On a March morning final 12 months, the chef Daniel Humm and members of his group from his three-Michelin-starred restaurant, Eleven Madison Park, in New York City, climbed into a number of pickup vehicles and drove into the scrubby mountains of Crete. For two hours, alongside winding roads and up steep hills, they adopted an area goatherd to his mitato, the stone hut from which he tends his flock.
What occurred subsequent, Humm says, “was like a spiritual experience.” The group participated within the humane slaughter of one of many animals, ready the meat collectively, and shared a meal with their hosts. “It was inspiring to watch this process, and the seriousness about it,” he tells me. It was a profound lesson not solely within the island’s agricultural traditions but in addition in referring to meals and the earth. “There is a sense of respect everywhere in Greece,” he says. “Respect for water, the ingredients, the animals, the environment—everything.”
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Humm and his colleagues had been in Greece for a two-week culinary immersion, impressed by a lunch Humm ate at Taverna Oikonomou on a earlier go to to Athens. “We were 80 percent through the meal and we had basically only eaten vegetables,” says Humm, who has lengthy been a proponent of sustainable, plant-forward cooking. (Eleven Madison Park was totally plant-based from June 2021 to October 2025.) “I was like, Oh my God, I need to bring my team here.” He related with Oikonomou’s proprietor, Vassilis Bakasis, in addition to Manolis Papoutsakis, the chef-owner of Pharaoh, a preferred restaurant in Athens with an intensive pure wine choice and an important vinyl assortment. They designed an itinerary that explored numerous sides of Greece’s complicated cuisine, bringing Humm and his crew to Papoutsakis’s house island of Crete and the smaller Cycladic island of Tínos, then doing a deep dive into Athens’s dynamic meals scene. The analysis journey will inform their work at Eleven Madison Park and the brand new restaurant Humm plans to open later this 12 months in Manhattan’s West Village.
After the pandemic Humm used his platform to problem the manners through which we purchase and devour meals. That contains questioning our industrialized meals techniques and the environmental impression of meat manufacturing, and contemplating what could be gained by reorienting the best way we eat towards the connections between meals and place. He’s additionally an advocate outdoors the kitchen: Humm helped cofound the food-equity nonprofit Rethink Food and, in fall 2024, partnered with UNESCO as a Goodwill Ambassador for Food Education, a task through which he focuses on the intersection of world foodways, biodiversity, and the pure world. “When you look at a place like Greece, or wherever there’s such long food traditions, there’s a lot to learn,” he says.