The restaurant occupies the base of a landmark Art Deco building at the corner of East 24th Street and Madison Avenue — built in 1909 as part of the Metropolitan Life Insurance complex, its soaring proportions and restored architectural detail setting a standard that every table must rise to meet. The dining room overlooks Madison Square Park directly. The Flatiron Building is visible to the south. The scale is that of a grand institution — high ceilings, large windows, the kind of room that has witnessed decades of the city's most significant conversations and has the quiet authority to absorb more.

Daniel Humm arrived at Eleven Madison Park in 2006 as executive chef, recruited from Campton Place in San Francisco by restaurateur Danny Meyer. In 2011, he and his partner Will Guidara purchased the restaurant from Meyer's Union Square Hospitality Group. What followed was one of the most documented ascents in the history of fine dining — four stars from The New York Times, three Michelin stars held continuously since 2012, six James Beard Foundation Awards, and the number one position on The World's 50 Best Restaurants in 2017. Humm became sole owner in 2019. The harder chapters were still to come.

When COVID-19 closed the dining room in March 2020, Humm partnered with Rethink Food — a nonprofit he had co-founded — to convert Eleven Madison Park's kitchen into a community commissary. At its peak, the team was preparing 3,000 meals a day for food-insecure residents of the Bronx and Brooklyn, and for frontline workers across the city. The restaurant's 200 employees kept their positions. The Michelin stars meant nothing. The work did.

When Eleven Madison Park reopened in June 2021, it did so with a completely plant-based menu — a decision Humm had reached during the closure. No other restaurant of this standing had made such a transition. The critics were skeptical. The supply chain was hostile — meat suppliers sent letters warning he would fail. In October 2022, the Michelin Guide awarded Eleven Madison Park three stars, making it the first plant-based restaurant in the guide's history to receive that distinction. As of October 2025, the menu offers guests the option to include select animal proteins in a few courses — a further evolution, not a retreat.

The tasting menu at Eleven Madison Park draws from Magic Farms, a property in upstate New York cultivated exclusively for the restaurant's seasonal program — established in 2021 to give the kitchen access to produce it could not otherwise source. The menu changes with what the farm grows, with what the season allows, with what Humm and his team are thinking about at any given moment. It is, as Humm has described it, an artistic endeavour that must also work as a business. Both conditions are met. A bar menu runs alongside the tasting menu. Bar seating accepts walk-ins. The room is open to those who simply want to sit with a glass of wine and watch the park.

In October 2024, Humm opened Clemente Bar on the second floor of Eleven Madison Park — a cocktail bar and tasting counter born of a collaboration with Italian contemporary artist Francesco Clemente, who painted numerous original works directly within the space. The bar takes its name from Clemente and his paintings define its atmosphere: vivid, layered, associative. A tasting counter runs alongside the cocktail program. It is the newest room in the building — and already one of the most singular addresses in the Flatiron District.

Madison Square Park begins directly outside the dining room windows — eleven acres of greenery at the intersection of Broadway, Fifth Avenue, and 23rd Street, one of the most composed public spaces in Manhattan. The Flatiron Building anchors the southern view. The EDITION hotel occupies the MetLife Tower to the north. The neighborhood around the restaurant has changed considerably since Eleven Madison Park first opened in 1998, when Danny Meyer placed it in what was then a quieter, less celebrated corner of the city. The park has always been there. The restaurant grew into it.

Reservations for the full tasting menu are available via Resy. Bar seating at Eleven Madison Park is open to walk-ins as well as reservations — a deliberate choice that keeps the room accessible beyond the tasting menu format. Clemente Bar on the second floor operates with its own reservations and its own program. The restaurant seats approximately 80 guests in the main dining room. Two hundred people work to make each service possible. The ratio is not incidental. It is the definition of what Humm means by hospitality.