THENEWYORKER,NOVEMBER23, 2020 11
PHOTOGRAPH BY NAILA RUECHEL FOR THE NEW YORKER; ILLUSTRATION BY JOOST SWARTE
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TABLESFORTWO
EMP To Go
For years, the restaurant Eleven Madison
Park set the standard for fine dining in
New York City and the world, at least for
a certain crowd. In 2017, it was ranked No.
1 by an opaque committee that chooses
“the World’s 50 Best Restaurants.” By late
2019, the price of the tasting menu, which
could take up to five hours to complete
and once famously included a course of
carrot tartare, fed tableside, and straight-
facedly, into a meat grinder, had risen to
three hundred and thirty-five dollars,
before wine and other add-ons.
And then the ground beneath the
restaurant industry fell out; not even the
most venerated blocks of Madison Avenue
were exempt. After the pandemic forced
dining rooms to close, Daniel Humm, the
chef who bought Eleven Madison Park
from Danny Meyer in 2011, seemed to
undergo a sort of radicalization. In an
interview with Bloomberg Businessweek, in
May, he described his “biggest lightbulb
moment”: the decision to transform his
kitchen into a commissary for a nonprofit
called Rethink Food, which provides free
meals for New Yorkers. “The infrastruc-
ture to end hunger needs to come out of
the restaurants,” he said. “I don’t need to
only feed the 1% anymore.”
For a while, it seemed like he might
not feed the one per cent at all. The
restaurant has never offered outdoor
dining, and Humm has so far elected
not to operate indoors at twenty-five-
per-cent capacity. A hypothetical re-
opening is “a blank canvas right now,” he
told Bloomberg Businessweek. “We would
need to redefine what luxury means.”
But, before the wealthiest New Yorkers
could go into champagne-and-caviar
withdrawal, Humm launched EMP To
Go, offering a roast-chicken dinner—
plus a turkey iteration for Thanksgiving,
Krug Grande Cuvée and white-sturgeon
roe optional—for pickup in not only
Manhattan and Brooklyn but also the
notorious one-per-cent strongholds of
East Hampton; Greenwich, Connecti-
cut; and Montclair, New Jersey.
Is EMP To Go the world’s best take-
out? On a recent rainy Sunday, I arrived
at Grand Army Plaza, in Brooklyn, on
the lookout for a dark-gray BMW X
parked in the roundabout’s inner ring,
as per e-mailed instructions. At the car,
a man scanned a clipboard for my name
and then handed me an expensive-look-
ing blue-canvas insulated bag embossed
with the restaurant’s abstractly floral
logo, for which I had paid two hundred
and seventy-five dollars. My feeling of
furtive anointment was replaced quickly
by a flush of embarrassment; putting
aside questions of morality, fine dining
is decidedly uncool.
Back home, I unpacked the free-
range, certified humanely raised chicken,
raw but ready to be roasted, pre-stuffed
with brioche, foie gras, and truffle. A
box of bitter greens came with tiny jars:
vinaigrette and sunflower-seed crum-
ble. There was half of a baked butternut
squash, sheathed in waxy seaweed, with
a miso-cured egg yolk to grate on top
of it, plus a par-baked potato gratin, an
apple tart, and a cannister of the restau-
rant’s status-symbol granola. “Truffle and
eggs,” a two-hundred-dollar add-on I’d
assumed was coyly named, turned out
to be plainly literal: six raw eggs and a
pair of dark, mottled knobs that smelled
vaguely astringent, along with directions
for how to master a French omelette.
The chicken was the most decadent
I’d ever cooked, not to mention the most
beautifully bronzed. (The secret, I think,
was frosting the skin, like a cake, with
softened butter.) The squash yielded eas-
ily to a spoon after I warmed it through,
brown butter pooling in its cavity, and
the rich, velvety gratin was stretchy with
Gruyère and sharp with Parmesan. But
my prevailing emotion was discomfort,
when the plates had been cleared—and
not because I had to wash them myself. If
Humm’s pivot to philanthropy felt like a
silver lining of the pandemic, a long-over-
due reckoning with a system that favors
few, EMP To Go seemed to undercut it,
luxury adapted but far from redefined.
Shaved clumsily over my omelette, the
truffles were only as remarkable as nuts,
and, paradoxically, less valuable for their
scarcity. (Roast-chicken dinner $275.)
—Hannah Goldfield
