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Daniel Humm

Total Work of Heart

At the summit of fine dining, success can feel like a treadmill. Your signature dish becomes an obligation. You work to maintain accolades, not be surprised by them. You are coordinating more than creating.

Daniel Humm knows the feeling. After taking Eleven Madison Park to three Michelin stars and the title of best restaurant in the world, he reopened after the pandemic with a radical proposition: an entirely plant-based menu. In a business defined by animal entrées, vegetables would have to carry the room. This was interpreted by many as a political statement, though in this interview I realized it was to twist the knob on his own creative energy through self-imposed constraints.

This is the restless mind of a former professional cyclist who takes an athletic approach to artistry. No vegan restaurant had earned three Michelin stars. Humm wanted to be first, which they did handily.

This is the Tao of Daniel: Set a goal, achieve it, then change the rules on yourself for the thrill of climbing new peaks. Twice through our conversation, Humm quotes Willem de Kooning: “I have to change to stay the same.”

He seems to draw more inspiration from artists outside food than from within it: Philip Guston abandoning abstraction, Miles Davis going electric, Monet’s water lilies. He invokes Gesamtkunstwerk (German for "Total Work of Art"), to describe a restaurant where food, room, people, and feeling form one composition. Every dimension has been pushed with love and craft.

What surprised me when we first met was his calm. Humm’s standards are exacting, but his presence is almost breezy (that's a good thing, I assure him). We discuss the harder origins of his ambition, how he builds a kitchen where “it’s cool to care,” and how he leads with the standards he sets.

We also follow that ambition beyond the dining room: Rethink Food’s work feeding underserved communities, and Riff, a dinner-in-a-box business he’s building with my longtime friend and Sir Kensington’s co-founder, Mark Ramadan. The proposition: $6.99 meals for two that are easy to whip together or an extended creative endeavor, should you so choose. For a chef used to composing an entire evening, the challenge is clear: make an ordinary Tuesday worth gathering around, and nudge home cooks to keep twisting the knob on their own artistry. Full disclosure, I'm a small investor.

Along the way, we discuss meditation, the emotional utility of ice cream, and a Japanese rice dish cooked in clay.

This is Daniel Humm, At Large.

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