CLIMATE WEEK MEATEASY EXPOSED BY NEW YORK TIMES

More details are out about the

SECRET MEAT ROOM

at Eleven Madison Park, the fair-weather Vegan restaurant recently skewered by New York Times restaurant critic Pete Wells:

New York Times restaurant critic Pete Wells slaughtered Eleven Madison Park’s revamped, veganized menu in an unstarred critical review this week — but the real golden nugget from the piece is that the all-vegan restaurant, has, well, a secret beef room. According to Wells, Eleven Madison Park offers an optional beef tenderloin dish to customers in its swanky private dining room, while maintaining the much-hyped vegan menu out front

The private dining room, which Wells previously revealed to serve beef tenderloin, apparently also serves... foie gras and sturgeon, a highly endangered species of fish…

by Luke Fortney@lucasfortney 

News of the meat-filled private dining room surfaced earlier this week following a brutal, unstarred review... drawing comparisons between the restaurant’s 10-course, $335 tasting menu and the taste of Lemon pledge...

In May 2021, Chef Daniel Humm of Eleven Madison Park announced he would no longer permit animal-derived ingredients to be used in his kitchen.  

"We offer three menus, all of which are 100% plant-based… Humm hammered his message home by telling the New York Times the restaurant would no longer serve meat or seafood, huffing, 

“The current food system is simply not sustainable, in so many ways… 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. “It’s a tremendous challenge to create something as satisfying as the lavender-honey glazed duck...”

Wells reported that when he dined at Humm's place, "the role of the duck" was " played by a beet, doing things no root vegetable should be asked to do. "

"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.

The pot is wheeled out to your table, where a server smashes the clay with a ball-peen hammer. 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.

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. That beet tasted like a beet, but more so. The one at Eleven Madison Park tastes like Lemon Pledge and smells like a burning joint. "

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