It is easy to jump to the conclusion. Four years ago, I spoke to everyone in the West that there was a decline from eating meat. We had recognized the danger that methane emissions (from cows like livestock cultivation) were prepared for the environment and all would do their work to save the planets. Others talked about how vegetarianism was healthy for us. And a mountain of publicity surrounded the growth of plant-based meats. Finally, we must all be eating Plant-based Beyond the meat burger, we were told.
Many of those who used to talk about saving the planet were honest and ready to invest their money where they had their mouths.
I know and praise Chef Daniel Hamm whose eleven Madison Park is one of the great restaurants in the world. Daniel was given a tough competition during the epidemic when his restaurant was closed. He was advised to file for bankruptcy as disadvantages. He refused and replaced eleven Madison Park in a way by feeding thousands of new Yorkers in the soup kitchen, suffering from epidemic.
When life finally became normal, I was ready to return to eleven Madison Park. But Daniel decided to take a new risk. He will remove animal products from the menu and only serve plant-based food, he announced. Commercially it was like a person who survived drowning by announcing that he would now blow himself.
Why, I asked him, would he want to risk financial suicide? The answer was quite simple: he believed that the overlapping environment of meat was damaging. And he was working on his principles. First of all, things became better than someone. Restaurant retained its three Michelin Stars. It was filled every night. And even a brutal review of the New York Times did not stop the dinner from booking space.
Daniel came to India after a while and I interacted with her for live audiences at Mumbai mosque. Before we went on stage, I asked him how it was going. He honestly replied that when the dining room was filled every night, booking time was required to guarantee a table. More importantly, the restaurant was lost at corporate dinner, which once made significant contribution to its lower line. But this kind of commitment was that he had resolved not to take salary from the restaurant until it came back to something like his old profitability.
Then, a few weeks ago, Daniel was forced to infiltrate reality. He announced that eleven Madison Park would turn its plant-based policies a bit. Some meat and fish will return to the menu.
He explained why he had to do this. There was a problem with corporate food. But there was also a more fundamental problem with tables of four or more. Often, even though three people were happy to eat a plant-based food, the fourth member of the party would protest and they would have to go elsewhere.
Eleven Madison Park will mostly be plants-based, but whoever wanted to eat some less vegetarian, will now find some dishes on the menu that they could order.
I am sure this was not an easy decision for Daniel, but I think it was right. Partly, because it saved one of the world’s great restaurants. But also because I believe in choice. All Indians know the spirit of visiting a restaurant abroad and finding out that a member of your party will have to live on bread and cheese as the menu does not have a vegetarian option. Just as most of the good restaurants of the West have started offering some vegetarian dishes, I think it is only appropriate that plant-based restaurants also provide degrees of choice to those who prefer animals.
When Michelin’s Gweendal Polynk saw eleven Madison Park as ‘The North Star’ as ‘The North Star’ for the chef, who wanted to find out the world of plants, many people (mostly French people, accept) argued that Ellen Passard had been doing the same thing for many years, the first thing was done. This was not strictly true. Yes, the Passard had been focusing on vegetables for years, but never gave all the animal products. From time to time, non-vegetarian cuisine will turn on the menu in its three Michelin-starred L’ARPEGE in Paris. A decade ago, I interviewed Passard about his menu options. He never mentioned the environment. It was a Pak option, he said. He only liked vegetables. (“My Petit Poice! They are better than caviar!” He said.)
Currently there is no meat on the L’Arapege menu, but there is no guarantee that it will always be the case. I sometimes wonder if the path of the passard is better. He never made himself in a corner and kept his options open. But then Daniel’s commitment to save the planet was never.
For all this, I think the restaurant menu requires a degree of flexibility. Even Daniel never asks people to turn vegetarian and leave all meat. His TV shows (and in our interview), he usually suggests that people leave meat for a day of the week. This is probably a better way to deal with this issue: restraint instead of restraint.
Daniel’s restaurant has three stars for over a decade, so their problems may not look like people faced by chefs in low restaurants. But, in fact, all chefs will have to make the same type of decisions.
While the meat was once seen as an enemy, now meditation is on industrial food, which we call ultra processed food. Most of the foods made in factories are poor for your health. It does not affect places such as eleven Madison Parks that always source everything carefully. But this means that the plant-based meat industry is in difficulty because its mock meats are made in factories and ultra processed.
And this means that in small restaurants, the chef will also have to source its components more carefully. Unfortunately the farm-to-table phrases have become a meaningless clich when it could direct the chef.
In his Bangkok restaurant Gagangan Anand, who makes every component a source with obsessive attention, make fun of the chef, who makes false claims to use the material from the neighborhood fields. The only animals in our neighborhood are road mice, they say, and move forward to serve the dishes, which he claims, made of mice. Of course the consonant has nothing with mice, but people get to think about farm-to-table claims.
I thought about Gagan when I went to have lunch on the routes by Rural Mitra, a small restaurant in Greater Kailash, Delhi. The kitchen and service teams of the roots are all women such as the owner Meenakshi Kumar. Like Asma Khan in London, Meenakshi has hired household cooks and women from outside the restaurant business.
But there is a strong Gagan connection. I know Meenakshi as she spent the public face of Gagan’s restaurant in Bangkok for more than a decade.
Gaggan left before sending the farm-to-table, which is just as well as Meenakshi’s concept in the roots-you have estimated it!-Form-to-table! Soon after returning from Bangkok, he bought a small farm and is growing organic vegetables there. These are vegetables that she serves in the roots.
But, like Daniel, she came to a crossroads in her journey. Should he live on a plant basis? Many of his guests complained how prohibited his choice.
And so, like Daniel again, he decided to include a little meat on the menu. He placed a vegetarian Vietnamese Pho on the menu (with rasam to compensate for the absence of stock). But as time passed, he also decided to present a chicken option. One of its best cuisine is double ripe eggs on rice with Indonesian bombs that is not the plant -based. But eggs are free range and rice is carefully sour.
The restaurants began to improve when he extended the menu beyond the fresh vegetables of his farm, although it is still a plant-centric place. But he has not learned to be an exclusiveist. If you are eating one of many Southeast Asian cuisine on the menu and fish sauce, it will give you.
Meenakshi is now turning into a mini queen of a mini empire of mini restaurants. He has opened the street street cafe that serves street food and also runs a street food cart called urban tapri. Both places serve meat, but are centered and run by women. She will soon open Basanti da Dhabhab, who will serve Punjabi food using vegetables from her farm.
Meenakshi’s restaurants are small, but I wonder if there is no lesson for larger establishments than her journey. Perhaps the best way to appreciate people, do not ban plant -based dishes with fresh, biological ingredients. Keep the menu plant-centric but do not remove the meat completely.
As eleven Madison Park makes its menu more inclusive, we will see how good this approach works. My guess is that the business will go up, the restaurant will retain its three stars, and Daniel Hmm was doing more to save the planet, until their restaurant was completely free from all animal products.
