H
OW DO THE HUMMS of the future,
including a rising wave of chefs
of color, view fine dining? Two
of the most prominent—Edouardo Jor-
dan, whose JuneBaby, in Seattle, won
the 2018 James Beard Foundation Best
New Restaurant award, and Kwame
Onwuachi, who won last year’s James
Beard Foundation Rising Star Chef
of the Year award for his Kith/Kin, in
Washington, D.C.—both say they were
deeply influenced by Eleven Madison
Park. Onwuachi actually worked there,
and Humm became a mentor.
“As a chef, I’ve always loved going to
fine-dining restaurants,” Jordan recently
told me. “Some knocked me out of the
park.” The multicourse, family-style
meal he gave 250 people in Oxford,
Mississippi, last October at the Fall
Symposium of the Southern Foodways
Alliance knocked me out: It was one of
the most memorable meals I’ve had in
the last decade, from definitively flaky
biscuits with cane syrup to irresistibly
gnawable pork neck bones. Jordan inar-
guably cooks at the highest level of any
chef in the country. But going for the
degree of perfection a Michelin star or
best-restaurant ranking requires is, he
says, “not always achievable, and always
stressful—for servers, cooks, and for
guests: What if they don’t get the expe-
rience they expected?”
He doesn’t see it as part of his own
future. “I’ve worked in fine-dining res-
taurants I knew personally did not make
money,” he says. “Owning a restaurant
is a business. Period. I love doing fine
dining—working little pop-ups, making
food beautiful. But I cannot expect my
cooks to make that kind of food every
day and give me a future. I don’t want to
be stuck at the stove 40 years from now.”
As for Onwuachi, his first high-profile
restaurant in Washington featured cours-
es even more numerous and service even
more reverential and much more garru-
lous than his former workplace, Eleven
Madison Park. It had prices to match,
and it closed quickly. Three years ago, he
opened Kith/Kin with a sharper story and
a shorter menu. “Fine dining is shifting
its definition,” Onwuachi says. “We’re
focusing on the culture of the food.”
Onwuachi first met Humm as a dazzled
student at the Culinary Institute of Amer-
ica, and when he got a job with him, fol-
lowed his advice about being a chef. “He
said, ‘A chef should know his country’s
Madison Park with severely grand pil-
lars, echoes both the New York space
and the marvelously silly, silvery 1929
fittings of Claridge’s, one of the great
Art Deco interiors of London and the
world. The room is discreetly buzzing;
the server shoals, choreographed by
Billy Peelle, the former general manag-
er of Eleven Madison Park, float in and
out. But the atmosphere is less hushed,
less reverent, less formal than stuffy and
expensive London restaurants are,
and more casual than EMP, with a bless-
edly shorter menu diners can keep to
three or four courses. Humm wants
Davies and Brook to be a place regulars
can come every week, and a few weeks
later he excitedly reported that one diner
had already been in six times. Its prices—
this is London, one of the world’s most
colossally expensive cities—might not
make that possible for most. And then
there’s the expectation that this hugely
anticipated restaurant by a celebrated
chef will offer a world-class experience.
But something about the brasserie-like
ease of Davies and Brook gives a view
of how fine dining can be cool for the
future—and creating that, Humm told
me, has become his new idea of win-
ning. Doing it at Claridge’s is particu-
larly sweet: He worked in the basement
kitchen for a few summer months when
he was 15, chopping tomato concasse
and trimming bread for tea sandwiches.
This early in, it was clear that Humm
and his longtime team are making their
vision work. Local critics and bloggers,
well-wishing chefs, and even Lauren Hut-
ton, a longtime Humm fan, were being
ushered in and out of the kitchen, where
Dmitri Magi, the former chef de cuisine at
EMP, who had moved his family months
before to open Davies and Brook, looked
exhausted but happy. Humm, who knows
how to play the game he says all artists
have to play to succeed, was circulat-
ing, spreading his long arms in enthu-
siasm and leaning his lanky frame into
the table to show that no one was more
interesting to him than the diners he was
talking to. Well after midnight, Humm,
Magi, Peelle, and the staff were hud-
dling around one of the gleaming stain-
less work tables in the newly outfitted
kitchen, going over the service with the
comfortable familiarity of a team after
an exhausting, satisfying game.
This time the smile wasn’t shy. Humm
was doing it. n
cuisine.’ ” So the young chef took gigs
doing pop-ups cross-country and learned
the food of his ancestors from Nigeria and
Trinidad, among other places. Now, echo-
ing Meyer, he says his goal is for custom-
ers to feel at home. Servers greet first-time
customers with “Welcome home” in the
hopes that they will “walk away with a
memory—a happy memory.”
Jordan and Onwuachi managed to
support themselves working for chefs like
Thomas Keller and Humm, and found
enough money for their own restaurants.
They’re the exception. “If I can’t afford to
send my kid to New York City to appren-
tice for six months unpaid,” Onwuachi
says, “or even cover their food or subway
card, that eliminates their opportunity
to learn at that very high level. That’s
another reason we’re misrepresented
in this industry.”
A lack of mentors who look like them
is a huge obstacle to young chefs of color,
both chefs say. (One recent sign of hope:
Meyer’s only full-service restaurant out-
side of New York City, Maialino Mare, in
Washington, has an African American
executive chef, Rose Noel.) How to change
the system to give more chefs of color bet-
ter opportunities? Onwuachi sighs. “If I
had the answer, I’d be doing it right now.”
‘
T
HIS IS THE THREE-STAR din-
ing of the future,” Humm says
as he shows me around the
ultra-elegant dining room at Davies and
Brook, barely a week after it opened. The
room, a similar luminous gray to Eleven
This world is
threatened,
mostly because
ambitious
young chefs see
fine dining as
a game not
wor t h play i n g.
MARCH 2020 115
