The chef who took Eleven Madison Park vegan, and then quietly took it back, has opened a restaurant downtown with a roast chicken for two, a martini cart, a Louise Bourgeois overhead and a poster of Prince in a pink feather boa presiding over the wine program. If that sounds like a man working something out, well, isn’t that what the West Village is for?
Humm, Daniel Humm‘s first namesake restaurant in the United States, opened on Saturday, Oct. 10, at 435 Hudson Street, between Leroy and Morton streets, according to Eater New York. It serves dinner seven nights a week, 5 to 10 p.m., per the restaurant’s website. Reservations are on Resy. The tasting menu, that eight-act opera of tweezers and tableside narration, has been left uptown on Madison Square.
“It’s not every day you want to have an eight-course tasting menu,” Mr. Humm told Food & Wine. Many of us have known this for years. It is nonetheless moving to hear it from him.
The menu, or: chicken returns from exile
What’s on offer is à la carte and “modern American,” in Mr. Humm’s phrase, built around a wood-burning oven. The opening menu, a spokesperson told Eater, includes crispy feta with sesame and shallot agrodolce, tuna crudo, a chicory and tangerine salad, fried eggplant with pickled green tomatoes, grilled fish, roasted chicken for two, and milk and honey for dessert. Wine Spectator adds wood-fired focaccia studded with cherry tomatoes, Hokkaido sea urchin toasts, rigatoni pomodoro and eggplant Milanese. There is no red meat, which Wine Spectator calls “an echo of the period when only plant-based foods were served at Eleven Madison Park.”
Echo is a generous word. In 2021 Mr. Humm made the city’s most famous dining room plant-based, a decision that won him admirers, a great deal of commentary and a long stretch of reviews about beets. Eleven Madison Park kept its three Michelin stars through the experiment and, as Eater delicately puts it, the walking back. Humm, the restaurant, feels like the resolution of that argument: poultry and fish, yes; steak, no; the man’s convictions intact but no longer on a dare.
The produce comes from Magic Farms in Hoosick Falls, N.Y., which Eater reports is growing exclusively for the restaurants. The kitchen is run by executive chef Dmitri Magi, who Food & Wine says has worked alongside Mr. Humm for 16 years.
The room, or: the most expensive ceiling on Hudson Street
If the food is meant to relax you, the room is meant to impress you, and it is not shy about it. The 5,000-square-foot space was designed by the French designer Pierre Yovanovitch, with suspended sculptural pieces by Louise Bourgeois, monumental work by Rashid Johnson and Roni Horn, and a ceiling mural by Francesco Clemente, according to Food & Wine. Wine Spectator describes oxblood carpets, velvet booths, modernist candelabras and Clemente’s hand-painted ceilings of stars, tiles, bricks and trains. “You walk in and you think, I’m in a dream,” the wine director, Michael Duffy, told the magazine.
Mr. Duffy, a former biology teacher who came from the Italian programs at Rezdôra and Massara, per Wine Spectator, has built a list of more than 1,500 labels leaning on Champagne, Burgundy and the smaller corners of France: the Jura, Beaujolais, Alsace, the Loire. His least expensive wine by the glass is a François Cazin Cour-Cheverny made from Romorantin, which he cheerfully described as “a grape that no one’s ever heard of.” Then there is the Prince matter. “He’s a musical inspiration for the restaurant,” Mr. Duffy said. “Miles Davis is a musical inspiration for Eleven Madison Park.” Uptown gets Kind of Blue; downtown gets Purple Rain. That is the whole thesis of the place, really, and it is not a bad one.
There are three ways in: the dining room, with the full menu, or the bar and the lounge, which have shorter menus, per Eater. Walk-ins are accepted in all three, according to a report from Exqz. That is a democratic gesture from a man whose other restaurant charges what it charges, and we intend to test it.
The ghost at the table
Every great New York restaurant opening has a ghost, and Humm’s is unusually well dressed. For twenty years, 435 Hudson belonged to En Japanese Brasserie, Reika Alexander’s cavernous downtown canteen, a favorite of the fashion and art crowds, which closed in December 2024, as W magazine reported at the time.
The handoff was not friendly. In a February piece headlined “Daniel Humm’s West Village Coup,” the newsletter Caper reported Ms. Alexander’s account that she had been trying to renew her 20-year lease and, on the afternoon of the April 2024 solar eclipse, arrived to let her landlord in for a showing only to find the door already open. Eater, summarizing Caper, reported that she said she was prepared to pay more, and that she discovered the Eleven Madison Park team touring the space while negotiations were still under way. The landlord, Hudson Square Properties, disputed any suggestion of bad faith and told Caper that unpaid rent was the subject of active litigation. Hudson Square Properties is a joint venture of Trinity Church Wall Street, Norges Bank Real Estate Management and Hines, per its own description. Esquire reported that she was told the rent would double. Ms. Alexander told Caper she was moving to Paris.
That is the West Village real estate story in miniature: a beloved, slightly louche institution that made the neighborhood fashionable, a church-backed landlord, a famous chef with deeper pockets, and a dispute that ends up in court and in a Substack. Nobody in it is a villain, exactly. But New Yorkers have long memories for rooms, and some will walk into Humm and see En’s ghost at the bar.
So: should you go?
We will file a proper review once the kitchen has settled in, as is customary and fair. For now, the case for Humm is clear enough. It is the most famous chef in New York cooking the food he actually wants to eat, in a room by Yovanovitch and Clemente, in a neighborhood where a good roast chicken has always been a love language. The case against is mostly the scramble for a table, which Resy releases three weeks out, per Exqz, and the faint guilt of sitting where En used to be.
Mr. Humm writes on his website that “simplicity is what I have come to value most.” In this town that is the most expensive thing there is. We suspect he knows it.
The City Politic has reached out to Daniel Humm and the Humm team, Reika Alexander and Hudson Square Properties for comment and will update this story with any response.
Photo: 435 Hudson Street at Leroy Street. Eden, Janine and Jim / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0.
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