A few years ago, a few of us at Eleven Madison Park in New York City, where I work as the General Manager, started thinking—obsessing really—about putting together a cookbook. It was an exciting time for us at the restaurant: Daniel Humm, a young, super-creative chef from Switzerland, had recently taken over the kitchen and was turning out incredibly complex dishes that looked stunningly simple on the plate. The wine list was better than ever before; the servers were firing on all cylinders. Suddenly, there was an intense, almost electric intensity in the dining room and the kitchen, and we wanted to capture it in a book.
