Eleven Madison Park, the elegant, internationally acclaimed Manhattan restaurant whose climate-minded move to an all-vegan menu four and a half years ago was hailed as both brilliant and baffling, is bringing back meat.
Its chef, Daniel Humm, said in an interview that he wanted to draw more diners to the restaurant, both for financial reasons and as an act of hospitality.
“I very much believed in the all-in approach, but I didn’t realize that we would exclude people,” he said. “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 restaurant has had varying levels of financial success since introducing the vegan menu, Mr. Humm said, but over the past year has found it increasingly harder to sustain the level of creativity and labor required. Bookings for private events, an essential stream of income, have been particularly sparse. “It’s hard to get 30 people for a corporate dinner to come to a plant-based restaurant,” he said.
Wine sales were down, too. “For wine aficionados, grand cru goes with meat,” he said.
The revamped menu, which begins Oct. 14, will still offer seven to nine courses for $365, and will largely be prepared without animal products. Diners will have a few opportunities along the way to opt for meat or seafood instead of vegetables. That might mean an oyster for a first course, a small serving of lobster or the dry-aged duck lacquered with lavender honey that has long been singled out by critics as a standout. Mr. Humm is also thinking of adding a chicken dish. Diners who want an all-vegan meal can still have one.
Mr. Humm introduced the vegan menu in 2021 when he reopened the restaurant, which had closed for 15 months because of Covid. During that time, he said, he fought off bankruptcy and spent his days working with Rethink Food, the nonprofit organization he co-founded, to serve a million free meals to medical workers and poor New Yorkers.
Mr. Humm says he saw that the global food system was fragile and riddled with social inequalities. He explored the growing genre of books and documentaries about the perils of a fast-changing climate and came to consider luxury less about ingredients like foie gras and caviar and more about carefully sourcing food and preparing it with exceptional skill and creativity.
“We couldn’t go back to doing what we did before,” he told The New York Times when he announced the vegan menu.
Skeptics doubted that diners would pay hundreds of dollars for vegetables and fruit, no matter how artfully prepared. Others dismissed it as another high-end stunt from a chef who had taken the restaurant through a series of different menus since he took over in 2006, including one that required waiters to perform card tricks.
But many people considered the move an important step in efforts to minimize the consequences of global warming by changing how animals are raised and consumed. If a chef like Mr. Humm, who landed at the top of the 2017 list of the World’s 50 Best Restaurants, believed in serving only plants, the thinking went, menus at more mainstream restaurants would begin to reflect concern for the welfare of animals and the climate.
The meat-free menu met with mixed reviews. Although the restaurant retained the three stars that Michelin first awarded it in 2012, other critics were not as impressed. Pete Wells, then The Times’s restaurant critic, described vegetable dishes that tasted harsh, out of balance or, in one case, like Lemon Pledge.
“Some are so obviously standing in for meat or fish,” he wrote, “that you almost feel sorry for them.”
The move back to meat comes after months of contemplation that started in earnest early this year during a research trip to Greece, Mr. Humm said. He and some colleagues traveled into the mountains to watch a shepherd slaughter a goat. “It’s very moving and there’s such respect,” he said. “If you had seen the whole cycle, of course you would never waste a bite of this.”
He spent the next several months thinking about that, and digesting comments from diners like, “I wish I could bring my husband, but he would never come.” He pondered the meaning of hospitality, he said, and realized that restaurant’s vegan dogma had become exclusionary.
In July, he decided it was time to give diners more choices and add meat back to the menu.
“To me, that is the most contemporary version of a restaurant,” he said. “We offer a choice, but where our foundation continues to be plant-based.”
Even if a diner chooses all the meat or seafood dishes on the menu, he said, most 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 percent vegetable dishes,” he said, “they might even like the vegetable dishes more.”