Eleven Madison Park is one of the top restaurants in the world, and when it reopens post-COVID, it will be ~vegan. elevenmadisonpark.com
This is just inconceivably daring to me—expectations for this echelon are already impossibly high, competition already intensely fierce.
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I'm not vegan, but I've been amazed how much progress has been made in the past decade towards making that choice feel tractable, or like not a huge sacrifice. I think this is how we'll get there eventually, if we do—rather than through old-school guilting. Wizard vs prophet.
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I'm excited about EMP making this move because there is no way they can do this without inventing radical new methods to make astonishing vegan food. The standard for these places is, quite seriously: with some regularity, diners must be brought to tears.
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And yes, of course, these methods will probably be super labor-intensive and maybe prohibitively expensive. But tons of high-end culinary innovation has predictably made its way downmarket over the last decade (sous vide, combi ovens); no reason to believe this will be different.
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They're using a technique in both of their final savory courses (beet, eggplant) which seems very doable in non-***:
1. Dehydration/concentration (curing, slow-roasting, setting on embers, etc)
2. Partial rehydration in flavorful liquid
Makes "meaty" texture with intense flavor.
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The current eggplant course is quite similar to the one in the second cookbook, actually, which isn't too hard to make! (Except it involves making miso from shelling beans, which takes a year—I used soybean miso!) Nice coverage here: bloomberg.com/news/features/
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For me the most interesting bits at EMP were already vegetable-centric, so it's not nearly so big a shift as it might seem. But those courses *did* usually benefit from dairy or a small amount of meat stock, and alas the replacements (thus far) really do suffer from the loss IMO.
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Hopefully it gets healthier though. I’m 6 years vegan now and none of the meat replacement stuff is of interest as they are usually not healthy (at all).
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Interesting. I guess one bummer of a context like this is that it doesn't really aspire to be healthy. After all, EMP's former tasting menus were certainly not! Innovation along that axis may have to come from elsewhere…
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thinking bout the trend to differentiate proteins in the past ~15 years, nieman pork, jidori birds, the wagyu craze. as the overall quality went up it was less exciting to see any protein on a menu, much less as a main. just not super novel esp if you can just... do that at home.
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Even before I became vegan I judged restaurants based on their creativity & execution of non-meat dishes. Steak & chops aren’t exactly dishes that require much of either, I’ve never understood why we pretend like those are the benchmarks of culinary excellence.
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Right. In general, I don't think such places are judged for steak/chops; but courses they *are* judged for usually do involve animal products. (e.g. EMP is famous for a lox-inspired smoked sturgeon canape and for creative foie gras presentations)
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