Chicken-less eggs? This New York restaurant has cracked the code with this tasty alternative for vegans

Chef Daniel Humm of three-Michelin-starred New York restaurant Eleven Madison Park is serving up an omelette using eggs that are not derived from chicken—but from a lab

You can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs, can you? What about a crème brûlée or gin fizz, in which eggs—whether the yolk, white or ensemble—are also a key ingredient? And yet, in New York, that’s exactly what chef Daniel Humm did recently for a very special dinner. The Swiss chef, who helms the award-winning restaurant Eleven Madison Park, has reframed the discussion to focus on using eggs that aren’t produced by an animal species to concoct such dishes.

Humm created these dishes using a totally new kind of egg, which is the fruit of nine years’ research. The process to create these “eggs” involves extracting the proteins from a conventional egg, preserving the DNA sequences and then using them to cultivate eggs with a strain of yeast. The mixture is then fermented in a sugar-based solution and the proteins extracted to form liquid egg. The formula, which required no less than US$233 million in investment, was concocted by Californian start-up The Every Company. And the dinner created by Humm served as the launch for the creation.

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Eleven Madison Park was the obvious choice for such a demonstration. The restaurant famously moved to a plant-based, even vegan-focused approach back in 2021. And when the restaurant reopened after a succession of pandemic-related closures, Humm announced his intention to serve dishes based on fruit, vegetables, land and sea plants, mushrooms and grains. It became the first Michelin three-star establishment to serve neither meat nor eggs.

This chicken-less egg has a lot going for it. Its production at scale stands to benefit from large-scale partnerships such as that with AB inBev, the world’s largest brewing group, whose portfolio includes brands such as Corona and Budweiser, as well as investments from the likes of actress Anne Hathaway. Its inventors also brandish nutritional arguments: the recipe is said to contain no cholesterol or saturated fats, with eight grams of protein per serving (by comparison a chicken egg contains an average of six grams of protein).