GO VEGAN, GO BROKE: Expensive Restaurant Backpedals After Meatless Experiment Fails Badly
Customers voted with their wallets: No meat, no eat.
Being Netflix-famous wasn’t enough to save them. Four years after going meatless, an elite restaurant with a $365 tasting menu is dumping the experiment and bringing back animal protein.
Daniel Humm, known to some Netflix users from the Neflix show ‘Seven Days Out’, has made a decision about the very first Three Michelin Star restaurant credited for having an entirely vegan menu.
In the words of a favorite line from Lord Of The Rings, ‘looks like meat’s back on the menu, boys!’
After four years of going meatless, Humm has bowed to market pressures, and is bringing back meat.
The restaurant with the suitably upscale-sounding name ‘Eleven Madison Park’ is right on Madison Avenue, next to, you guessed it, Madison Park. The $365 price tag for their vegal offerings didn’t bring in enough for them to break even.
At the time, the chef said that cutting out animal products was a “risk worth taking” and that a restaurant experience should be about “more than what’s on the plate”.
However, in a post on Instagram today (13 August), Humm said: “Change is fundamental to who we are and how we grow. As I approach my 20th anniversary at EMP, I’ve decided it’s time for change again.
“Starting October 14th, we will integrate our new culinary language into a menu that embraces choice. We will offer a plant-based menu, of course, but also select animal products for certain dishes – fish, meat, and yes, our honey-lavender-glazed duck.
He added: “Eating together is the essence of who we are, and I’ve learned that to truly champion plant-based cooking, I need to create an environment where everyone feels welcome around the table.” — The Caterer
In other words, even if one or two members of a family or group buy into the vegan way of thinking, that doesn’t mean everyone else wants to go to a place where that view is crammed down their throats.
Their menu was too niche. Corporate events weren’t biting — literally.
As the chef himself admits, when people get together to eat, they aren’t looking for a sermon, they’re looking for a meal everyone can enjoy.
In this case, it means bringing back ‘fish, meat, and yes … honey-lavender duck.’
It’s a good time to mention Doug’s book giving a theological defence of hunting: The Bible and Hunting
Here’s a look at the blurb from the book:
If a person looked to Scripture and paid particular attention to the passages within the Bible that address the topic of hunting, then they’d walk away thinking not only is hunting animals tolerated but it is endorsed by God. And that’s exactly what this little book is about: proving that God, from Genesis to Revelation, is extremely cool with hunters and hunting. I’ll go out on a biblical limb and claim right off the bat that you cannot show me, through the balance of the Bible, that the God of the Scripture is against the responsible killing and the grilling of the animals He created. ~Doug Giles