic dessert but had a wonderful savory sturgeon taste which paired well with the caviar. Even better was the everything bagel crust, familiar in taste but completely unexpected to have in such a refined setting. This was also served with a small tin on the side which featured some white asparagus, some of which had been pickled. This was excellent by itself but also went very well with the cheesecake, adding a nice acidic component. A fantastic dish that is worth the price of admission.
Foie gras is one of my favorites and Eleven Madison Park offered it both poached and seared so of course, I went with the seared version which was paired with asparagus and sesame. This was an interesting presentation, the kitchen searing the foie gras twice - once in a hot pan and once with a blow torch after wrapping it in some thinly shaved asparagus. Asparagus and foie gras is a novel combination but not one I necessarily need to be repeated. The flavors worked together fine but I don’t think this take is going to replace more traditional foie gras flavor pairings soon. Notably, this marked the third dish in a row that the kitchen incorporated asparagus in one way or the other. I enjoy asparagus as much as the next guy but having such repetition seems like a sloppy menu design to me.
For the seafood course, I choose a butter and citrus poached lobster tail with ginger and dandelion greens. I really enjoyed the cook on the lobster, the typical butter poach kicked up a notch by the addition of citrus which came through nicely in the flavor of the meat and paired well with the ginger. The single dandelion green added a nice earthiness and bitterness to round out the flavor profile of the course. A good dish but one that still felt very sparse in its presentation.
Next up was an elaborate presentation of snails with morels and ramps. The snails were grilled on a skewer over an open flame and served fresh off the skewer to really add the taste of the grill to the plate. The snails were paired with morels, ramps, and some daikon wraps with the idea that you made little snail tacos which was a fun course but not one you’d expect in a three-star. The morels and ramps were nice, perfect for spring, and adding a nice fresh note to the plate with the herbal flavors of the dish actually reminded me a bit of snail porridge at the Fat Duck. This is a tough dish for me to judge as I am no lover of snails. Just like the snail porridge at the Fat Duck, the dish was fine but unremarkable with the table side grilling seeming more like a gimmick than any practical purpose.
For the main course, I had the famous Eleven Madison Park duck breast with daikon and duck jus. The amount of effort that goes into this duck dish can not be disputed. The duck is aged for nearly two weeks (to dry out the skin and add a bit of flavor), slathered in honey, stuffed with lavender, and given a spice coating (cumin, coriander, cumin, more lavender) before being roasted to a perfect medium-rare in the oven. The breast was paired simply with a duck jus and some daikon radish for freshness. The seasonal variations of duck are one of Eleven Madison Park’s defining dishes - it has been on the menu, virtually unchanged, since 2006. It was the reason I visited. Did the duck live up to the hype and the amount of effort that went into it? Not really. Don’t get me wrong, it was a very nice piece of duck but it wasn’t transcendent. The skin, nice and crispy and with a phenomenal spice was a highlight, but the meat was nothing special. I also did not really need to repetition on the daikon which was also featured on the escargot dish and the amuse. The duck was served with sides of goat cheese spring peas and horseradish mustard greens which were both fine but not that connected to the dish. If you compare this to the best duck I’ve had at Troisgros or Waldhotel Sonnora it is not a kind comparison.
For dessert, I selected the lemon and black sesame option. The dessert featured three clean layers, black sesame shortbread, black sesame ice cream, and lemon curd. This tasted fine with the lemon and sesame playing nicely but it was frankly shockingly minimalistic for a three-star dessert. This is a dish that would have been fine as a pre-dessert but sadly disappointing given it was the only offering from the pastry section. The meal finished off with a chocolate and shortbread dessert pretzel. Per the server, this was an homage to the many pretzel carts around New York. It was nice to see another touch of the locality to make it into the meal but I still felt like this was a somewhat anti-climatic end to the meal. You have to give the kitchen credit for the dedication to executing the vision of Chef Humm but surely dessert was a good as point of any to throw a bit of excess into the meal.