New York City’s three-Michelin-star eatery Eleven Madison Park has reintroduced meat to its menu, with chef-owner Daniel Humm saying the all-vegan menu wasn’t as profitable or welcoming.
Four years after shocking the food industry by turning to an all-plant menu, Daniel Humm has had a change of heart.
The chef-owner of Eleven Madison Park, which has three Michelin stars and has been named the world’s best restaurant, announced that the eatery is bringing back meat to draw more diners.
“Change is fundamental to who we are and how we grow. As I approach my 20th anniversary at EMP, I’ve decided it’s time for change again,” he wrote.
“Starting October 14, we will integrate our new culinary language into a menu that embraces choice. We will offer a plant-based menu, of course, but also select animal products for certain dishes – fish, meat, and yes, our honey-lavender-glazed duck.
“Eating together is the essence of who we are, and I’ve learned that to truly champion plant-based cooking, I need to create an environment where everyone feels welcome around the table.”
The move has financial motivations too. “I very much believed in the all-in approach, but I didn’t realise that we would exclude people,” he told the New York Times. “I have some anxiety that people are going to say: ‘Oh, he’s a hypocrite,’ but I know that the best way to continue to champion plant-based cooking is to let everyone participate around the table.”
The new menu will still be mostly plant-based, and diners who want a fully vegan meal will still be able to get one. But people will now also have a choice to opt for an oyster, a small serving of lobster, or the dry-aged lavender honey duck that was its signature dish for years. There may also be a chicken dish at some point.
“To me, that is the most contemporary version of a restaurant,” said Humm. “We offer a choice, but [one] where our foundation continues to be plant-based.”
The menu will still offer seven to nine courses for $365, and even if diners choose the meat or seafood options, the majority of the meal will still be plant-based. “When people come in and maybe they had one fish or a lobster or the duck, but they also had 80% vegetable dishes, they might even like the vegetable dishes more,” said Humm.
Why Eleven Madison Park went vegan
Eleven Madison Park first went vegan after reopening post-Covid-19 in 2021. During the 15-month closure, Humm fought bankruptcy and had come to a realisation that the food system, as it stands, isn’t sustainable in the long term. “It was clear that after everything we all experienced this past year, we couldn’t open the same restaurant,” he said at the time.
The 180-degree turn was celebrated by food sustainability advocates, who hailed it as a major step forward for food systems transformation. If such a prestigious restaurant could go vegan, could it herald a new era of planet-friendly dining?
Critics, however, questioned whether diners would fork out upwards of $300 for a meal with just vegetables, and the new menu received mixed reviews.
But during this time, Humm continued to advocate for sustainable dining, showcasing future-friendly products like precision-fermented eggs on the menu and collaborating with Californian firm MeliBio to develop a plant-based honey.
The chef also appeared in the 2024 Netflix documentary, You Are What You Eat: A Twin Experiment, which showcased the health benefits of a plant-based diet.
“If I’m truly honest, things have changed. In the last five years, it’s changed more rapidly than ever before,” he said in the four-part series. “Things used to be wild, now they’re farm-raised. Things used to be available, now they’re not available. Things used to taste a certain way, now they taste totally different. The quality of our food – it’s changing in front of us, rapidly.”
He added: “I started to realise the impact that animal farming has all over the world. I started to realise what was going on in the fish industry, and how broken it is. I started to feel guilty because I felt that, for a long time, I didn’t question enough exactly where our food was coming from. Like, all of our food. When you have that knowledge, you have the responsibility to speak about it.”
Daniel Humm’s re-embrace of meat reflects America’s wider food landscape
Those sentiments may have remained with Humm, but they’re no longer driving his business decisions. He told the Times that Eleven Madison Park had varying financial success since the plant-based shift, but found it more and more difficult to sustain the level of creativity and labour required.
At the same time, bookings for private events have plunged. “It’s hard to get 30 people for a corporate dinner to come to a plant-based restaurant,” he explained, adding that wine sales were down too: “For wine aficionados, grand cru goes with meat.”
His restaurant has never been fully vegan. Even with the plant-based menu, the restaurant still offers honey and dairy milk in tea and coffee service. But it was heralded as a positive step for vegan eating, at a time when interest in the diet was at an all-time high.
Humm’s decision to return to animal products reflects the wider cultural and financial landscape in the US. Sales of plant-based food fell by 5% in the foodservice sector last year, while conventional meat sales reached an all-time high, despite record prices for some categories.
Apprehension over ultra-processing has led many Americans – particularly young men – to double down on meat, a decision complemented by carnivore diet and right-leaning influencers like Joe Rogan and Andrew Tate.
Plant-based meat companies, meanwhile, have struggled to keep up. One of the largest players in the space, Beyond Meat, has had an alarming decline in sales this year, and is now moving past its meat-mimicking products to highlight traditional plant proteins instead. Impossible Foods, its major rival, has teased a move into blended meat (which combines animal and plant proteins into a single product).
Humm’s decision means Eleven Madison Park will no longer be one of the few plant-based restaurants to have a Michelin star. But it comes in the same year the list has seen two new entrants to the list, with London’s Plates and Seoul’s Légume earning one star.
And just last month, Alain Passard’s legendary French eatery Arpège, announced a switch to an almost all-vegan menu, with the exception of honey sourced from its own beehives. Others on this list include Dutch establishment De Nieuwe Winkel (two stars), Germany’s Seven Swans, and Switzerland’s KLE (both one star).
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