Daniel Humm - The NoMad Cookbook

Copyright 2015 by Made Nice, LLC

Photographs copyright 2015 by Francesco Tonelli

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Ten Speed Press,
an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division
of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

www.crownpublishing.com

www.tenspeed.com

Ten Speed Press and the Ten Speed Press colophon are
registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Humm, Daniel.
The NoMad cookbook/Daniel Humm, Will Guidara,
and Leo Robitschek.

First edition.
pages cm
Includes index.

1. Cooking. 2. NoMad Hotel (New York, N.Y.) I. Guidara,
Will. II.

Robitschek, Leo. III. Title.
TX714.H8455 2015
641.597471dc23
2015007694

Hardcover ISBN:9781607748229

eBook ISBN9781607748236

eBook design adapted from printed book design by be-ples

v4.1

a

NAMING A NEIGHBORHOOD
by Andrew Zobler

A DAY IN OUR LIFE
by Jeffrey Tascarella

WELCOME, dear reader, to The NoMad, or rather to its cookbook.

In the following pages we will welcome you as fully as we possibly can into our little world. We are going to tell you about our food, our cocktails, the wonderful people on our team, and some of the bumps in the road we encountered as we opened our hotel on the corner of Twenty-Eighth and Broadway.

It all started in early 2011, when Daniel and I were at DBGB debating whether or not we would order a second burger, and out of nowhere he said: I think it should be the Rolling Stones.

Sorry, I need to back up a bit.

This all really started the first time we heard that Eleven Madison Park needed a little more Miles Davis. If youve read anything about our restaurants, youve probably heard this story before, but its important to tell it here again as it has had everything to do with everything thats happened since.

A few years earlier, in 2006, we were taking our first steps to evolve Eleven Madison Park (EMP) into the fine dining restaurant it is today. The Miles line came in our first review, during a very formative timewe were trying to find exactly what our new identity would be, craving language to help articulate the direction which we wanted to go. With this one line, a reviewer telling us she wished we had a little more Mileswe were given a gift.

In the months that followed, we researched Miles obsessively and drafted a list of eleven words that were most commonly used to describe him, among them fresh, cool, collaborative, and endless reinvention. These became our mission statement, and guided us as we made the hundreds of changes over the course of our restaurants continuing evolution.

See, some of our favorite restaurants are those that, once opened, are fully realized and will live forever without change. But EMP is not like that. Its a project that we will never be done with, a concept that is always in motion. Still, in 2010, after four years of very focused attention, we realized it was time for us to begin the process of building our second restaurant.

The prospect of another restaurant is so exciting, but scary as hell. Your second act can determine if youre the next Rolling Stones or the next Vanilla Ice. We knew we wanted the new place to be more casual than EMPits louder and looser siblingbut that was really all.

So we started looking for a space, figuring where we decided to build it would help identify what it was going to be. We looked all over the island of Manhattan, from Battery Park City to the Upper East Side. But nothing felt right, and everywhere we went, EMP felt so far away. We knew that we needed to maintain a significant presence at EMP, so our next restaurant needed to be close enough to allow for that.

The last project we looked at before we discovered The NoMad was another hotel on Madison Avenue, and of everything wed seen or considered, it was the one we were most excited about. Wed met with the ownership, wed started to design the space, and wed even spent quite a bit of time with a kitchen designer figuring out how we could tweak the existing kitchen to fulfill Daniels needs as a chef. But as we came closer and closer to finalizing the deal, we realized that something just didnt feel righteven today I cant articulate what it was. So at the eleventh hour we walked away. It was a hard decision, though we felt confident it was the right one. Still, frustrating to be back at the drawing board.

Thankfully, that frustration was short-lived. The next day, the kitchen designer we had been working with let us know that there was a project in the works practically around the corner from EMP. He asked if we would like to schedule a meeting with the owners to check it out.

So, a week and a half later, Daniel and I did something we had never done before: we walked out of EMP and we headed north. We walked across Madison Square Park, took a left on Twenty-Sixth Street and a right on Broadway, and walked to the corner of Twenty-Eighth Street.