Concept visual: Wild Bite Club.
HUMM opens with wood fire, à la carte menus and a chicken for two. The deeper change is not meat’s return but a hospitality model built around choice after years of culinary absolutism.
A roasted chicken for two is waiting at the centre of one of New York’s most scrutinised opening menus. It is not arriving at a steakhouse or a revivalist bistro. It belongs to HUMM, the forthcoming West Village restaurant from Daniel Humm, the chef whose name became shorthand for the most ambitious plant-based dining experiment in American fine dining.
The bird is reportedly based on Humm’s mother’s recipe. Around it sit crispy feta, tuna crudo, chicory with tangerine, fried eggplant, grilled fish and a dessert called milk and honey. Reservations opened on 1 October; the restaurant is scheduled to open on 10 October at 435 Hudson Street. No one has yet eaten a normal service there. Yet the menu already makes a clear argument: the future Humm is proposing is not one in which vegetables defeat meat. It is one in which culinary conviction must survive contact with a mixed table.
The dish that should not be surprising
Chicken for two is an ordinary restaurant proposition. That is exactly why it carries so much meaning here. In 2021, Eleven Madison Park reopened with an entirely plant-based menu. In 2022 it became the first restaurant to earn three Michelin stars while operating that way. The achievement turned exclusion into prestige: butter, eggs, meat and fish were absent, yet the restaurant remained at the summit of luxury dining.
The same clarity also created a boundary. In a later note announcing the return of selected animal products, Humm wrote that the all-or-nothing period had produced a new culinary language—eggless meringue, almond-milk ricotta, koji stocks, whipped cashew cream—but had also unintentionally kept people out. Eleven Madison Park now offers choice on selected courses, including the option to remain fully plant-based.
HUMM takes that lesson downtown and removes the tasting-menu ceremony around it. The new restaurant is described as casual and à la carte, with a full menu in the dining room and shorter menus at the bar and lounge. Its opening list is not a repudiation of plants. Vegetables still do much of the expressive work. The reversal is subtler: purity is no longer the organising principle of hospitality.
From manifesto to guest list
Fine dining has often treated coherence as a virtue. The chef selects the sequence, the diner submits, and every course reinforces one worldview. A completely plant-based tasting menu was the most rigorous version of that arrangement. It gave Eleven Madison Park a sharply legible identity and forced its kitchen to invent rather than substitute.
But coherence has a social cost when dinner is shared. One guest’s principle becomes another guest’s veto. Corporate groups, birthdays and families rarely arrive with identical appetites. A restaurant can ask them to agree before booking, or it can design a table where their differences remain visible but manageable.
That is the mechanism inside HUMM’s apparently eclectic menu. Crispy feta and roasted chicken sit beside eggplant, salad and grilled fish not because the kitchen lacks a point of view, but because the point of view has moved upward—from the ingredient rule to the social occasion. The governing question becomes less “What do we refuse to cook?” and more “Who can eat together here?”
This is not a neutral evolution. It exchanges the authority of the manifesto for the messier discipline of choice. The kitchen must make several paths feel intentional rather than offering a token vegetable plate beside the “real” main course. Humm’s advantage is that five years of plant-based technical work give vegetables more than a supporting role. The risk is that pluralism turns a once-radical cuisine into tasteful optionality.
The chef puts his name on the middle
The most revealing branding decision is not on the plate. Eleven Madison Park carries the architecture, address and history of a grand institution. HUMM carries the chef’s surname. Yet the eponymous restaurant is the more relaxed one.
That reverses the usual hierarchy. Chefs often reserve their names for the highest-priced, most controlled expression of themselves, then use looser brands for cafés, bars and spin-offs. Humm is attaching his name to wood fire, shared food and an à la carte room. The personal flagship sits in the middle ground between a three-star tasting menu and an everyday neighbourhood restaurant.
The Financial Times describes a 7,731-square-foot project developed over 14 months, filled with custom ceramics, art and a carefully designed soundtrack. Pierre Yovanovitch designed the interiors; works by Francesco Clemente, Rashid Johnson, Louise Bourgeois and Roni Horn are part of the room. Casual, in this vocabulary, does not mean inexpensive or visually modest. It means that the guest controls more of the evening.
An earlier community-board filing for the Hudson Street premises listed meze, flatbreads and small plates on a sample menu. The final opening menu reported by Eater is more polished and personal, but the underlying grammar remains: dishes can be assembled, passed and shared rather than delivered as a fixed sequence.
The farm survives the reversal
Some continuities matter more than the chicken. HUMM says it will follow seasons, markets and the harvest from Magic Farms in Hoosick Falls, New York, which also grows exclusively for the restaurant group. The farm relationship began during Eleven Madison Park’s plant-based chapter and remains part of the new restaurant’s supply story.
This continuity complicates the easy “vegan chef returns to meat” headline. Humm is not restoring the old hierarchy unchanged. He is carrying the infrastructure and techniques built around produce into a menu with more exits and entrances. A chicory salad is not automatically a consolation prize when the organisation has spent years treating vegetables as headline material.
The emerging model is therefore less ideological but potentially more transferable. A tasting menu can prove that plant-based luxury is possible. An à la carte restaurant can test whether those techniques influence what mixed groups actually order when chicken, fish, cheese and vegetables compete on equal terms.
That competition is important. It will reveal more than praise for a chef’s principles. If vegetable dishes become the centre of shared orders even when animal products are available, the plant-based chapter has changed desire rather than merely enforced compliance. If the chicken for two dominates while the vegetable dishes behave like sides, the restaurant will have widened access without moving the centre of gravity.
A reversal still awaiting its receipts
The strongest limitation is simple: HUMM has not opened. The current evidence consists of reservations, preview reporting, a menu description and a highly designed room. There are no public prices for the final menu, no normal-service reviews, no repeat-guest data and no evidence that the dining room will function as casually as its description suggests.
Scale may also undermine the intimacy being promised. A large, art-filled venue with three seating zones can create flexibility, but it can also become a machine for expensive spectacle. The former tenant, En Japanese Brasserie, occupied the address for two decades; Eater reported a disputed lease transition. A restaurant invoking community will eventually be judged by more than its communal plates.
The thesis would weaken if prices make frequent neighbourhood use implausible, if the shorter bar and lounge menus feel like reduced access rather than different occasions, or if plant-forward dishes become decorative cover for a conventional luxury menu. It would strengthen if mixed groups order across the menu, if vegetables command the same sharing status as the chicken, and if the room earns repeat use after opening-month attention fades.
Observed: HUMM is scheduled to open on 10 October with à la carte service across a dining room, bar and lounge, a menu spanning vegetables, fish, dairy and chicken, and produce from Magic Farms. Emerging: Humm’s restaurant group is replacing a single ingredient doctrine with a portfolio of choices while retaining the techniques developed during its plant-based chapter. Possible next step: other ambitious restaurants may treat dietary plurality—not a separate vegan menu—as a design problem for the whole table.
WBC’s read: choice is the harder luxury
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p class=”wbc-rpt-view”>HUMM is not interesting because a famous plant-based chef serves chicken. It matters because Daniel Humm is shifting the unit of hospitality from a coherent menu to a mixed table. The opportunity is a more durable form of plant-forward dining: vegetables can compete for desire without requiring every guest to accept the same rules. The risk is that “choice” becomes a polite retreat, with animal dishes carrying the spend and vegetables supplying moral atmosphere. The condition to watch is ordering behaviour after the opening rush. If mixed groups share vegetable dishes as centrepieces—not accommodations—the plant-based chapter has travelled. If the chicken for two becomes the only story, purity did not evolve; it simply lost.