Eleven Madison Park – three stars, remade on Madison Square

Eleven Madison Park occupies the ground floor of 11 Madison Avenue, a limestone skyscraper designed for the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company and originally conceived as a hundred-storey tower that would have outscaled the Empire State Building, only to be stalled at twenty-nine floors by the Depression and finished in 1950. Danny Meyer opened the restaurant here in 1998; Daniel Humm took over the kitchen in 2006 and bought the business with Will Guidara in 2011. Few dining rooms have reinvented themselves as publicly: card tricks gave way to a sculptural Cloepfil interior, and in 2021 the entire menu turned plant-based, a decision that nearly broke the restaurant before making history. It holds Three MICHELIN Stars, a rating it has carried without interruption since 2012, and in October 2025 it began serving meat and seafood again alongside its vegetable-led cooking.

01The room and the setting

The restaurant sits on the northeast corner of East 24th Street and Madison Avenue, directly across from Madison Square Park, inside the Metropolitan Life North Building designed by Harvey Wiley Corbett and D. Everett Waid. The stock-market crash of October 1929 halted construction at twenty-nine floors, built in stages over two decades and completed only in 1950, with corner entrances rising three storeys above a lobby finished in travertine, marble and aluminium-leaf coffering.

When the dining room was last remade, architect Brad Cloepfil of Allied Works kept the original volume, the nickel-plated bronze windows and the ornamental ceiling plasterwork across the restaurant's 2,250 square feet, with a further 650 square feet in the adjoining bar. He aimed for the space to feel "enriched but simple", like the cooking, and designed a custom porcelain service inspired by research at London's Victoria and Albert Museum, its raw rims and glazed centres appearing to float above the tablecloths.

02The chef

Daniel Humm, born in Switzerland, earned his first Michelin star at the age of twenty-four. Danny Meyer recruited him to Eleven Madison Park in 2006 to succeed chef Kerry Heffernan, and five years later Humm and his then business partner Will Guidara bought the restaurant from Meyer's Union Square Hospitality Group, going on to open NoMad New York the following year. Guidara left the partnership in July 2019, and Humm took full ownership.

Insider tip

Book via Resy; menus are prepaid and non-refundable; full tasting $385.

When the pandemic closed the dining room in 2020, Humm turned the kitchen toward relief work, preparing more than a million meals for frontline workers and underserved communities, distributing them through churches, shelters and food banks, before reopening eighteen months later with an entirely plant-based menu.

03The cooking

The all-vegan menu was, by Humm's own telling, a gamble that nearly ended the restaurant: with Eleven Madison Park on the brink of bankruptcy, critics missed the lavender-honey duck and bristled at radish tart and sunflower salad in its place. It paid off in 2022, when the restaurant became the first in the world to hold three MICHELIN stars for a menu built entirely from plants, turning ice cream, ricotta and meringue into dairy-free recipes and reimagining caviar and butter from vegetable ingredients. Much of the produce now comes from Magic Farms, the regenerative farm in upstate New York that Humm co-founded in 2021.

Four years on, in October 2025, Humm reversed course, telling guests the kitchen would "integrate our new culinary language into a menu that embraces choice", adding fish, meat and, in his words, "our honey-lavender-glazed duck" back alongside the vegetable-led courses. The new menu stays mostly plant-based, and diners who want a fully vegan meal can still order one, or choose an oyster, a small serving of lobster, or the dry-aged duck that had been the restaurant's signature dish for years before it disappeared.

04What to order

The dry-aged, honey-lavender-glazed duck is the dish to ask for if you want the one that defined Eleven Madison Park for over a decade, vanished in 2021 and returned only in October 2025. Those who prefer the sea can choose an oyster or a small serving of lobster among the reintroduced options, while anyone wanting the kitchen's other identity can still request the fully plant-based tasting from first course to dessert.

For a weekend. For a lifetime.