Inside the Food Truck Launched By the World's Best Restaurant
Chef Daniel Humm has cooked some of the most elaborate and expensive meals in the world at his New York restaurant, Eleven Madison Park, which has been awarded about every accolade there is to win in the food world. Now he’s serving meals out of a food truck.
The Swiss-born chef is a co-founder of Rethink Food, a non-profit focused on reducing food insecurity by fighting hunger in the city’s poorest communities. In 2017, a former Eleven Madison Park station chef, Matt Jozwiak, came to Humm with the idea to begin using extra food from the restaurant to feed the hungry. They teamed up to launch the organization, which sourced food from restaurants and used it to create meals for needy New Yorkers out of a commissary kitchen.
“When COVID happened, obviously there were no more ingredients coming from restaurants,” Humm tells me. “We had to really pivot. We had an empty kitchen, we had farmers who were sitting on produce that was going bad, and we had cooks without jobs, so I decided to turn Eleven Madison Park into a community kitchen and produce meals to distribute through Rethink.”
Humm says he quickly realized how much more efficiently his team could create meals compared to a commissary kitchen staffed by volunteers. “Every chef knows how to cook an inexpensive but delicious meal because that’s how we cook for our staff,” Humm says. “That was the ‘a-ha’ moment for me.”
Soon the Eleven Madison Park kitchen was producing not food for its $335 tasting menu from pre-pandemic times, but rather 3,000 meals a day to be served in disadvantaged communities in Brooklyn and the Bronx. Every meal includes a starch, a protein, and a vegetable; a recent Monday’s menu consisted of roasted chicken with Spanish tomato rice and broccoli rabe.
And as of April 12, Humm and Eleven Madison Park have a physical manifestation of their presence in the communities: a food truck decked out with the restaurant’s distinctive logo, staffed by EMP employees. Humm says the reaction to the truck has been moving.
“People are so grateful. They come and say, ‘Oh, my God, this is the best meal I’ve ever had,’” he says. “People tell us that at the restaurant, but to have someone tell you that on the street is really touching.”
In addition to producing meals for Rethink during the pandemic, the EMP kitchen has created takeout meal kits for Eleven Madison Home. In May, the dinner for four includes a choice of D’Artagnan Green Circle Chicken, beef tenderloin, Montauk fluke, or a whole cauliflower along with seasonal sides like Bibb lettuce, bok choi, and green beans. They don’t come cheap (prices start at $250)—but every kit purchased provides 10 meals to be served from the food truck.
Eleven Madison Park is scheduled to reopen its dining room on June 10, with an entirely plant-based menu. Its kitchen will continue to produce meals for Rethink and the food truck—a silver lining that came out of the pandemic—will keep delivering food to the New York communities that need it most.
The food truck, Humm says, is a circular model. Every guest who comes to the restaurant or orders from Eleven Madison Home is helping to provide for people in need, each of Eleven Madison Park’s 200 employees is involved in the work, and every supplier to the restaurant is participating through product donations.
“One thing became clear to me,” Humm says. “I’ve been so lucky and our restaurant has been awarded with so many things, but I’m still very young. What I’ve realized through the pandemic is that food is my voice, and we have a platform to inspire change. The more people who are talking about it, the more people who are inspired to do this work, the more things will actually change.”
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