Eleven Madison Park

Twenty-Six Years on Madison Avenue

When Danny Meyer opened Eleven Madison Park in 1998, the Flatiron District was still finding its footing as a dining destination. The Art Deco building at the base of the MetLife tower was chosen partly for its grandeur and partly for its address overlooking the park — a combination that gave the room an atmosphere few Manhattan dining rooms can replicate. Meyer sold the restaurant to chef Daniel Humm in 2006, and what followed over the next decade was one of the more consequential runs in American fine dining: number one on the World's 50 Best Restaurants list in 2017, with consecutive top-five placements from 2013 through 2018. The current three Michelin stars, maintained through 2024, confirm a level of consistency that very few restaurants in New York have sustained across two decades. Among the city's $$$$ tier — alongside Le Bernardin, Per Se, and Masa , Eleven Madison Park occupies a distinct position: the only one that pivoted entirely to plant-based cooking and held its star count.

A Dining Room That Works on Its Own Terms

American fine dining at the top tier tends to split between hushed, architecturally severe rooms and those that create warmth through scale. Eleven Madison Park belongs to the second camp. The 1920s Art Deco interior was built for commerce, and the high ceilings and wide floor plan mean sound distributes differently than in smaller tasting-menu rooms. Music plays at an audible level, and the service team adjusts to the table rather than imposing a uniform formality. That calibration , formal enough to support a ten-course tasting menu, loose enough that conversation doesn't feel monitored , is one of the harder service registers to maintain at this price point, and it is part of what separates the experience from the more severe version of luxury found at some peers in the same category.

The art inside the room is commission-specific: Rita Ackermann's chalkboard painting and Daniel Turner's stone monument, made from melted items from the pre-renovation kitchen, give the space a sense of material history that generic luxury hotel restaurants rarely achieve. The Forbes Travel Guide Five-Star designation, held through 2025, reflects the totality of that experience, not just the food.

The Plant-Based Pivot and What It Actually Means

In 2021, Eleven Madison Park relaunched after its pandemic closure with a fully plant-based menu. The move attracted the most attention of any single programming decision in recent New York fine dining, partly because no three-Michelin-star restaurant in the country had made a comparable shift. The question the kitchen had to answer was whether plant-based cooking could sustain the structural expectations of haute cuisine , the layering of texture, the precision of temperature, the mimicry of classical preparations , without the proteins that had historically done that structural work.

The answer, according to the La Liste ranking of 88 points for 2026 (89 in 2025) and the retained Michelin stars, is that it can, though the kitchen uses fermentation as a primary tool to build the depth that protein would otherwise provide. A dedicated fermentation sous-chef, Brock Middleton, operates as a specialist within the kitchen, producing the components that give dishes the savory complexity the tasting menu requires. The carrot tartare, cited in La Liste commentary as a reference point for the restaurant's approach, uses preparation techniques borrowed directly from classical meat tartare service. The caviar course from the pre-pivot menu has been reimagined without animal products, retaining the presentation logic of the original. The restaurant does allow diners to supplement their tasting menu with select animal protein courses, giving it more flexibility than a strictly vegan program.

The supply side of the menu is tied to a dedicated upstate New York farm that harvests specifically for the kitchen, making the seasonal arc of the menu more traceable than most tasting-menu formats allow. Each menu includes one or two tableside preparations, a service element drawn from the classical French tradition that connects the current format to the restaurant's original French cooking lineage.

The Wine Program: 22,000 Bottles and How to Read the List

Among New York's top-tier tasting-menu restaurants, the wine programs at Le Bernardin and Per Se have historically set the reference points for cellar depth. Eleven Madison Park's program sits in the same tier: 4,700 selections across an inventory of 22,000 bottles, with a corkage fee of $75 for those bringing their own bottles.

Wine Director Adam Waddell oversees a team that includes sommeliers Nick Walters, Ehron Souza, Sam Neely, Brian Kim, Mark Guillaudeu, Anthony Alvarez, Jordanne Pascual-Cancel, Grant Dearden, and John Fuller , a depth of floor staff unusual even among three-star programs. The breadth of the sommelier team means pairing conversations can go deep without pulling a single person away from the floor for extended periods, a practical advantage that shapes the pacing of longer tasting menus.

The geographic strengths of the list reflect a classic fine-dining cellar built over decades: Burgundy and Rhône for French depth, California for domestic representation, Bordeaux and Champagne as expected anchors, with Italy, Germany, Austria, and Alsace giving the list range beyond the French-American axis. Star Wine List placed the program in its leading five for both 2023, 2024, and 2025 , a consecutive recognition that tracks the list's sustained curation rather than a single strong vintage cycle.

For a plant-based tasting menu, the wine pairing challenge is specific: without the fatty proteins that anchor most classic pairing logic, the sommelier team works with acidity, minerality, and textural weight as primary variables. Dishes built on fermented and aged vegetable components tend to pair well with wines that have some reductive quality or extended lees contact, and the Burgundy and Loire strengths of the list align with that direction. Diners willing to engage with the sommelier team on the rationale behind individual pairings will get more from the list than those who default to the standard pairing flight.

The wine pricing sits at the $$$ tier on Star Wine List's scale , many bottles above $100, with Burgundy and Champagne anchoring the higher end. For those seeking comparable wine depth at the same price level in New York, Atomix and Jungsik New York both operate serious programs, but neither matches the raw inventory depth of the Madison Avenue cellar.

Where It Sits in a Wider Context

The concentration of three-star tasting-menu restaurants in New York is unusual by global standards. Within that peer set, the differentiation is less about technique than about what each kitchen uses technique to say. Per Se maintains Thomas Keller's French Laundry lineage in a Columbus Circle room. Le Bernardin operates within a tightly defined seafood idiom. Masa is a pure omakase format. Eleven Madison Park is the one making the most visible argument about what fine dining should be doing, which generates more critical friction but also more discussion about the restaurant's place in the broader trajectory of American cooking.

Plant-based model pursued at 11 Madison Avenue has influenced how other serious restaurants think about their own reliance on animal protein , not necessarily by replication, but by demonstrating that the decision is available. Restaurants like Alinea in Chicago, The French Laundry in Napa, and Single Thread Farm in Healdsburg each make distinct arguments about sourcing and seasonal constraint; Eleven Madison Park's argument is further along the spectrum. Among international peers, 8½ Otto e Mezzo Bombana in Hong Kong and Alain Ducasse at Louis XV in Monte Carlo represent the classical fine-dining model that EMP has deliberately moved away from, which makes the comparison instructive rather than hierarchical.

For context across American fine dining formats, the programming at Lazy Bear in San Francisco, Providence in Los Angeles, and Emeril's in New Orleans each reflect different regional answers to the same question about where serious restaurant cooking is going. EMP's answer is the most categorical.

As part of its broader sustainability commitment, a portion of proceeds from every meal funds the Eleven Madison Truck, which provides free meals to New Yorkers experiencing food insecurity , a structural philanthropy model rather than a promotional one.

Planning a Visit

Reservations open at 9 a.m. on the first of each month for the following month and fill within hours. The dining room offers a tasting menu of eight to ten courses; the bar offers a five-course version, with seats on the bar stools giving access to an abbreviated format at a different price point. Saturday and Sunday lunch service runs from noon to 2 p.m., with dinner service extending to 11 p.m. Thursday through Sunday. There is no dress code. The take-home granola , made with raisins, coconut, and chia seeds , is included at the end of the meal.

For broader context on the New York dining scene, see our full New York City restaurants guide, as well as our New York City hotels guide, bars guide, wineries guide, and experiences guide.

Quick reference: 11 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10010. Dinner Tuesday–Sunday from 5/5:30 p.m.; lunch Saturday–Sunday from noon. Three Michelin stars (2024). Wine inventory: 22,000 bottles. Reservations open the first of each month for the following month.