Changing tide? Meat-free high-end restaurant

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Changing tide? Meat-free high-end restaurant

Postby PJK » Mon May 03, 2021 7:44 pm

Is this a blip...or the turning of the tide?

The New Menu at Eleven Madison Park Will Be Meatless
The restaurant will no longer serve meat or seafood when it reopens, Daniel Humm, the chef, said. “The current food system is simply not sustainable, in so many ways,” he said.

NY Times, 5/3/21

Last summer, the chef Daniel Humm made a promise to himself. If he was going to reopen Eleven Madison Park, the Manhattan restaurant that has been called the best in the world, he was not going to return to importing caviar and braising celery root in pigs’ bladders.

On Monday, Mr. Humm announced that Eleven Madison Park, closed since last March by the pandemic, would reopen with a plant-based menu. It marks a striking departure for one of the most lavishly praised American restaurants of the past 20 years. An institution long known for the technical proficiency of dishes featuring suckling pig, sea urchin and lavender glazed duck will reopen with a menu free of meat and seafood.

Over the last 18 months, scrutiny of meat- and seafood-based diets for environmental and social reasons has intensified as the pandemic has exposed weaknesses in global food systems and underscored inequities in American life. Though Mr. Humm still offers plenty of red meat at his London restaurant, Davies and Brook at Claridge’s hotel, the move at Eleven Madison Park — which has four stars from The New York Times and three from Michelin — suggests how different fine dining may look as restaurants reopen and reimagine themselves.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/03/dini ... -menu.html
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Re: Changing tide? Meat-free high-end restaurant

Postby Daydream » Mon May 03, 2021 8:23 pm

Very interesting! I hope the restaurant will be successful when it reopens.
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Re: Changing tide? Meat-free high-end restaurant

Postby JeffN » Tue May 04, 2021 8:46 am

The good news, if done right, this restaurant can be highly successful in business, just like Millennium was.

The bad news, we (healthy, low fat, WFPB, low SOS) are not their target. If we were, they would go broke as we are such a small part of the population. This is where the difference between vegan and healthy is most important. Many vegan items on menus are as bad, if not worse then some of the non vegan choices.

A friend, who is a l/t vegan and successful Star McDougaller copied me on his response to the news of this new restaurant that he emailed out.

"It is interesting because he is such a prestigious restauranteur with significant influence and he seems motivated by the environment and animal well being which of course I think is good. Recall, however, that I am not a vegan activist; rather, my food choices are motivated primarily by health.

The only way to get any modern population to enjoy food - to pay for it again and again - to keep coming back - is to make it calorically dense, and the way to do this is to substitute animal derived-elements with plant-derived elements that are of equal or higher caloric concentration, and if you don’t do this, people will think the food doesn’t taste good, and ultimately, your virtuous effort will become a commercial failure - the doors will close because no one will come because the food isn’t “delicious”.

Our brains are programmed by nature, forged in scarcity, to seek out calorically dense food because, in an environment of scarcity, such food was the most pro survival that could be eaten; however, in an environment of abundance, which is the environment today due to human technology, food has been engineered to be calorically dense because it will trigger the same dopamine response, once triggered in nature, by calorically rich food.

(Note: the consumer perceives food as “delicious” but the brain perceives it as calorically dense - a powerful energy source - and thus rewards the consumer with a larger dopamine hit - in this way, cheeseburgers are more “delicious” than unadorned vegetables. Again, what is really happening here is that the brain is signaling by your perception that the food is delicious, that the food is really a rich energy source.)

The upshot is that vegan restaurants simply substitute animal fat with plant fat which isn’t all that much more healthy. Whenever I go to one of LA’s fancy vegan haute couture establishments, I invariably feel sick afterwards because the food is approximately 50% fat, albeit plant-based fat, but fat none the less.

I should really expand the categories to salt, sugar, and fat combined in the perfect mix to trigger the bliss point. So the entire phenomenon of restaurant entertainment merely consist of flavoring salt, sugar, and fat in different ways but always maintaining high percentages of these unhealthy elements.

The question is do we want to eat Thai flavored salt, sugar, and fat or Italian flavored salt, sugar, and fat? Or perhaps Middle Eastern flavored salt, sugar, and fat? Or Chinese? Or Mexican? Or Vegan?

It matters really very little what the seasoning is, the macro elements are always salt, sugar, and fat.

For this reason, I don’t get excited about the “new” vegan restaurant because I know that in order for it to be commercially successful it has to serve food that has percentages of salt, sugar, and fat well above that which I will consume and consider to be healthy.

For the same reason I don’t eat the synthetic plant-based meats because they are 72% fat, 44% saturated fats, and very high in sodium.

And again, I don’t blame the operators of these restaurants for engineering their menu to be approximately 40 to 50% fat and high in sugar, salt and sodium, because if they did not, the population which they must serve would never consider the food to be palatable because nearly every single potential customer has taste buds that are overwhelmed by salt, sugar, and fat."


In Health
Jeff

PS this reminds me of a tweet the other day by Tom Campbell, MD (son of T Colin Campbell, PhDl)

Thomas Campbell, MD
@DrTomCampbell
Apr 24, 2021
The more I’ve worked with patients over the years, the more strict my guidance has become. It would be nice to be moderate and pleasing to more camps, but when I’m trying to help a highly motivated person who may be dealing with serious illness, it just doesn’t work as well.

Amen Dr Campbell!
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Re: Changing tide? Meat-free high-end restaurant

Postby JeffN » Wed May 05, 2021 9:00 am

The easiest restaurants to get a healthy meal at are not vegan restaurants but steakhouses and SE Asian style restaurants (Japanese, Chinese, Thai, etc).

I would recommend you read the following thread (and the links in it) on Dining Out

viewtopic.php?f=22&t=60642

And this one on When Vegan is not Enought

viewtopic.php?f=22&t=36550

In Health
Jeff
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Re: Changing tide? Meat-free high-end restaurant

Postby Dougalling » Thu May 06, 2021 9:37 am

Actually, IMHO, if he were to have 1/2 the menu as WFPB no SOS, he could promote high end cuisine for people who want to eat healthy for prevention/reversal of diabetes, heart conditions, cancer, obesity, etc. It would not just be for WFPB no SOS people.
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Re: Changing tide? Meat-free high-end restaurant

Postby JeffN » Sun Apr 10, 2022 12:11 pm

JeffN wrote:And again, I don’t blame the operators of these restaurants for engineering their menu to be approximately 40 to 50% fat and high in sugar, salt and sodium, because if they did not, the population which they must serve would never consider the food to be palatable because nearly every single potential customer has taste buds that are overwhelmed by salt, sugar, and fat."



UPDATE - Not Surprised

Go vegan, go broke!

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/articl ... rough.html
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