Four Stars!

The variety of Meyer price points within these few hundred feet says it all. “I’ve pretty much devoted my entire career to taking something excellent and making it more accessible,” says Meyer. “And taking something accessible and making it even more excellent.”

And excellence, in the Meyer empire at least, means a very specific thing: a mix of a copacetic environment, flawless food, and service marked by “precision.”

“We’re relatively anal here,” says Guidara, the GM. He sits back in the couch at the front of the restaurant in a perfectly pressed suit. Too anal, he explains, is robotic; too friendly is sloppy. It’s doing them both simultaneously that makes a restaurant excellent. The service at Eleven Madison presents a formal environment, but “brings a sense of humanity” to the table as well, says Guidara.

Oftentimes that “humanity” is Meyer himself. Every morning, Meyer’s assistant presents him with annotated notes of all the reservation lists at all of his restaurants that night. Then he’ll spend that night shuttling around to each of them. When he gets to the front desk, “usually the first words out of my mouth are, ‘Send me,’” Meyer says. Then he’s off to table 22 for a 65th anniversary, or to say hello to an old friend, or to the kitchen to check in on his troops.

There’s a feeling of camaraderie here, similar to that empowering final sequence of a movie, when the underdogs spend hours running stadium stairs and raise enough money for uniforms to win the championship in the end. When they’re not serving food, the team at Eleven Madison Park is likely busy with one of a dozen bonding activities. They’ll order in pizza and crowd around their favorite DVD on movie night, take a trip to a farm to see how goat cheese is made, or, at staff happy hour on Wednesdays between 3 p.m. and 4 p.m., one staffer shares a presentation with the rest—last week’s lesson was on the craft of brewing.

While it may have four stars, Eleven Madison Park could always improve. “It’s not possible to be perfect, and we’re not kidding ourselves into thinking that we are,” Guidara says. But through painstaking attention to detail, it has come pretty close. “See those magazines over there?” Guidara says, pointing to a pile of brochures fanned carefully across a coffee table. “They will always be placed exactly like that. And those pillows you’re sitting on?” he says, eying the impressions I’ve left on the velveteen upholstery. “Someone will fix those when you stand up.”

It’s a half hour before the dinner service begins, and many of the 145 staff members at Eleven Madison are at work preparing the room: ironing white table cloths with cordless irons, positioning the dinner plates on the table so that if, should a diner pick up a plate to inspect the underside, he’ll find that the label is facing him. To Chef Humm, this represents exactly how the restaurant has changed since he began in 2006. “When I started, in a meeting we would discuss why food goes to the wrong table,” he says. But now, “we’ll discuss the label of the china underneath the plate.”

Upstairs, with his arms folded in front of him, Guidara watches through a window on the second floor as the staff members below perform their allotted chores. “People won’t realize that our table cloths are ironed,” he says. “People won’t realize that we edit out 30 seconds of a song because it changes the vibe of the restaurant too much…We want people to feel the culmination of those details.”

The hard work has paid off. “My goal wasn’t to create something new,” Chef Humm says of his three years at the restaurant. “My goal was to create something that has been done before, but do it better. To cook a lamb, and cook it perfectly. When we started doing that, my creativity started to kick back in. I started to relax a little bit.” And now that they’ve got the four stars, the crowd—and what they were looking to eat—has significantly changed. “At first, everybody wanted a green salad,” Humm says. “But that doesn’t happen anymore. Nobody wants a green salad anymore. People want to come and see what we have created. They no longer just want to be fed.”

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Isabel Wilkinson is a Daily Beast intern. She has written for New York magazine and Women’s Wear Daily.

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