To dine for: Eleven Madison Park is more than a restaurant
A “dream weaver” turns your chance remarks into reality at a $400 dinner at the “world’s best restaurant”.
Between courses six and seven, my date and I are whisked into the kitchens of Eleven Madison Park, apparently the world’s best restaurant, for an edible cocktail. This involves perching on a makeshift bar while a mixologist pours liquid nitrogen, bourbon, Concord grape ice cream and popping candy into a bowl. Eventually an extremely elaborate whisky sour emerges from a plume of smoke.
This wasn’t just special treatment. It’s the kind of thing that happens all the time to diners at Eleven Madison Park, which was voted top of the World’s 50 Best Restaurants list this month at a gala night in Melbourne. It’s the first New York restaurant to win the accolade and only the second American one to do so.
The top spot has long been hogged by a clique of innovative but pompous European restaurants that have reinvented fine dining over the past 15 years. First there was the Fat Duck in Britain and El Bulli in Spain, where Heston Blumenthal and Ferran Adria respectively pioneered so-called molecular gastronomy, making bacon and egg ice cream and liquefying olives.
After that came Rene Redzepi’s four-time winner, Noma, the Copenhagen restaurant that precipitated the Nordic dining revolution: hyper-local, foraged, fermented, artfully delivered tasting menus. Last year the winner was Osteria Francescana, a small room in the town of Modena, Italy, where lentil caviar and oyster water are part of Massimo Bottura’s gastronomic show.
Eleven Madison Park is a departure from all that. Housed in a grand palace on Manhattan’s Madison Avenue, it is much closer in its aesthetic to the fine dining houses of the 1980s and 90s, redolent of bull markets, shoulder pads and chateaubriands. Its elevation is a huge victory for the New York food scene, which has at times been derided for its vulgarity by the high priests of European haute cuisine.
Eleven Madison Park’s Swiss chef, Daniel Humm, and American restaurateur, Will Guidara, have long coveted this prize. Described as the “Glimmer Twins of gastronomy”, Humm and Guidara have transformed the restaurant from a place where bankers hunker down over cote de boeuf and a bottle of bordeaux to the very best in the world, at least according to the judges who vote for the 50 Best award.
Humm is the athlete — intense and driven. Guidara is the charm — witty and precise. He’s also the driving force behind Eleven Madison Park’s obsession with service, which has turned it from a mere dining experience into something more akin to immersive theatre.
The staff have Googled you before you get there. They know your nationality, favourite football team and first pet’s name before you’ve sat down for an amuse-bouche. My date very recently took up an exciting new job, so she arrived to a handwritten note congratulating her on the appointment.
The waiters eavesdrop on your conversation and pass any useful titbits to the restaurant’s “dream weaver” (think of a much, much sexier version of Roald Dahl’s BFG), who stalks you throughout your meal, in the nicest way possible. Over dinner I mentioned in passing that I’d always wanted to go to the library bar at the nearby NoMad hotel. After our meal, a waitress escorted us on a walk to the NoMad, where a table and a cocktail customised to our personality types awaited.
This again is a far from unusual experience at EMP. Stories abound of the dream weaver’s most elaborate after-dinner treats. There was the Spanish family who arrived during a blizzard. The children had never seen snow before, so on finishing their meal they were presented with two toboggans, painted with the restaurant’s logo, for them to take tobogganing in Central Park the next morning.
One regular diner, notable for his debonair style, was presented with a pocket square with the faces of his favourite staff embroidered on it. Another is soon to have a “cat cafe” made for her outside the restaurant; her boyfriend is secretly collaborating to bring her cat along for a digestif.
Mention pizza and you’re presented with a slice as though it were part of the tasting menu. Discuss the fantasy television show Game of Thrones and a complimentary glass of mead greets you at the end of dinner. The wine is opened by blowtorching a pair of tongs at the table until they are hot enough to melt off the entire top of the bottle — cork, glass and all. Thankfully, the barolo was unharmed.
It’s all wildly, absurdly, preposterously over the top. But that’s the point. A fantasy. An experience that you can bore all your friends with until they decide they too want to shell out $US300 (almost $400) each to enjoy it.
Oh, and of course there’s the food. Which is seriously good but not, to my mind at least, best-in-the-world good. The menu at Eleven Madison Park is a regularly evolving affair, reflecting the hyperactive inventiveness of its chef.
Currently they’re doing a Daniel Humm greatest hits menu, which is a trip through all the fads and fetishes of the foodie revolution. There’s sea urchin cappuccino, frothy and extravagant. A clam bake full of sumptuous razor and quahog clams from Long Island and a suckling pig adorned with impossibly crisp crackling. The very best dish was a dessert: “milk and honey”, a blend of dehydrated milk foam and bee pollen that will truly take you to the promised land.
Not all the dishes were hits. The sous-vide chicken with black truffles was ever so slightly bland. The carrot tartare is ground at your table and presented with a tray of elaborate condiments (dried peas, quail’s egg yolk). It was better than it sounds, but the philistine in me would still have preferred raw beef.
In a way, though, it’s reassuring to have food made from ingredients that you at least recognise. Or, as the Danish chef Bo Bech described Humm’s approach: “He’s not only cooking for himself. He’s actually cooking for people. He wants them to be happy. He’s not trying to f..k your mouth with things you’ve never heard of.”
Eleven Madison Park is a special-occasion sort of place that’s a long, long way from cheap. In fact, when I sent the receipt to the office — $US642.36 (and that was just for the food) — the picture editor wryly informed me that it could have bought him 146.39 portions of scampi and chips from the work canteen.
I’m pleased it has topped the best restaurants list, though, because it’s so much fun. When I switch jobs from lowly journalist to wildly overpaid financier, I’m going back all the time.
THE SUNDAY TIMES