Chef Daniel Humm serves a 10-course, plant-based menu at Masque, Mumbai

Chef Daniel Humm’s 10-course, plant-based menu is part of a collaboration between his restaurant in New York, Eleven Madison Park, and Mumbai’s Masque on a culinary project, ‘A Nod To Nature’s Best’

“We are running out of time and we need to start now,” begins Chef Daniel Humm, owner of Eleven Madison Park (EMP), as we sit down with him to chat about his collaboration with Mumbai-based ingredient-driven restaurant, Masque. Chef Daniel, who is passionate about plant-based food and recipes, emphasises the need to adapt to sustainable living and eating. He is collaborating with Masque on a project titled, ‘A Nod to Nature’s Best’ that explores plant-based food.

“Our food system is collapsing. There is plastic in the ocean. The fishes are full of diseases that we have never seen before. It is making us sick. The meat industry is destroying the planet. The Amazon forest is being destroyed. We are chopping trees to construct tall, concrete buildings, but we are not realising the fact that these forests are the lungs of our planet and by chopping them, we are not just running out of resources, but also harming the earth. Every week there is a new natural disaster that we are not even prepared to deal with. This is why food becomes a very powerful language now. We are bringing plant-based food eating experience to the world to show them how magical it is. We want to inspire other restaurants and chefs so that slowly everybody adapts to this concept because we don’t have time to sit around,” says Daniel.

The EMP team along with Daniel landed in New Delhi on August 23 and were accompanied by Aditi Dugar, director and founder of Masque and Varun Totlani, head chef of Masque, who took them to the streets of Delhi exploring local food and sourcing native ingredients. They later travelled to Kashmir. Daniel arrived in Mumbai on August 27 to lay out the collaboration dinner with Masque on September 1 and 2.

Under Daniel, his restaurant has received many accolades— in the year 2017, EMP was ranked number 1 on the World’s 50 Best Restaurants list. He says: “ Receiving awards comes with big responsibility. For a decade our restaurant was famous for duck, lobster, caviar and all kinds of meat, but I always felt there is something higher than just winning awards. The supermarkets are full of choices and options in products. For example, the dairy section has different kinds of milk such as almond , rice , soy , nut milk and so on. A lot of these products are full of preservatives, multipliers and are highly processed. Some of these products are advertised what they are not in real. The most important part is that we are forgetting that we need these products to taste good.”

“Eating plant-based food is extremely enriching, plentiful and diverse and that is where chefs really need to step in and have the responsibility to make the future as delicious and as healthy as possible. As a chef, it is really important for me to celebrate each and every ingredient and be aware that we are sourcing the ingredients in the right manner,” he adds. Daniel, who is a vegetarian by choice, says he is constantly trying to make plant-based food more delicious.

Talking about the market and demand of plant-based food, Daniel says it is not really about what he thinks or believes in. “It is a fact that the planet is running out of resources. There are several studies that explain how by 2050 we would need five planets to feed our one planet if we continue to eat the way we do right now. Eighty per cent of all the farm lands in the world is used for animal farming but it only accounts for 11% of the calories. Choosing plant-based food is not a trend or something I came up with; this is just a reaction to the reality,” he asserts.

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