Can the Restaurant Industry Be Saved?

(Rolling Stone) There’s a refrigerator in the kitchen of Eleven Madison Park designed specifically for ducks. They hang in rows, hooks through their heads, ready to be rubbed down with honey and lavender, and plated like pieces of modernist art. The dish is a specialty of chef Daniel Humm, who took over the Manhattan brasserie in 2006 and turned it into one of the world’s most renowned fine-dining establishments. It’s the type of place where meals last three hours and reservations must be bought, like concert tickets.

"A lot of photographers want this shot,” Humm says, standing next to the duck refrigerator one afternoon in early April. He’s speaking about a previous life, one that ended only weeks earlier, when Eleven Madison Park and every other restaurant and bar in New York suspended dine-in service indefinitely, and the glass-paneled case in front of him was still stocked with succulent fowl. Now, it’s filled with towers of cardboard to-go boxes, the kind you might fill up at one of midtown’s countless pay-by-the-pound hot bars. The meals inside of them — today it’s pasta Bolognese, roasted broccoli, and house focaccia — cost around $5 to produce, including labor. A 12-person skeleton crew, drawn mostly from the 300 employees Humm was forced to furlough, hopes to assemble up to 3,000 of them before the day ends. The effort is a collaboration with the nonprofit Rethink Food, which is delivering the meals to hospital workers and others in need as the city combats the coronavirus. When the partnership began on April 1st, Eleven Madison Park almost certainly became the most expensive commissary kitchen in the history of food service.

It is one of the more surreal examples of how the pandemic has thoroughly upended New York’s storied culinary scene, where some 26,000 restaurants and their 350,000 workers are scrambling to pay rent, feed their families, and figure out whether there will be a job for them to come back to — and to what extent the industry will resemble the one the virus swept away, like a natural disaster, in March. Even Humm, who ran one of the most successful restaurants in the world, has acknowledged that there may not be a place for Eleven Madison Park in whatever culinary scene emerges from the pandemic. This doesn’t mean he’s any less determined to play a role in shaping the future of food service. “The world has changed,” Humm says in a soft Swiss accent. “If anyone is out there and hasn’t seen that yet, I hate to break it to them, but it’s changed. This is also exciting. There was a model that we were kind of stuck in. Now we have the blankest canvas you can imagine.” ..........(more)

https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/can-the-restaurant-industry-be-saved-995037/