Four Stars!

Frances M. Roberts / Newscom Danny Meyer's restaurant, Eleven Madison Park, just received an ultra-rare four-star review from The New York Times. Isabel Wilkinson goes inside one of New York's best-oiled machines.

On the night of August 12, when Danny Meyer stepped into the elevator of his apartment building, the service on his cellphone cut out, as usual. He was anxious, but outwardly, appeared his typical relaxed self—just more dressed up than usual, in a crisp, white dress shirt and a black sport coat with no tie.

When the doors finally parted, and Meyer made his way onto the street, his phone immediately began buzzing with waiting voicemails, emails, and text messages that had accumulated while he was in the elevator.

“My goal was to create something that has been done before, but do it better,” says Chef Daniel Humm. “To cook a lamb, and cook it perfectly.”

Across town at Eleven Madison Park, Meyer’s crown jewel in the Flatiron District, dinner was already under way. But head chef Daniel Humm wasn’t at his usual station in the middle of the kitchen. A sanguine 32-year-old Swiss chef who earned four stars at his San Francisco restaurant, Campton Place, he, too, was nervous. So much so that he had decided he was “useless” in the kitchen that night. Humm retreated to the restaurant’s office, where he just kept hitting “refresh” on nytimes.com—waiting for it to appear.

Downstairs, Will Guidara, the restaurant’s slender general manager, was pouring olive oil over a gnocchi garnished with violet artichokes, Taggiasca olives, and bacon. Everyone on staff that night knew that Eleven Madison was receiving a third review from New York Times food critic Frank Bruni, who had awarded the restaurant two stars in February 2005, and elevated that ranking to three stars in January 2007. “Mr. Humm’s food—not the new table settings, not the tweaked lighting—made me do it,” Bruni wrote of the increase in stars. But his evaluation admitted that portions at the restaurant were “picayune, and desserts are something of a question mark.” Tonight, though, an anxious optimism permeated the air. “We knew that we had improved in the last two years,” Humm said. According to Meyer, the restaurant had simply not lived up to the potential of its magnificent Art Deco setting in the Metropolitan Life North building. A two-star restaurant is described by the Times as “Very Good.” “We didn’t think we were doing the architect of the building any favors by giving them a ‘very good’ restaurant,” says Meyer.

The management had filled the place with regulars on that night, one of whom was dining alone in the corner of the marble room, next to where Guidara was drizzling the gnocchi. The man checked his iPhone, and suddenly shouted the words everyone was waiting to hear: “Four stars!” The quiet dining room exploded in revelry. Champagne bottles popped, staff members hugged, and diners put down their forks to cheer. “I don’t know if that woman ever got her olive oil or not,” Guidara says now.

With its fourth star, Eleven Madison Park, which opened in 1998, had been officially anointed as the Sixth Wonder of New York: the sixth restaurant, after Le Bernadin, Jean Georges, Daniel, Masa, and Per Se to receive four stars from Frank Bruni.

“It was not my goal that Eleven Madison become a four-star restaurant,” says Meyer. “It was my goal that it become an excellent restaurant.”

Meyer’s empire extends all over New York: from The Modern at MoMA, to a new restaurant, Maialino, which will open at the Gramercy Park Hotel this fall. He’s also just opened Taste of the City at Citi Field, aka “DannyMeyerLand,” which includes Shake Shack, Blue Smoke, and a taqueria. But this corner of Madison Square—with Tabla adjacent to Eleven Madison, and Shake Shack, the burger Mecca, just inside the park—is Meyer’s culinary campus. And, if this is his campus, then Eleven Madison, as Guidara puts it, is Meyer’s “graduate school.”