“THIS IS A BEAUTIFUL part of life,” Dan-
iel Humm says as a custom-designed
ebony and brushed-chrome gueridon
cart rolls up to our corner banquette at
Eleven Madison Park, in the spectacular
former lobby of a landmark Manhat-
tan Art Deco skyscraper. Of course the
servers would be extra solicitous as they
explain the carefully composed platter
before us. This was their boss, even if he
was in a black sweater and black pants
that, on his long athlete’s legs and trim
six-four frame, make him look like he’d
just come from a mountain bike ride in his
native Switzerland instead of the kitchen.
“Where would we be without fine dining?
It’s a part of our culture.”
As two servers carve an enormous
grilled golden oyster mushroom that looks
like a live sponge delivered by a deep-sea
diver, Humm smiles, a look of shy but
deep satisfaction on his boyish, mallea-
ble face. He knows that his life-changing
duck breast glazed with honey and lav-
ender will follow, and that we, like many
tables a night, will be ushered on a kitchen
tour to admire the chef brigade quietly
working against a backdrop of gleam-
ing glass-fronted refrigerators where
nearly 150 Long Island ducks air-dry for
two weeks. Stately, safe, coddling, full of
promise—the world diners enter when
they come through Eleven Madison Park’s
oversize revolving door is one Humm
fought to create and maintain.
This world is threatened, mostly
because ambitious young chefs see fine
dining as a game not worth playing.
Winning one Michelin star, let alone
three, as Humm did, requires a level of
perfectionism and consistency in a daily
struggle he finds inspiring. You can never
reach perfection, he tells chefs, but you
can get damn close if every small habit
each day—every sliced tomato, butchered
chicken, skinned fillet, hand-scrubbed
cutting board—is as good as you can
make it and better than the day before.
Add the investment in staff, the consis-
tency of a vision, the custom-designed
ceramics for those gueridons: It takes
energy, focus, sacrifice, and money—a
lot of money—to get and keep three-star
status (Michelin’s highest rating) or win
the number-one spot on the World’s
50 Best Restaurants list, as Eleven Madi-
son Park did. It seems beyond the reach
and—worse, Humm worries—interest
of young chefs. Will they fight to create
worlds like this? Does the next generation
of diners care if this beautiful part of life
continues to exist? Whether he can find
a way to make fine dining look cool will
help determine the future of the style
Humm is busily redefining for today, in
both New York and London.
Eleven Madison Park is now in the full
contours of Humm’s image, but when he
arrived, in 2006, it was still the creation
of Danny Meyer, the pathbreaking res-
taurateur who reimagined fine dining
for New York and the country. At Union
Square Cafe, Meyer had Americanized a
stubbornly European, usually stodgy way
of cooking and eating, replacing fawn-
ing and suspiciously servile service with
casual, caring grace. By hiring Humm,
who had attracted national attention at
a San Francisco hotel restaurant, he was
placing a bet that haute cuisine could
thrive without coats and ties.
Humm, who trained as a competitive
athlete in his youth, brought intense
focus to every detail of serving and pre-
sentation. To make the front of house
work, Meyer matched him with Will
Guidara, a Cornell hotel school grad
who had worked in several of his restau-
rants. Guidara welcomed guests with
a go-ahead glint that buoyed you just
coming through the door. A tasting menuthat went from ridiculous to sublime
and back again in the same several-hour
experience caught the food world’s
attention. In pursuit of perfection, and
stars, the pair removed tables, increased
the already generous staff-to-guest ratio,
and built a whirring team of cooks and
servers—shoals of them, gliding in and out
of the dining room as if on invisible
roller skates. Diners in New York and
then the world made the restaurant a
worth-the-voyage destination.
Late last summer, Guidara and Humm
broke up, a split that shocked the restau-
rant world. Theirs seemed an ideal mar-
riage of swashbuckling entrepreneurship
and obsessive artistry, and that combi-
nation had won every prize there was
to win. The team had opened the wildly
successful NoMad restaurant and bar,
whose very name helped revitalize a
Manhattan neighborhood, and extend-
ed that into NoMad hotels in Las Vegas
and Los Angeles. What would become of
their Make It Nice restaurant group and
of Davies and Brook, a new restaurant
in London? If they came unglued, what
did that mean for other aspiring chefs and
restaurant owners looking for partner-
ships to propel them forward?H
UMM, 43, EXHIBITED his own
drive from the age of 11, when
he entered cycling competitions;
the kitchen work he took on in a few years
was just to pay for equipment. At 15, he
left home outside of Zurich to work and
to train. He was hell-bent on becoming
an international champion—of cycling or
cheffing, whichever came first. “I raced
all over Europe,” he says with that shy,
satisfied smile. “I was doing it.”
By 24, in 2000, he was executive chef
at a small country restaurant near the
borders of Germany and Austria. Gault &
Millau named him a “culinary discovery”
of the year and Michelin gave him his first
star. Convinced by an enthusiastic regu-
lar to consider working in San Francisco
in 2003, Humm never looked back.
Much of this he recounts in his 2019
cookbook-memoir Eleven Madison Park:
The Next Chapter. He gives credit to kind-
ly, disciplined chef mentors, but his real
role models are artists. A love of design
united his parents, who married and had
him by the time they were 19. His father
was an architect; his mother sewed and
wove, like the family of one of his artistic
heroes, Louise Bourgeois.