12/22/2023 0 Comments Recent menuSo is the nonbutter that arrives with the bread, molded into the shape of a sunflower, bright yellow with a dark eye of tangy fermented sunflower seeds in the center.Įleven Madison Park has trained its audience to expect “endless reinvention,” one of 11 touchstone words and phrases on a sign that hangs in the restaurant’s vast and precise kitchen. Originally kneaded with cow butter, the laminated dough has been rejiggered with butter made from sunflower seeds, and it’s an unqualified success. There is a plant-based version of the restaurant’s wonderful bread, like a savory croissant rolled into a crisp golden swirl. It’s a sleight-of-hand trick, but your taste buds accept it in place of the fishy brininess of sturgeon roe. I’d say it tastes delicious, and I might add that its flavor brings up deep, partly subconscious associations with the sea. At Eleven Madison Park, they have been seasoned with kelp. The seeds, dark and round and shiny, are sometimes said to taste like broccoli. Tonburi, made from Japanese summer-cypress seeds, arrives on chipped ice inside an antique silver caviar bowl that looks as if it belonged to the Romanovs. When it happens, all doubts evaporate for a few minutes. This would explain why a half-eggplant in which glazed slices of pickled eggplant ride like passengers in a canoe had an intoxicating richness the first time I ate it and a cloying heaviness the next.Ī couple of the kitchen’s efforts to get plants to mimic something else succeed. It’s possible that some of the special sauce is so concentrated that an extra drop or two can push things over the top. At Eleven Madison Park, certain dishes are as subtle as a dirty martini. Eleven Madison Park now employs a “fermentation sous-chef,” Brock Middleton, following the lead of other yeast-loving restaurants, including Noma, in Copenhagen, which keeps home-brewed garums and other magic juices around to provide an invisible lift.Īt Noma, these sauces are administered so subtly that you don’t notice anything weird going on you just think you’ve never tasted anything so extraordinary in your life. His cooking has always been process-intensive, but there seems to be something new at play, most likely an effort to add umami with fermented liquids rich in glutamates. ![]() Maybe he should bring back the celery root steamed in a pig bladder. ![]() Humm used to get purer, deeper results out of vegetables before the restaurant went vegan. The ingredients look normal until you take a bite and realize you’ve entered the plant kingdom’s uncanny valley. The servers offer few explanations for the doctored flavors, and no warnings, either. A tartare of minced cucumbers, honeydew melon and smoked daikon is suffused with an acrid intensity. Rice porridge under crisp, pale-green stems of celtuce has a tangy, sharp undertone that another restaurant might get from a grating of aged pecorino. Marinated wedges of heirloom tomatoes have a pumped-up, distorted flavor, like tomatoes run through a wah-wah pedal. Time and again, delicate flavors are hijacked by some harsh, unseen ingredient. It tastes of vadouvan and something else, something harsh and sharp that overpowers the nugget of sesame-seed tofu hidden inside a squash blossom. I don’t know what else accounts for the viscous liquid that looks and sort of feels like browned butter, but clearly isn’t. I suspect that the summer-squash dish that appears halfway through the menu somehow descends from the butter-poached lobster. ![]() The one at Eleven Madison Park tastes like Lemon Pledge and smells like a burning joint. That beet tasted like a beet, but more so. They used to do a similar beet act at Agern, a New Nordic restaurant in Grand Central Terminal, roasting it inside a crust of salt and vegetable ash. The beet is cleaned of pottery shards and transferred to a plate with a red-wine and beet-juice reduction that is oddly pungent in a way that may remind you of Worcestershire sauce. The pot is wheeled out to your table, where a server smashes the clay with a ball-peen hammer. Over the course of three days it is roasted and dehydrated before being wrapped in fermented greens and stuffed into a clay pot, as if it were being sent to the underworld with the pharaoh. In tonight’s performance, the role of the duck will be played by a beet, doing things no root vegetable should be asked to do. “It’s a tremendous challenge to create something as satisfying as the lavender-honey glazed duck, or the butter poached lobster, recipes that we perfected.” “It’s crucial to us that no matter the ingredients, the dish must live up to some of my favorites of the past,” he wrote. Buried in his announcement was a less-noticed passage that foreshadowed things to come.
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