Tatler Asia’s editorial director, Eric Wilson, recounts his recent return to Eleven Madison Park—his first since the renowned New York fine dining restaurant went meatless in June—and reflects on his experience
The journey to Eleven Madison Park, which has emerged from the pandemic in a new incarnation as the world’s most famous plant-based restaurant, begins through a metallic revolving door set within a soaring limestone and marble loggia of the grand art deco Metropolitan Life North Building on Madison Square Park in New York.
Scratch that.
The journey to Eleven Madison Park began more than a month earlier when I sat at my laptop to make a reservation at 9 am EST on 1 July (or 9 pm Hong Kong Standard Time). The moment the following month’s bookings were released, I felt a rush of excitement as I saw all the dates of August suddenly available. I clicked on the first table available at a decent hour, but it suddenly evaporated. I clicked the next one, and the same thing. Gone. Click. Poof. Click. Poof. Sixty seconds later, all the bookings were gone, and I was left only with the option to join a waiting list that’s reportedly 15,000 long for the most in-demand restaurant in America.
Scratch that.
My journey to Eleven Madison Park began when my husband, an incurable optimist, suggested we walk in right when they opened at 5:30 pm on the last night of our summer holiday to the States to see if we could snag seats at the bar—he’d been tipped off by the concierge at our hotel that there were six spots that sometimes became available, if you were lucky, and nice, and daring enough to set foot into a four-star fine-dining establishment unannounced. Normally I wouldn’t tolerate this sort of potentially mortifying gambit, but we were staying across the street at the Edition with a few hours to kill before our midnight flight back to Hong Kong, and had a backup reservation for our final dinner in the city, ironically at a classic chop house down on Broadway since there’s nothing like a New York steak, so what could it hurt to humour him this one time? Surely, we’d walk into that revolving door, dressed in our identical grungy airplane clothes and sneakers no less, and revolve right back out onto the street. We’d laugh about it. But that didn’t happen.
We entered. After quickly making our case, we were ushered to the side, out of the view of the proper guests and slightly away from the grand dining room with its grand windows looking out onto the park, as a wave of uniformed servers whispered comments back and forth, and a very pleasant young woman was dispatched to the bar area, then returned a moment later and escorted us to the bar, where we were seated in the 2nd and 3rd stools from the right, the first being occupied by a man wearing—my God!—shorts. He was a restaurant owner from Connecticut in town for a food-and-beverage trade show, and had heard the same thing about the seats at the bar. Meanwhile, diners in fancy dresses and suits, and apparently some members of a Korean boy band, slowly filled the dining room visible though a cutout in the small bar.
Ever since I posted this experience on Instagram, I’ve been asked by hundreds of people what the new Eleven Madison Park dining experience is like. Is the food good? Is it worth the price (US$335 a head for the dining room tasting menu, or $175 for six courses at the bar)? Can vegetables really live up to all this hype? And my answer is always the same: It was worth it to me.