NEW YORK | It all starts with one simple, even lowly ingredient: the radish.
Chef Daniel Humm and business partner Will Guidara, owners of Eleven Madison Park and the more casual NoMad, are the brains behind some of New York’s most sophisticated and refined dining. But the first recipe in their inventive, lavishly presented new “NoMad” cookbook is called simply “Radishes.”
And that’s all it is: radishes, some melted butter, and salt for dipping.
“We think it really embodies the spirit of NoMad,” says Guidara. “It’s humble, simple luxury. But presented with a certain…” He searches for the word. “Panache.”
Sitting in NoMad, which opened in 2012, one can see how much the two men have striven to translate the feeling of a restaurant into a book. Diners can choose to sit in an elegant paneled library just off the bar; the book itself — huge and black, resembling a Hogwarts book of potions — has an old-fashioned library card pocket in the front.
The bar is a haven for countless inventive cocktails (maybe these are the potions, actually), and an inset in the back of the book contains a whole mini-volume: a cocktail recipe book. This elegant little book resembles a pocket bible and has its own foreward, table of contents and index.
Oh, and that library card pocket? Inside is a neatly folded paper, which turns out to be a huge, detailed map of the NoMad neighborhood (it stands for north of Madison Square Park), an area that didn’t have a name before Humm and Guidara arrived, and which is intricately connected to the restaurant and accompanying hotel.
“The neighborhood has always just been a really important part for us,” says Guidara, of the area in the upper 20s, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. “It’s literally where uptown and downtown intersect, and we wanted that to be the feeling and the ethos of this place, with luxurious food and trappings but with a youthful sensibility. I think this is about as far downtown as some people will come — and as far uptown as other people will go.”
Humm, of course, is known as the culinary wizard behind Eleven Madison Park, one of the world’s top restaurants, which has twice been given a rare four-star review in the New York Times, among other accolades. When the pair began working together, Humm ruled the kitchen, Guidara the dining room. They bought the place from restaurateur Danny Meyer in 2011, then created NoMad a year later. The duo plans a third restaurant in three years’ time.
Each restaurant has its own specific vibe, and for Eleven Madison Park, it’s Miles Davis — an idea they got from a restaurant review. For NoMad, it’s the Rolling Stones, an ethos they describe as a mix of the chaotic energy of a Stones concert, paired with the care and deliberateness with which the Stones run their band, and their business. “It’s not about sounding like them, but THINKING like them,” the men say.
But there was an additional goal with NoMad: making hotel dining desirable again. Or, as Humm says, “to recreate the idea of a grand hotel.”
“We looked back at old New York and saw how it was in the past — the Plaza, the Waldorf — people went to hotels to go out, to have drinks, to eat for any occasion,” the chef says. “But then, restaurants got so bad in the hotels that nobody wanted to go anymore, and the only way to get people back was to get a restaurant in with its own identity, and name. And we wanted to just challenge that idea. Here, if you’re in the room or in the bar or in the restaurant you’re in the NoMad, and we love that idea.”
Of course, they had to trust their partners on the hotel side, notes Humm. Even more so, they had to trust each other. The two men say their own partnership is the key, er, ingredient of their success. “We’re best friends, and we’re business partners,” Humm says.
What that 50-50 partnership results in, says Guidara, is a restaurant where the kitchen and dining room are in perfect sync. “And our relationship trickles down to our team,” he says. “We can really feel it here when we’re not getting along as well as we sometimes we do. It may be hyperbole, but we can feel it.”
“For us it’s like a marriage,” he says. “In all the lovely ways and all the challenging ways.”
The new cookbook has given the authors a chance to correct a mistake they feel they made in the Eleven Madison cookbook, which was to underestimate the skill of home cooks and abandon the metric system, which they use in their own kitchens, for pounds and ounces.
“We realized that anyone who’s going to cook from this book is going to have a (metric) scale at home — or they’ll buy it,” Humm says. “People today are so into food.”
Home cooks will be able to reproduce NoMad classics like the whole roast chicken with black truffle brioche stuffing, snap peas with buttermilk and chive blossoms, or the “milk and honey” dessert. For the authors, it’s been a chance to look back at their core dishes and their ethos, and make sure it’s all in alignment.
“You’re really thinking, where did we succeed, and where did we push the boundaries too far?” Humm says. “A cookbook makes a restaurant better.”
And then there’s the small matter of preserving the restaurant for posterity.
“The difference between a restaurant as an art form and a film, or music, or painting, is that in 200 years you’ll experience all those other things exactly how they were intended,” Guidara says. “But restaurants exist only in memories. A cookbook is a way to at least get a little closer to memorializing it. It’s a moment in time. This is our food. This is how we create it.”