Daniel Humm, the chef at New York’s Eleven Madison Park restaurant, gained his first three-star Michelin rating in 2011 and was awarded the title of world’s best restaurant six years later. “There weren’t any awards left,” he recalls thinking at the time.
But this week in New York, he achieved another milestone as Eleven Madison Park — now reconfigured as a plant-based kitchen — became the first vegan restaurant to be awarded three Michelin stars. “The plant-based menu is a bold vision of luxury dining,” the 2022 New York guide said. It is an achievement that is likely to reverberate across the culinary world.
Humm’s earlier honours at Eleven Madison were thanks to popular menu items such as roast suckling pig, poached lobster and glazed duck. But during a 16-month pandemic shutdown, Humm and his colleagues decided to reorient the restaurant to a plant-based menu as a response to the threat posed by climate change. The dramatic shift by one of the world’s most high-profile restaurants was a shock.