Eleven Madison Park, one of the world’s best restaurants, may not reopen after the pandemic
While most hospitality entrepreneurs are busy coming up with ways to reopen, one of the world’s best-known and best restaurants may remain closed.
The future of Eleven Madison Park (EMP), the three-Michelin-starred New York restaurant that was crowned the best in the world in 2017, is uncertain. “Reopening is still a big question mark,” owner Daniel Humm tells Bloomberg in an interview. “I absolutely want to continue creating the most creative dishes with the finest ingredients, but at the same time, it has to make sense in some way.”
Nobody is waiting for this
For Humm, reopening an expensive fine-dining restaurant doesn’t feel right. Just as it didn’t feel right to start selling fancy EMP-to-go boxes. “The virus is so intense in New York; nobody is waiting for that.”
But what does Humm want to do? “Help the ever-growing group of New Yorkers who are going hungry.” We wrote about it earlier: together with the Rethink Food foundation—which prepares surplus restaurant food for people in need—he transformed his kitchen into a soup kitchen, serving around 3,000 meals a day to people who needed them.
Redefining luxury
“That opened my eyes,” says Humm. Now, if EMP reopens, he wants to open the restaurant to both homeless people and people who are going hungry, as well as the affluent guests the restaurant always welcomed before the coronavirus pandemic.
Humm himself doesn’t yet know exactly what that will look like. But he believes it is clear that EMP will never be the same again. “We need to redefine what luxury means. This is an opportunity to help people who have nothing. I don’t want to cook only for the 1% anymore.”
Photos: Rethink Food
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