Fancy
Fancy restaurants aren’t my cup of tea, but I’ve been rapt with the dialogue around Eleven Madison Park since their decision to go meatless. The blustery, virtuous announcement back in May vaguely mentioned our unsustainable food system and posited EMP as revolutionary leader in changing that. “It is time to redefine luxury as an experience that serves a higher purpose and maintains a real connection to the community,” Humm proclaimed. I have a hard time stomaching the notion that luxury can ever be revolutionary, but all that money is a powerful force in the small world of NYC plant-based dining, so I wanted to see what they would do with it.
So far, though, the word coming out of Flatiron isn’t staggering. I’ve had a couple friends who’ve gone there and said that the meal wasn’t worth the hype. Some of the reviews have been lackluster, with the most brutal takedown coming this week from Eater. The article starts off disappointingly predictable, mainly criticizing the price of the vegetable-based dishes, which is unfair because the price is the whole point of EMP. You can’t really criticize the price without criticizing luxury in general, or the wealth divide that causes places like EMP to exist. Some of the more valid criticisms are buried deeper in the article. Humm comes from a Eurocentric palate and it sounds like his attempts to incorporate other (mostly Asian) culinary influences don’t really hit. Some of the courses reference their meat equivalents a little too closely, which will always find them wanting in comparison. And the dessert isn’t awesome.
Reading about EMP got me thinking about what I’d do if I were creating that kind of luxury experience. Luxury always boils down to time: someone is paying a lot of money for a lot of other people’s time. The question is, where do you invest that time? Rather than spending the bulk of it on line cooks fastidiously plating each dish, I’d want to put the time into the sourcing (growing or foraging) of incredible ingredients. Working on slow ridiculous fermentation projects. Gathering together the wisdom of plant-based culinary traditions with hundreds of years behind them. It still wouldn’t be revolutionary, but maybe it would be cool.
Peaches & Matsutake
Alice Waters had this incredibly boss move at Chez Panisse where, for awhile, the dessert course was just one peach on a plate. The message of the dessert was, “The world has created something that is already so perfect that a great cook cannot improve on it.” It forces us to think about the role of sourcing in restaurants, which is among the most important parts of cooking. If we’re talking about an outlandish budget for my imaginary restaurant, I’d put as much of that as I could farther back in the supply chain, and invest in farms producing really good stuff. The meal would showcase some of those ingredients very simply — maybe an ancient heirloom apple or a small bowl of the best olive oil with a piece of fresh bread.
I’d probably also be able to get my hands on ingredients like the matsutake mushroom, which is highly prized in Japan but supposedly tastes a little like garbage to the uninitiated. Maybe I’d pair with a chaser to make it more palatable, but if I’m building a once-in-a-lifetime experience, I’d rather serve things that are interesting than tasty.
Slow food
Noma, the Copenhagen destination that runs a plant-based menu all summer long, is probably closest to the fancy restaurant of my dreams. They have an entire space and set of people devoted to fermentation and they make some truly wild shit out there. I have their fermentation cookbook, though I haven’t dedicated myself to fully exploring it. The closest I’ve come to tasting what they do is trying some Empirical Spirits, the drinks company started by two Noma alums. My friends and I shared one can (this was before COVID) and passed it around just smelling it and taking the tiniest sips for half an hour.
It makes sense to me that the luxury of money should translate to the luxury of experimenting with time and coming up with deep flavors that most people can’t try at home.
Old knowledge
I would try to make room for the expertise of people practiced in some of the centuries-old vegan cuisines of the world. Maybe we’d have a master tofu maker from Kyoto. An Ayurvedic practitioner from Southern India. An Ital chef from Jamaica. It might be difficult to blend these cuisines in a conscientious way, since some of them have rules that contradict one another, and they certainly build on different palates. So maybe we’d have a couple different menus for different days? That’s expensive, but we have infinite money.
Plant-based cooking is hardly a new phenomenon, and if I had the platform of an ultra-fancy restaurant, I’d want to highlight its deep roots around the world. People have managed to come up with some pretty fantastic foods over the centuries, so I would focus on those rather than attempting anything that mocked the meat dishes that fine dining restaurants seem more comfortable with.