Daniel Humm, chef-owner of Eleven Madison Park, built one of the world’s finest restaurants, an iconic New York institution, renowned for its groundbreaking and artful dishes. In recent years Chef Humm has continued to redefine the fine dining world by reshaping the menus to explore vegetables and plants, becoming the first plant-based restaurant to earn three Michelin stars.
Outside of the kitchen, Humm has become passionate about the environment and has encouraged his audiences to eat more plants, even just one day a week. He’s spoken before the UN Climate Conference and cofounded Rethink Food, which addresses food insecurity. Humm was recently named UNESCO Ambassador for Food in Education, where his goal is to demonstrate how chefs can shift to make better choices for the environment.
In this episode of Food People, Chef Humm discusses how he wants to use this new platform, along with his new book Eleven Madison Park: The Plant-Based Chapter.
Jamila Robinson: I'm Jamila Robinson, editor in chief of Bon Appetit and Epicurious, and this is Food People. Food People is the show where I get to sit down with the luminaries, making big moves in food, from chefs and entrepreneurs to celebrities and even activists. Because food is something we all participate in.
This week I was delighted to have Daniel Humm in the studio. Daniel Humm is the chef and owner of the world-renowned New York City restaurant Eleven Madison Park, a storied restaurant that's won every accolade there is in the food world, including three Michelin stars and number one on the world's 50 best list in 2017. But in 2021, Chef Humm made the decision to change the restaurant, famous for ingredients like foie gras and lobster, and of course its lavender-syrup duck, to an entirely plant-based menu. That decision and the advocacy Chef Humm has done with groups like Rethink Food and the United Nations has made him one of the most visionary chefs and thinkers in food today. I'm so excited for you to hear our conversation.
Welcome, chef Daniel Humm. It is so lovely to have you here in the studio.
Daniel Humm: So good to see you Jamila. Thank you so much for having me.
JR: You're so welcome. It's so great to be here. I'd like to start our conversation with a question we ask all of our guests, and it's a little bit different for you because you coming in as a chef, but what makes you a food person?
DH: I think we're all food people, which is part of the beauty of being in the food world and part of the dilemma also because everyone thinks they are an expert.
JR: Oh, say more. I love it. Say more.
DH: Well, we all eat and we all have our preferences and our loves and our references from memories. And yeah, we all think that we know best.
JR: When I think about you and your work, I always think of you as this source of change and you having all of these reinventions, reimaginations of your career. So what's it like for you to be a food person now versus the food person you started as?
DH: Yeah. Well, I fell in love with cooking and the craft of cooking and creating something with your hands and having it be able to come to life and get feedback immediately. And I wanted to become a chef and I wanted to become one of the best chefs and I wanted to have Michelin stars and win awards. And so I went sort of on this journey. I was a competitive cyclist before I cooked, and I think there my competitiveness was born and I took that into cooking and I wanted to win. And since then my view on winning has changed a lot. Our restaurant was named the number one restaurant in the world in 2017, and at that point we've already had the three Michelin stars for over a decade. We had the four New York Times stars. We basically won everything that I thought I wanted to win. And at that point I sort of realized that there was still a lot left. There was an emptiness. I feel like the restaurant maybe didn't have so much of a purpose other than cooking for very privileged few who get to come to the restaurant.
So after that, the pandemic hit and of course that was devastating in particular for our industry, for many other industries too. We, Eleven Madison Park, have this beautiful restaurant, but the restaurant really, it's just an empty shell if it isn't for the incredible team that makes it come to life on a daily basis. And when the pandemic hit, we lost a lot of our team because while in the end of the day, Eleven Madison Park was almost closed for two years, there was no serving food, there was no hospitality. We couldn't do what we do. So that was devastating losing our team. In real estate, people always say like location, location, location. In restaurants, it's really about people, people, people.
JR: Hospitality, service, staff, skill, chefs.
DH: But then there's a lot of good that came out of that. After getting over losing our team, we also were in extreme difficulties financially. We couldn't pay our rent, we couldn't pay our bills, we had no income. So we had to sort of navigate it through that. But I'm a co-founder of an organization called Rethink Food, and we started that before the pandemic. We take food from restaurants and grocery stores and anywhere where there is waste or leftover or things that are close to expiring, we make meals for people in need. And because of that, I was very tapped into what was going on around food insecurity as the pandemic hit. And in New York, there's about 8 million people who live here. A million are food insecure, usually. When the pandemic hit, that number doubled. And so we decided to transform Eleven Madison Park into a community kitchen, cooking thousands of meals, like 5,000 meals a day every day.
JR: How many meals did you end up cooking over…because you were serving meals over in Queens Bridge, one of the housing developments over the bridge in New York City.
DH: Yes.
JR: Was it more than a million?
DH: Yeah. We celebrated a million meals at some point during the pandemic. Imagine Eleven Madison Park all of a sudden being focused on creating these meals in these cardboard boxes, five, 6,000 a day. It changed my life. I felt guilty at times. I felt like I should have done more before. I felt like I just lived in my little bubble. I wasn’t really aware of New York as a whole. The pandemic made me feel much more a New Yorker. It made me feel I had a responsibility. And at times I didn't even know if I wanted to reopen the restaurant because I felt I had done everything with it I wanted to. I won all the awards.
JR: All the awards. What would you have done if you didn't reopen the restaurant?
DH: In my head it was like, oh, maybe this next chapter is about giving back. Because during the pandemic I really reconnected with cooking and with sort of food as a language, food as my language. And as a chef there is an opportunity to use that for change. And so when our landlord called me in the middle of the pandemic, I thought he was calling me to say, "Hey, you need to leave. You haven't paid your rent." But the contrary happened. He said, "Hey, we see what you're doing. We want to support you. We're going to forgive all your rent, and when the time comes, we will help you reopen."
JR: That's transformational.
DH:It was incredible. And at that point, first I put my creative hat back on in terms of what the restaurant would look like, and I knew I had no interest in reopening the same restaurant. Our restaurant was well known for duck and lobster and caviar and foie gras and all these things. And from a creative place, I didn't think the world needed another preparation on a butter-poached lobster or a suckling pig. I thought creatively we had both a responsibility and an opportunity to create the next era of fine dining. And I was also thinking about luxury a lot. And in a lot of ways, I think some of the ideas of luxury we had are antiquated and no longer true.
JR: You and I have talked a lot about caviar.
DH: Yes.
JR: Seeing caviar at a restaurant in Brazil, for example, where the caviar has to be flown from halfway around the world, and then it's not always that great.
DH: No.
JR: It doesn't always taste good. It's not that interesting or innovative. And then going and having something really special, really delicious. Was there anything that made you think, "Oh, this is actually luxurious. This is a really special rare ingredient."
DH: Definitely, and I want to point out a few things. Because it didn't all just happen during the pandemic. I think we started to focus on cooking with vegetables before. We had this dish cooked in a pig's bladder. It's a very traditional dish. It's sort of like the beginning of the original sous vide cooking, and it's used to cook chicken. We used it to cook celery. We had a dish of tartar, we made it with carrots. We had a dish that was supposed to be a caviar dish with sugar snap peas. We ended up not using the caviar because the peas were superior. And so it was sort of leading up to that.
And then there were moments in restaurants where it was just so shocking to me at times, or it was so glaring to me that there was a real problem. There was one meal…I was sitting in Switzerland on Lake Geneva on this beautiful terrace overlooking the lake with the snow-filled mountains behind. And I had this dish with langoustines from South Africa with a sauce of finger limes from New Zealand and caviar from China. That was a very luxurious meal. And after a while, you're just like, what really is luxury? And so when you quiet everything down, and I think the pandemic did that naturally for us, there was a lot more time to think and to listen. It becomes very clear all of a sudden, what is luxurious? And for me, the things that are most luxurious are the things that I cannot get anywhere or anytime I want. There are these special moments to have them.
JR: Right. Peas in the springtime.
DH: For example. It's also about the creation. I mean, there are different genres of dining, but when you speak about fine dining, you really speak of haute cuisine, which is sort of like the haute couture. It's not an everyday thing. And so I think in those creations, I'm really longing for something that where the creative part is so genius and the experience becomes transformative, and I'm not looking to have Kobe beef on my plate or caviar on my plate.
JR: That always seemed very clear when Eleven Madison Park changed to a plant-based menu. It was very clear to me what your vision was. Is this experience that was just taking you to a new place still with the same kind of beauty, everything being exquisite service, impeccable, just unmatched. But what was it like for you to breathe a new life into Eleven Madison Park as a plant-based entity?
DH: I mean, it's always kind of been this way. There's been a lot of chapters of Eleven Madison Park. Eleven Madison Park is 27 years old. I've been there for 20 of those 27 years. And there's been many, many chapters of the restaurant and it's always been very personal. And I almost feel like if I would stop changing, then that would be a change. So in a way, I feel like when I think of food and working with food and creating with food, it's always based on my experience to this day, it's based on the place we are, New York City, the building, but then also what's going on in the world. And it's always sort of like what I feel at that moment. And from a creative place, I do feel most excited about working with vegetables.
At the beginning, I thought it might be limiting to leave all these techniques and ingredients behind, but what I realized is that it's been extremely freeing. And I realized that in a way before we were tied down by these rules of fine dining and these expectations.
JR: Or what even a menu was supposed to be like. What I love about Eleven Madison Park now is I never know what I'm going to get. There's no predictability to it. I always knew, "Okay, I am going to get some snacks. I'm going to get a shrimp thing. I'm going to get some other piece of fish, a piece of meat-
DH: You know what's going to happen for the most part in most restaurants.
JR: ...some duck and then"... Yeah. And now you don't know, which is so fascinating to me.
DH: I feel like we were just cooking condiments before. I feel like we were just cooking seasonal condiments for fish and meat. And today we're sort of creating the entirety of a dish. We also started a farm upstate called Magic Farm, which has added another layer. And as you said, there could be 300 different things that could be your main course. Before there's like five.
JR: We're going to take a quick break when we're back. Chef Humm's work outside the kitchen.
So I'd like to move out of Eleven Madison Park and start to think about your work outside the kitchen. You've kind of become this, I don't know if you would describe it this way, but you've kind of become this quiet humanitarian in a way. You talked a little bit about Rethink Food and all the meals that you've served to food insecure New Yorkers and turning the restaurant into a commissary and community kitchen. You've spoken at the Climate Change conference and now you're the ambassador to the UN on food and education. What do you want to say about food and education?
DH: Well, first of all, I'm very proud that we've been recognized with our restaurant by the UN and by climate activists. But I don't see myself as such. I feel like I'm very much a chef and I want to have my work as a chef and with food speak and do the work. But I do know the power of the language of food. I want to bring it outside of the walls of the restaurant. And if I'm anything, I am an expert in food and I;m very aware of what's available and what's no longer available and what are the problems. I feel like I have a responsibility to share that.
And even so, there's this romance of the chef who goes to the market every day and only buys the things that are at the peak of the season. And ideally, the vegetables never even hit the refrigerator, it's so fresh. And of course on Monday there's no fish in a restaurant because of course the fishermen don't work over the weekend. It's all not true.
JR: It's a fantasy.
DH: It's a fantasy. And I think we need to start speaking on that.
JR: How do you think chefs specifically, or how do you think the restaurant industry should be moving on climate? What are some things that you think that they should be doing across the industry?
DH: Well, the one thing I want to say is sometimes it feels so daunting and it feels like we don't even know our electric cars really better than the regular cars. You hear things, people say like, "Oh, but the batteries are just as bad." And sometimes it's so complicated that we feel so overwhelmed that we don't even start anywhere. And what I would say is that we cannot be perfect.
And I think as a perfectionist, and perfection has been my entire life, today I think more about progress than perfection. Because we can't tackle everything from food waste to recycling, to eating plant-based, to have better energy sources. We cannot tackle all of it. We can't be perfect. But I would say we have to push ourself to start somewhere. And I think we all have an opportunity to make a little change in our world, if it's at home or in your work. And then if you start somewhere, it can grow from there. And if we all start, tackle our little things, that can become very powerful.
JR: What's the easiest way to start?
DH: For me, it was clear that the most powerful thing we can do is actually to choose what is on our plate. And this is not a religion for me, cooking plant-based, but I know it's better for the planet. And by the way, it's better for your health also. But eating plant-based more often, that's a positive change. Even if you eat plant-based once a week. Or I mean, in America, average American eats a pound of meat a day. That's absurd.
JR: That's a lot.
DH: Do we really need that? So if we can reduce that by half, we've come a long way.
JR: That's a major change.
DH: And it will make a big difference in terms of climate.
JR: So you've got a lot going on right now. You have new collection of books, Eleven Madison Park, the plant-based chapter. And you just opened the Clemente Bar, which is chic, sexy little bar inside Eleven Madison Park. That is a collaboration with the Italian artist, Francesco Clemente. Can you talk a little bit about those projects and your new book and all this stuff you've got going on?
DH: Yeah. Well, I think since the reopening of Eleven Madison Park, which is almost four years now, thankfully, it's been challenging for a while. It took a lot to get people to buy into this, but I think people really are now very excited about it.
JR: It took them a while. It did take them... It's so funny.
DH: So now we're sort of on the other side, but it's also as it's about an experience, there's so many other factors than just cooking plant-based, but there's all the other elements of a great restaurant. And so we actually just released our new book, The Plant-Based Chapter of Eleven Madison Park. That really lets people behind the scene that there is a book on photography by this incredible photographer, Yi Fan, who documented the restaurant for a two-year period. And it's for the first time that we're showing also kind of like the imperfection that's going on, from the guys bringing out the trash at three o'clock in the morning to eating family meals.
JR: Does that make you itch a little bit to have the pictures of the trash? Well, let me put it this way. How do you feel about showing the imperfection? You just said that you were such a perfectionist. How does it make you feel to show some things that people don't normally see?
DH: I think for the longest time, we try to only present ourselves in the best possible light. And I think you have to kind of play a lot of smoking mirrors until you reach that mountain top that we thought was the mountain top. But then when you reach it, you actually realize that the beauty is in the imperfection, in the humanity of things. And then you get more comfortable as you're no longer just trying to reach these awards. You're getting more comfortable in sharing the other sides, the more beautiful sides. So the book is, one book is backstage photography that shows really the back of the kitchen and the dining room. There is a book of my notebook that's sort of my drawings and my notes, also a lot of imperfection there. And then there's the recipe book where everything is very edited and very refined and absolutely perfect. So for the first time, we're really showing sort of all sides what goes into a restaurant.
JR: That's amazing to be able to see all of those. I love to say that it's a process, not an event. And there's always progress-
DH: I think that's right.
JR: ...in that perfection. And if when you're striving for excellence, there's a lot of work that goes into striving for excellence. But we present this beauty. Because no one wants to see a struggling ballerina-
DH: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
JR: ...But to jump high to get that mountain, you have to reach up.
DH: A lot of falls.
JR: A lot of falls. We're going to take another break. When we're back, how Chef Humm thinks about the next 30 years of his career and the marks he'd still like to make.
You've won a lot of awards, you have had all of these reinventions, a lot of change. What's legacy mean to you?
DH: For me, it's really something that I'm at the beginning of sort of trying to figure out. And I feel like in the last 20 years at Eleven Madison Park, or even more than 30 years in my career, I feel like only now I got to a point where I feel like I have a foundation to actually build a legacy. I don't think I have done it yet. And having this platform now, I think I feel responsible to do that. And it has to do with being an agent for change and with educating the younger generation. I think having more of a purpose that goes beyond the wall of the restaurant, that's really important to me. And I feel like we're sort of starting to build that. But we're at the very beginning of it. But the good news is I probably have another 30 years in this career, and I feel like we can really build a strong legacy.
JR: What do you want people to be saying about you in 30 years?
DH: I'm very inspired by art. The things that inspire me the most are sort of the artists who really made a change, like Marcel Duchamp, just like every object could be art. Or with Fontana who took the canvas and sort of slid through it and sort of a questioned what is art. And even as recent as Mauricio Catalan who did the banana, I mean that, we're all laughing, but he's really laughing.
JR: Yes.
DH: So for me, that's actually a pretty great example. I think it's a great artwork. It's a great comment.
JR: It's a conversation, right?
DH: Yes. But what I would love for people to think is that we really like change. We weren't afraid to change. And it takes a lot of courage to change; it takes even more courage when you have something very successful and you change it again. My experience has always been, the thing is, you're creating something, then you have to build it. And then you need all your fans to absolutely love it. And you're convincing them with all your energy to love it. And then when you're there and everyone is loving it, you're like, "Hey, by the way, I'm going to do something else." Of course they're pissed off. I remember when our restaurant was a brasserie and it would serve french fries. And when we removed french fries from the menu, people got really upset because their beloved restaurant with their beloved french fries is no longer serving french fries.
JR: But what's so interesting now is that Clemente Bar has fries.
DH: We came full circle.
JR: That's true. Okay, as we wrap up here, I would love to know who are some food people that you're excited about or we should be talking about?
DH: I don't have much time to follow every chef in the world, which is a shame because there are a lot of amazing chefs out there. But I have a big team of my own. I feel very privileged to be working with some of the greatest chefs there are. And in our kitchen at Eleven Madison, we have Dominique, who runs the kitchen on a daily basis. He's incredible, such a talent. We have Josh, our creative director, who is so inspiring. He pushes me and inspires me. And then we have our pastry chef, Laura Cronin, who if there's any area in the kitchen where not having butter or cream is probably the most challenging…like the pastry. She has figured out to create some of the most beautiful desserts I've ever had without using any dairy. This team is really inspiring me and pushing me, and I feel like they're much better chefs than I ever was. So that's inspiring. Outside of the restaurant, I really love Michael Pollan. I think he's written some incredible books, and that has really also helped shine a light on some of our food system. I really love this little book he did, Food Rules. And then Alice Waters with Chez Panisse, what she stands for and what she's done with food education is very inspiring to me as well.
JR: Wonderful. Chef Daniel Humm of Eleven Madison Park and the Clemente Bar. His new book is Eleven Madison Park: The Plant-Based Chapter. Thank you so much, Chef.
DH: Thank you so much, Jamila, for having me.
JR: Thanks for listening to Food People. If you enjoyed this episode, please give us a rating and review on your podcast app of choice and hit that follow button so you never miss an episode. I'm your host, Jamila Robinson. Our senior producer is Michele O'Brien. Our associate producer is Abi Lieff. Jake Lummus and Pran Bandi are our studio engineers. This episode was mixed by Jake Lummus. Jordan Bell is our executive producer. Chris Bannon is Conde Mass head of global audio.