Eleven Madison Park’s Foie-Gras-Stuffed Chicken To Go | The New Yorker

"For years, the restaurant Eleven Madison Park set the standard for fine dining—it was ranked No. 1 in 2017 by the opaque committee behind the “World’s 50 Best Restaurants,” and before the pandemic its tasting menu could take up to five hours and cost $335, famously including courses such as carrot tartare and even a meat-grinder presentation. Daniel Humm, who bought the restaurant from Danny Meyer in 2011, pivoted during the pandemic, converting the kitchen into a commissary for the nonprofit Rethink Food and saying, “I don’t need to only feed the 1% anymore.” Still, he launched EMP To Go: I picked up the roast-chicken dinner (available for pickup in Manhattan, Brooklyn, East Hampton, Greenwich and Montclair) for $275 in a blue-canvas insulated bag embossed with the restaurant logo; optional add-ons included Krug Grande Cuvée, white-sturgeon roe and a $200 “truffle and eggs” kit with six raw eggs and two dark truffles. The package arrived raw but meticulously composed—the free-range, humanely raised chicken pre-stuffed with brioche, foie gras and truffle; a box of bitter greens with vinaigrette and sunflower-seed crumble; half a baked butternut squash sheathed in seaweed with a miso-cured egg yolk to grate; a par-baked potato gratin; apple tart; and a canister of the restaurant’s granola. Cooking it produced the most decadent roast chicken I’ve made—beautifully bronzed (I suspect the secret was frosting the skin with softened butter)—the squash yielded with brown butter pooling in its cavity, and the gratin was stretchy with Gruyère and sharp with Parmesan. Yet my prevailing emotion after clearing the plates was discomfort: Humm’s philanthropic pivot felt like a silver lining, but EMP To Go read like luxury adapted rather than luxury redefined, and the truffles—clumsily shaved over my omelette—were more nutlike and paradoxically diminished by their scarcity." - Hannah Goldfield