Eleven Madison Park Before All The Michelin Stars

The Daily Meal's editorial director, Colman Andrews, has penned a memoir, My Usual Table: A Life in Restaurants, to be published on March 18. This passage recalls the days when the offices of Saveur magazine, which Andrews was editing, were located a short walk from Eleven Madison Park, today one of New York's most highly rated restaurants.

In 1998 Danny [Meyer] opened two...restaurants, sharing the ground floor of an art deco skyscraper across the street from Madison Square Park. The original plan had been to install just one large restaurant in the 22,000-square-foot space, but it was bisected by a load-bearing wall, so Danny would have ended up with two dining rooms connected by a door. That didn't make sense to him, so instead he created two separate places: a stunningly beautiful modern American one in the larger portion of the space, and what was almost certainly the country's first serious Indian fusion restaurant on the other side of the wall. The Indian restaurant, with the talented Indian-born Floyd Cardoz in the kitchen, was called Tabla. The showplace was Eleven Madison Park.

The designers, Bentel & Bentel, had a lot to work with: The ceilings were twenty-five feet high, the walls and floors were pristine marble, and one whole side of the dining room was inset with broad, twenty-foot-high paned windows looking out onto the park. Bentel & Bentel raised the bar area and half the dining room slightly to improve sight lines and transected the lower portion of the space with a long two-sided banquette. Handrails and trim were made of nickel bronze, commonly used for accents in the deco era but rare today (the metal was imported from Australia). Room dividers were lustrous blond English sycamore inset with geometric tracery and pale green images of leaves. In three places around the room, immense black-and-white oils by the artist Stephen Hannock depicted scenes of Madison Square Park, based on photographs from the early twentieth century. All this added up to a brilliant job of evoking the past without descending into caricatured nostalgia. It was also purely and unmistakably a New York restaurant, full of energy and majesty and a subtle conjuration of the glamour of an earlier era. I thought it was a vivid expression of the style and spirit of the city as much as, though in a different way than, the legendary Four Seasons was. There was a kind of Gothamite grandeur to both....

The chef was a tall, soft-spoken, Pennsylvania-born Irish-American named Kerry Heffernan, who'd cooked under David Bouley and, at Mondrian, under Tom Colicchio. Kerry was a solid technician who seemed equally at home making grilled sandwiches of chicken, bacon, and Saint-André cheese or English pea flan with morels or lobster with lemongrass velouté. The service was vintage Danny Meyer, which is to say intelligent and efficient, and the interior settled a kind of calm on me, transporting me into a world far from my daily concerns. 

Eleven Madison became my canteen, my after-work hangout, my preferred venue for business lunches. I made almost everybody come to me there. I'll buy lunch, or drinks, I'd say, but I'd like to go to Eleven Madison. Nobody ever turned me down. Sometimes I'd have a serious meal at the place, maybe roasted root vegetables with a truffled chèvre parfait or twice-baked fingerling potatoes with truffles, followed by roasted capon or some beautifully presented, very fresh fish of some kind. (Kerry was an avid fisherman who knew his seafood.) Other times I'd have what I called my "diet lunch" — half a dozen oysters followed by Kerry's oxtail and foie gras terrine. The restaurant's plateau de fruits de mer was one of the most spectacular in the city, sparkling fresh and full of variety, and the oysters in particular were always superb. One day I took Johnny Apple, who had written some pieces for Saveur, to lunch at Eleven Madison. There were Martha's Vineyard oysters that day, and we ordered a dozen to share. They were so good that we ordered a second dozen. And then a third. I don't remember what we had as main courses.

It is a measure of how much at home I felt at Eleven Madison that when I looked around the office on the afternoon of September 11, 2001, and realized that there were still ten or twelve of the editorial staff at their desks—whether they couldn't get home or just didn't have anybody to go home to, I didn't know—I spontaneously invited them to lunch with me at the restaurant. There were only a handful of people sitting at scattered tables, talking in hushed tones, and an appropriately dark mood suffused the interior. Richard Coraine, one of Danny's partners, welcomed us. I explained that we'd been working, and needed some comfort before figuring out what to do next. He brought us food, he brought us pricey wines on the house—Château Rayas, Château Lafite Rothschild—and he brought us updates. We all talked, nervously at first, more confidently as the wine took hold; we relaxed; as a staff, we had always been reasonably close, but I thought we somehow drew still closer together over our well-laden table. After lunch, we all went our own ways, by no means immunized against the day's horrible events, but somehow at least a little bit restored. That's the kind of place Eleven Madison had become for me.

Danny Meyer knew that Eleven Madison Park was a gem of a restaurant, a unique space with a crack service staff, and at some point he began thinking that the food was too casual, too brasserie-like. An establishment as unique and elegant as Eleven Madison, he reasoned, should offer sophisticated fare to match—food as good as that served by the top French restaurants in the city. Shortly before I quit Saveur, he asked Kerry to move over to Hudson Yards, his new catering operation, and, in pursuit of his culinary goal, brought in a Swiss-born chef named Daniel Humm, who had worked at Pont de Brent, Gérard Rabaey's three-star restaurant in Montreux, and then won accolades as the chef at Campton Place in San Francisco.

Humm banished such plebeian fare as seafood platters and grilled cheese sandwiches from the menu, and the restaurant became less and less the kind of place you could stop by for a casual lunch. He introduced sea urchin "cappuccino" with cauliflower mousse, peekytoe crab salad, and sea urchin roe; slow-poached egg with brown butter hollandaise, asparagus, Parmesan foam, and a Parmesan tuile; and poached lobster with curried granola to the menu. Frank Bruni gave Humm four stars in The New York Times and declared that his cooking "bridges the classically saucy decadence of the past and the progressive derring-do of a new generation." The restaurant soared so high that it left Danny's orbit. In 2011 Humm and his general manager, Will Guidara, who had worked at Spago in Beverly Hills and then run the restaurants at the Museum of Modern Art, bought the place and took it in their own direction.

There are no à la carte offerings at Eleven Madison these days, only a fifteen-course prix fixe menu at $195 per person. That menu has a New York theme; the diner will enjoy sophisticated reimaginings of a bagel with smoked sturgeon, an egg cream, and a black-and-white cookie (actually served twice, first in savory, then in sweet form), among other things, in addition to such dishes as seared scallops with pear gelée and caviar and roast duck crusted with Sichuan peppercorns and served with sweet cabbage and foie gras. Eleven Madison is now surely one of the half dozen best restaurants in New York City, a place with a lot of stiff competition—which is, frankly, not something that could have been said about it in the old days. But it is the chef's restaurant, not the customer's.

Excerpted from MY USUAL TABLE: A Life in Restaurants by Colman Andrews. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced without written permission from HarperCollinsPublishers.

Colman Andrews will be the guest at a ticketed lunch based on a chapter of his book at 1:30 p.m. on Sunday, March 16, at Oyster Club in Mystic, Conn.; a reading and signing the same afternoon at 5 p.m. at La Grua Center in Stonington, Conn.; a reading and signing at 7 p.m. on March 18 at R.J. Julia Bookstore in Madison, Conn.; a talk and reading at 7 p.m. on March 19 at the 92nd Street Y in New York City; an onstage conversation about the book with Ruth Reichl at 7 p.m. on March 24 at Powerhouse Arena in Brooklyn; a reading and signing at 6 p.m. on April 10 at Book Passage in the Ferry Building in San Francisco; an onstage conversation at 7 p.m. on April 11 at Great Good Place for Books in Piedmont Center in Oakland, Calif.; a reading and signing at 1 p.m. on April 12 at Diesel Bookstore in Larkspur, Calif.; and a ticketed dinner at 7 p.m. on April 13 at Osteria Mozza in Los Angeles.