The Taste by Vir Sanghvi: Daniel Humm's restaurant embraces flexibility with return of meat options

After a successful plant-based transition, Eleven Madison Park's Daniel Humm decided to include meat again to accommodate diners' preferences.

It’s easy to jump to conclusions. Four years ago everyone I spoke to in the West said meat-eating was in decline. We had recognised the danger that methane emissions (from the farming of livestock such as cows) posed to the environment and would all do our bit to save the planet. Others talked about how vegetarianism was healthier for us. And a mountain of hype surrounded the development of plant-based meats. Eventually, we would all be eating plant-based Beyond Meat burgers, we were told.

Eleven Madison Park shifts to include meat, balancing principles and profit. (Representative image)(Freepik)

Many of those who talked about saving the planet were sincere and were willing to put their money where their mouths were.

I know and admire the chef Daniel Humm whose Eleven Madison Park is one of the world’s great restaurants. Daniel was hit hard during the Pandemic when his restaurant was shut. As the losses mounted he was advised to file for bankruptcy. He refused and turned Eleven Madison Park into a sort of soup kitchen feeding thousands of New Yorkers who were suffering through the Pandemic.

Daniel came to India a little later and I did an onstage conversation with him for a live audience at Mumbai’s Masque. Before we went up to the stage, I asked him how it was going. He answered honestly that while the dining room was full every night, the booking time required to guarantee a table had dropped. More significantly, the restaurant had lost out on corporate dinners, which had once contributed significantly to its bottom line. But such was his commitment that he had resolved not to take a salary from the restaurant till it returned completely to something like its old profitability.

Then, a few weeks ago, Daniel was forced to let reality intrude. He announced that Eleven Madison Park would bend its plant-based policies a little. Some meat and fish would return to the menu.

He explained why he had to do it. There was the problem with corporate dining. But there was also a more fundamental problem with tables of four or more. Often, even if three people were happy to eat a plant-based meal the fourth member of the party would protest and they would have to go somewhere else.

Eleven Madison Park would remain mostly plant-based but anyone who wanted to eat something less vegetarian would now find a few dishes on the menu that they could order.

I am sure it was not an easy decision for Daniel but I think it was the right one. Partly, because it saved one of the world’s great restaurants. But also because I believe in choice. All Indians know the feeling of going to a restaurant abroad and discovering that a member of your party will have to subsist on bread and cheese because the menu has no vegetarian options. Just as most good restaurants in the West have begun offering a few vegetarian dishes I think it’s only fair that plant-based restaurants also offer a degree of choice to those who like animal-products.

When Gwendal Poulennec of Michelin hailed Eleven Madison Park as ‘the North Star’ for chefs who wanted to explore the world of plants, many people ( mostly French people, admittedly) argued that Alain Passard had been doing the same thing for many years, long before Daniel went plant-based. This was not strictly true. Yes, Passard had been focusing on vegetables for years but he had never quite given up all animal products. Periodically, non-vegetarian dishes would turn up on the menu at his three Michelin-starred L’Arpege in Paris. Around a decade ago, I interviewed Passard about his menu choices. He never once mentioned the environment. It was a culinary choice, he said. He just liked vegetables. ( “ My petit pois! They are better than caviar!” he exulted.)

At present there is no meat on the L’Arpege menu but there is no guarantee that this will always be the case. I sometimes wonder if Passard’s way is better. He never boxed himself into a corner and kept his options open. But then he never had Daniel’s commitment to saving the planet.

For all that, I think restaurant menus require a degree of flexibility. Even Daniel never asks people to turn vegan and give up all meat. In his TV appearances ( and at our interview), he usually suggests that people give up meat for one day of the week. That’s probably a better way of dealing with the issue: restraint rather than abstinence.

Daniel’s restaurant has had three stars for over a decade so his problems may not sound like the ones faced by chefs at lesser restaurants. But, in fact, all chefs will have to make the same sorts of decisions.

While meat was once seen as the enemy, the focus is now on industrial food, what we call Ultra Processed Food. Most foods made in factories are bad for your health. This doesn’t affect places like Eleven Madison Park which always source everything carefully. But it means that the plant-based meat industry is in trouble because its mock meats are made in factories and are ultra processed.

And it means that chefs at smaller restaurants also have to source their ingredients more carefully . Unfortunately the phrase farm-to-table has become a meaningless cliche at a time when it could have guided chefs .

At his Bangkok restaurant Gaggan Anand, who sources every ingredient with obsessive attention to detail, makes fun of chefs who falsely claim to use ingredients from neighbourhood farms. The only animals in our neighbourhood are street rats, he says, and proceeds to serve dishes that, he claims, are made from rats. Of course the dishes have nothing to with rats but he does get people thinking about bogus farm-to-table claims.

I thought of Gaggan when I went to have lunch at Roots by Rural Mitra, a tiny restaurant in Delhi’s Greater Kailash. The kitchen and service teams at Roots are all female as is the owner Meenakshi Kumar. Like Asma Khan in London, Meenakshi has hired home cooks and women from outside the restaurant business.

But there is a strong Gaggan connection. I know Meenakshi because she spent more than a decade in Bangkok as the public face of Gaggan’s restaurants.

She left before Gaggan started doing his send-up of farm-to-table, which is just as well because Meenakshi’s concept at Roots is—you guessed it!— farm-to-table! Soon after she came back from Bangkok she bought a small farm and has been growing organic vegetables there. These are the vegetables she serves at Roots.

But, like Daniel, she came to a crossroads in her journey. Should she stick to being plant based? Many of her guests complained about how restricted their choices were.

And so, like Daniel again, she decided to include a little meat on the menu. She had put vegetarian Vietnamese Pho (with rasam to compensate for the absence of stock) on the menu. But as time went on, she decided to offer a chicken option as well. One of her best dishes is double cooked eggs on rice with Indonesian sambals which is not plant -based. But the eggs are free range and the rice is carefully sourced.

The restaurant started doing better when she extended the menu beyond her farm fresh vegetables, though it is still recognisably a plant-focused place. But she has learned not to be an absolutist. If you are eating one of the many South East Asian dishes on the menu and want fish sauce then she will give it to you.

Meenakshi is now turning into a mini empress of a mini empire of mini restaurants. She has opened Gully Gully Cafe which serves street food and also runs a street food cart called Urban Tapri. Both places serve meat but are plant focused and are run by women. She will soon open Basanti da Dhabha, which will serve Punjabi food using vegetables from her farm.

Meenakshi’s restaurants are tiny but I wonder if there isn’t a lesson for bigger establishments from her journey. Perhaps the best way to get people to appreciate , plant based dishes with fresh, organic ingredients is to not restrict their choices. Keep the menu plant-focused but don’t banish meat completely.

As Eleven Madison Park makes its menu more inclusive, we shall see how well that approach works. My guess is that business will go up, the restaurant will retain its three stars, and Daniel Humm will end up doing more to save the planet by being less restrictive than he was when his restaurant was completely free of all animal products.