YOU know a movie is in trouble when a voice-over narrator has to explain the plot that the combined efforts of screenwriter, director and editor failed to make clear. Something like that is going on at Eleven Madison Park, which just eliminated its $125 prix fixe option and now offers only one menu, a $195 blowout that lasts about four hours.
The meal is narrated almost from the minute you sit down, starting with a printed card tied to a box of savory black-and-white cookies ("the quintessential New York treat"), and scarcely letting up until you leave, when you are handed a pocket-size book of historical background on the food you've just eaten.
Restaurant dishes are rarely self-explanatory these days, when it seems every item on every plate must be pointed out and identified before the first bite is taken. But with its new format, Eleven Madison Park, celebrated around the world for Daniel Humm's virtuosic cooking and its vaulting ambition to be seen as an innovator, has made the explanatory text central to the meal.
Taken on their own, with no voice-over, a high number of dishes in the new tasting are extraordinarily pleasurable, fine enough to transcend any words that might be applied to them. And a few of the narrated courses lead to the kind of delight more often inspired by theater or dance.
With others, though, the speeches can step on the kitchen's toes. And throughout the meal, the tone of those words feels strangely at odds with the restaurant's evident aim of creating, as the tag on the cookie box might put it, the quintessential New York experience.
In a sense, the narration began long before I showed up at lunch recently to get a first taste of the new menu. For weeks, the restaurant's young operators, Will Guidara, the general manager, and Mr. Humm, the chef, had been explaining the changes at length in The New Yorker, The New York Times and other places. Walking in the door, I already knew about the cheese course hidden inside a picnic basket, the dessert predicted by a magic trick and the invitation to visit the kitchen.
I knew, too, that all of this was connected to the history of food in and around New York, but I still wasn't quite prepared for just how often this history would be served up.
"If you're wondering why you have a bag of chips on your table, the potato chip was invented in upstate New York in the 1800s," a server said at the start of the second course, a cup of what tasted like salty and smoky apple juice. Indeed, next to the cup was a shiny foil sack containing crisp peels of apple and celery root.
A spellbinding broth of clams and buckwheat was introduced with a spiel that ended this way: "Even today, people on Long Island gather on the beaches for clambakes as they celebrate with family and friends."
And a malted chocolate egg cream was given this gloss: "Some say the egg cream was invented in Manhattan, some say Brooklyn, but everybody agrees that it contains no eggs and no cream."
Stilted and earnest, these little homilies recur throughout meal. While people come to Eleven Madison from all over the world, those who live in the city may have to fight back the impatience and urge to interrupt that come with the keys to every New Yorker's first apartment. The narrative tone isn't sharp, it isn't quick, it isn't wised up, and it assumes the listener knows nothing: in other words, it's not a New York voice. By the end of the four hours, I felt as if I'd gone to a Seder hosted by Presbyterians.
Ordinarily, you might just snicker about all this during the cab ride home before conceding that yes, the meal had been exceptionally well prepared. But at times, the stories undermine Mr. Humm's cooking.
About midway through my lunch, a server clamped a meat grinder to the table. He began talking about New York's steakhouses, famous around the world. By this time, the smoke of seared dry-aged beef was in my nostrils. "One of the most iconic dishes in steakhouses is steak tartare," he went on.
Something about that seemed not quite right, factually, but I quickly forgot about it because his next move was to feed a cooked carrot into the meat grinder. This was Eleven Madison Park's tribute to Manhattan's temples of beef: bright orange mush that you might feed a baby.
There was more to it than that, of course. Mr. Humm is a wizard with vegetables; I don't think there's another New York chef cooking at his level who can tease as much flavor and beauty from them. So by the time I'd mixed the carrots with the garnishes that stood in for the traditional steak tartare extras, then applied a few drops of mustard oil and carrot emulsion presented in plastic squeeze bottles, I had one of the most surprising, inventive carrot dishes I've tasted in a long while. But my appetite was primed for porterhouse. No carrot should face that kind of competition.
By PETE WELLS 18 Sep, 2012
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Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/19/dining/at-the-reinvented-eleven-madison-park-the-words-fail-the-dishes.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
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