This is rich — and meaty, too.
Chef Daniel Humm very proudly and visibly announced in May that his high-end Manhattan restaurant, Eleven Madison Park, would emerge from its COVID closure with an entirely plant-based menu. “The way we have sourced our food, the way we’re consuming our food, the way we eat meat — it is not sustainable,” he told NPR at the time.
What he didn’t tell the outlet is that he’d still have what has been called a “secret” meat room for the pseudo-elites.
Humm certainly claimed to be going whole veggie hog. While you’d still be able to get milk and honey for your coffee, his restaurant was not just eliminating meat, but fish, too. Its price tag of more than three Franklins was staying the same, though.
Yet if Clara Peller (of Wendy’s commercial fame) were resurrected to ask “Where’s the beef?!” Eleven Madison Park’s richest patrons would know.
As the New York Post’s Page Six reports (as presented by commentator Monica Showalter):
Just call it Eleven Madison Pork: It emerges the city’s most exalted vegan restaurant has a secret meat room for the mega-rich.
This May chef Daniel Humm had announced with much flowery fanfare that his Eleven Madison Park restaurant would reopen in June from its pandemic closure with a fully plant-based vegan menu. But not just any meager meatless menu: It’s 12 courses for $335….
However, it seems those principles are off the plate in the restaurant’s private dining room … [which] comes complete with a meat-heavy menu that includes foie gras, beef tenderloin, roasted chicken and pork….
Page Six has exclusively obtained the private dining room menu, which features dishes such as the highly controversial foie gras, beef carpaccio and butter-poached lobster with black truffle and celery root.
Plus, there is pork seared with red cabbage and cocoa beans, roasted chicken and beef, scallop, halibut, trout and sturgeon, which is listed as endangered in some areas. Not to mention a series of local cheeses.
While it was not reported if “local cheeses” meant those made in rat-infested NYC, my, the above does sound delectable, though a bit rich for my tastes (in price, not palate-piquing potency).
But then there’s the fare for the poor millionaire. Telling the New York Times in May about his pandemic pondering (and proving that an idle mind really is “the Devil’s playground”), Humm said, “It became very clear to me that our idea of what luxury is had to change. We couldn’t go back to doing what we did before.”
“While the restaurant’s ingredient costs will go down, labor costs will go up as Mr. Humm and his chefs work to make vegan food live up to Eleven Madison Park’s reputation,” the Gray Lady also related.
They’d better work harder, however, if a Tuesday write-up by Times restaurant critic Pete Wells is any indication. While he did have some kind words for Humm’s establishment in what NBC called a “withering” review, he also said of a type of beet dish, “The one at Eleven Madison Park tastes like Lemon Pledge and smells like a burning joint.”
Wells also noted “that in some dishes, vegetables were forced to do so much work impersonating meat that ‘you almost feel sorry for them,’” related NBC.
You know you have too much time and money on your hands when you can devote so much energy to trying to make veggies identify as meat (a bit like a boy identifying as a girl). But this type of moral preening is common among the arts-and-croissants crowd.
Monica Showalter reminds us that Barack Obama’s 60th birthday bash in Martha’s Vineyard (you know, that place “refugees” are never sent to) was, along with being a maskless affair, also an (allegedly) plant-based one. Moreover, “The 2020 Golden Globes featured a vegan menu, as will the 2021 Met Gala, a major fashion-industry event,” reported Bloomberg.
This agenda is “also being foisted on schools, as ‘Meatless Mondays’ depriving kids of critical nutrition to satisfy the elites and their bows to the god of global warming,” Showalter also informs.
As for Humm’s place for swells, it’s not hypocritical — just misunderstood. As Page Six further reports, a restaurant source “insisted the meat dishes were prepared in a separate kitchen from the vegan fare and claimed foie gras had not been on the private dining menu since the restaurant reopened as a plant-based venue.”
“The source, somewhat fishily, also claimed, ‘The private dining room is operated as a separate business to the main restaurant,’ even though it clearly bears the same name and branding on its menu,” Page Six continued.
What’s more, MSN’s EATER reports a restaurant spokesman as expressing that “the restaurant plans to transition to a vegan private dining room by January 1, 2022.”
“That decision was made ‘prior to this week’s coverage,’” according to the spokesman, EATER continues.
As for Humm, even if his clientele were principled enough to be deterred by the apparent hypocrisy, he’d be fine. Page Six also tells us he’s dating billionaire philanthropist widow Laurene Powell Jobs, wife of the late Steve Jobs (well, we know who does the cooking in that relationship!).
Despite this, Humm’s restaurant “got the max [$5 million] on Joe Biden’s COVID restaurant bailout relief, known as the American Rescue Plan, while others, mostly small fry, got nothing,” notes Showalter. Yes, leftists love the little guy so much they want to keep him just the way he is — little.
Showalter also notes studies showing that vegetarianism isn’t all that healthful. But the pseudo-elites needn’t worry because they’ll always live a “private-meat-room life.” Oh, they’re not necessarily insincere when bloviating about “sustainability.” They just mean that having the hoi polloi enjoy life’s pleasures is unsustainable.
If only the top 0.01 percent do, the Earth will just smile wide.
As for high-end dining, $335 meals are ostentatious, amounting to trophy dinners as much as anything else. If you know where to go, you can get the best possible food for 17 to 30 dollars a dish. So if someone has character to match a robust wallet and really wants to feel better about himself, get a $20 meal — and use the rest of that Eleven Madison Park money to help the ruling class’ victims.
