“It’s funny how after more than 30 years of cooking this is where I have arrived,” Daniel Humm tells me across the screen.
The Swiss chef is the kind of person whose past precedes him. If you care about food, you know the beats of his career. By the age of 24, he’d earned a Michelin star. A move to the United States a few years later brought him first to the West Coast then to New York, where he quickly climbed the ladder at Eleven Madison Park, the restaurant he acquired in 2011. By the next year, the institution held three Michelin stars. Then it topped the World’s 50 Best Restaurants list in 2017, the same year Humm opened a nonprofit, Rethink, which turns restaurant excess into meals for food insecure individuals. In 2021, the chef exploded our collective understanding of what constitutes fine dining by converting Eleven Madison Park into an entirely plant-based restaurant. (It has since re-incorporated meat.) Three years later, he teamed up with the artist Francesco Clemente, a good friend, to open a bar above complete with hand-painted frescoes. If reading the above was exhausting, I can assure you those are just the highlights.
Humm is 50 now and approaching yet another career milepost, opening his first standalone restaurant in the U.S., to which he has lent his surname, as a fresh start. “There’s a great quote by Picasso about how it’s taken his whole life to learn the craft of painting, and even more time to unlearn it,” he says. “That’s very true for me as well.” This pared-down ethos will translate to more casual fare (and price points) than is usually associated with the chef. Humm has leaned into his mother’s Franco-Italian heritage, his travels through the Mediterranean, and the resource that is Magic Farms, the pesticide-free farm he helped open in 2021 to supply Eleven Madison Park, to concoct a menu that doesn’t “get in the way of our ingredients.” (Expect roasted chicken, eggplant Milanese, grilled branzino, and no red meat.) Off the table, artwork by Louise Bourgeois, Roni Horn, Rashid Johnson, and the now 74-year-old Clemente, who painted the ceiling by hand, will punctuate architect Pierre Yovanovitch’s design.
Ahead of Humm’s opening on Oct. 10, we sat down with the chef to talk about reinvention, why accolades still matter, and what makes a restaurant last.
This year is a big one for you. You’re marking 20 years at Eleven Madison Park and embarking on your first standalone restaurant project in the U.S. How do you feel?
It’s been a long time in the making. I’ve liked this space [at 435 Hudson Street] for a long time, even when it was another restaurant. The fact that we have it is incredible.
What about the space is so exciting to you?
I love the neighborhood and Hudson Street and the scale of the room, which is reminiscent of Eleven Madison even if it’s a more casual restaurant. It feels like the right kind of sibling.
Opening a restaurant is a crazy thing. We worked with a lot of my friends, artists like Roni Horn, Rashid Johnson, Francesco Clemente… We worked with the estate of Louise Bourgeois; we worked with [architect] Pierre Yovanovitch, who’s a great friend. And then of course our entire team, many of [whom] have been with me for a long time. Then one day we open it to the world, and everyone is gonna have an opinion. [Laughs] That’s the beauty of it too: Everyone has a very personal feeling about a restaurant. But, you know, it has my name, and there’s no place like home.
Is there something that’s been a lesson for you in working on Humm, even as someone who’s at the top of your field?
It’s the first restaurant I open completely on my own. We had never done it like this, from A to Z. We did do a casual restaurant before, at the NoMad Hotel, which was extremely successful for [almost] 10 years. It helps to have that experience behind us because it gives us a certain confidence that we can do it. With restaurants, you need to have the finger on the pulse. You want to open the restaurant you believe is what the world is gonna want, but also where you want to cook the things you want to cook and eat.
How does that translate into the menu, but also the experience as a whole?
The cooking comes from a very confident kind of place: I know what ingredients to use, I know exactly how to cook them, and then to leave it exactly like that. That will come across as a simple way of cooking.
In terms of the space, my dad is an architect and I grew up visiting houses by famous architects all my life. If I weren’t a chef, I’d probably be an architect or working in interior design. I love to create spaces. I’ve always been inspired by the Gesamtkunstwerk. A great restaurant is very much like that. Everything matters, from the door you walk in, to the podium, to the uniform, to how it’s gonna smell, how it’s gonna sound, the light, every material that you see and touch.
When you walk into a restaurant as you, Daniel, what’s the first thing you look for? What do you pay attention to?
It’s really the feeling. You can feel if something feels authentic or not. The thing I really don’t like personally are “concepts.” There’s less and less just restaurants, authentic places done by people who do what they believe they want to do. Everything today has to be a concept. I’m looking for real places. I like permanent places, I like heritage. In 2028, Eleven Madison Park turns 30. That’s a long time in the restaurant world. With this new place, Francesco is painting the entire ceiling of the restaurant by hand. We could have chosen to paint on a canvas and hang it on the ceiling, but we’ve chosen to paint directly on the ceiling because we want this place to feel permanent. We want to become an institution.
You’ve mentioned that you took trips with the team to prepare for Humm. Can you tell me about some of the places you visited?
We went through Greece and Italy. I have some of my favorite restaurants in those places. I like Nino in Rome, I like Nuova Arena in Milan. One of my favorites in Athens is Ta Kanaria. They only do fried fish and mullet. Sometimes they have grilled fish, and they do Greek salad but that’s it. It’s three generations. When the weather is bad, they’re closed because they can’t fish. Then there is an amazing place next to the market called Diporto. It’s this older guy, he’s 85 years old, and he cooks from the market only during lunchtime. It’s amazing.
Art has been such a backbone to your projects and is so important to the way that you live your life. What do you hope the works on view at Humm will bring out of people’s experience?
With all my restaurants I try to create a space that feels entirely personal to me. How can I create a space that feels as close to my home? It’s not about the art thing, in a way; it’s really about creating a space with your friends.
When we re-opened Eleven Madison after the renovation, everyone was waiting to see what we were gonna do in terms of the art. We were offered Basquiat paintings and Warhol paintings, and that just didn’t feel interesting at all. Of course they’re great artists, but they have no relation to our restaurant. At that point, I worked with Daniel Turner and Rita Ackermann and Olympia Scarry to create the main room. Daniel created a sculpture out of the old kitchen; he melted down the old equipment into a solid form that became the step into the restaurant that everyone who comes in has to go through. You have to step over the past to be in the present. Rita took the painting that was there before, a landscape of Madison Square Park, and repainted it on a chalkboard and then erased it. The chalkboard is obviously about creativity, moving forward, teaching, learning. We wanted to write a new chapter. Then Olympia took these broken glasses from the renovation and made these stained glass windows that hang above the entry now.
What is your relationship to the work of Louise Bourgeois that will be on view at Humm?
It’s a work that my mom collected. I became very close with Jerry [Gorovoy], who worked with Louise for 45 years as her assistant. He’s running the estate now. She’s not living but she might as well be because I feel I’m so close to the work.
Interiors of Humm. Photography by Adrian Gaunt.
You’re so often preceded by your accolades: Michelin stars, James Beard Awards, World’s Best Restaurant. People don’t necessarily see the struggle that it takes to get there and the everyday work. What do you feel like has been the hardest part of doing this job?
Our work is fleeting. The experience is impermanent. If the food is not eaten in 10 minutes, it dies. The whole thing has to be enjoyed in that moment and it’s very hard to capture it, other than in people’s sort of memory.
There’s the great [land] artist Andy Goldsworthy, who puts these icicles together and then the sun comes and [the artwork] falls apart. That’s kind of like what we do. We live for that one moment that they can stand. The hard part is you have to do it again the next day and the next day and the next day and the next day. But I [also] love that about it.
In terms of awards, I was a competitive cyclist before cooking and I wanted to be the best, I wanted to win races. When I started to cook, it became my new sport: I wanted to work for the best and be the best and win every award possible. It’s very motivating and powerful, not just for myself but for the entire team because you can say, “Let’s get two stars.” Then you’re like, “Wow, let’s go for four.” You cannot do this without an incredible team, so you use any tool at your disposal to motivate your team. For a long time, awards were that north star. In 2017, [Eleven Madison Park] was named the World’s Best Restaurant. Then we were like, “Okay, what’s next? What if we open a restaurant without animal products and get three stars?” We did that.
I co-founded a nonprofit Rethink Food with Matt Jozwiak, who came out of our kitchens. That work has changed my life. Last year we served 12 million meals in New York, and we are on track to do the same this year. It’s given me a higher purpose. Because with the awards, it’s like, how can there be a best restaurant in the world? That’s a ridiculous thing. It’s not like a cycling race, where there’s a number one. Restaurants aren’t like that. I’ve also struggled with [the fact that] doing what we do at the highest level is a rarified experience. At the same time we’re working with food, and food is so essential to every human being in the world. For a long time I was thinking about how I could bring this thing that we love so much to more people. One of the most powerful ways I have been able to do that is through Rethink Food and now through opening a new restaurant that’s a more casual experience. It’s not gonna be a cheap restaurant, but it’s definitely more accessible than what we do at Eleven Madison.
But the awards still matter. People in our industry, a lot of us come from broken homes, no college education, and this is our thing. We have nothing to show for it really, but the awards really do show something. For me and for a lot of our chefs, if we get a star or an award, it’s a point of pride that then partners or parents can be like, “Wow, he’s doing something. He’s on the right track.”
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