Eleven Madison Park's Vegan-Only Restaurant Has a Secret Meat Room for the Rich

In tonight’s performance, the role of the duck will be played by a beet, doing things no root vegetable should be asked to do. Over the course of three days it is roasted and dehydrated before being wrapped in fermented greens and stuffed into a clay pot, as if it were being sent to the underworld with the pharaoh.

The pot is wheeled out to your table, where a server smashes the clay with a ball-peen hammer. The beet is cleaned of pottery shards and transferred to a plate with a red-wine and beet-juice reduction that is oddly pungent in a way that may remind you of Worcestershire sauce.

They used to do a similar beet act at Agern, a New Nordic restaurant in Grand Central Terminal, roasting it inside a crust of salt and vegetable ash. That beet tasted like a beet, but more so. The one at Eleven Madison Park tastes like Lemon Pledge and smells like a burning joint.

I suspect that the summer-squash dish that appears halfway through the menu somehow descends from the butter-poached lobster. I don’t know what else accounts for the viscous liquid that looks and sort of feels like browned butter, but clearly isn’t. It tastes of vadouvan and something else, something harsh and sharp that overpowers the nugget of sesame-seed tofu hidden inside a squash blossom.