Daniel Humm opens Humm in Manhattan's West Village

Daniel Humm is opening Humm, a wood-fired restaurant at 435 Hudson Street in Manhattan's West Village, this fall, his first new venture after more than two decades running Eleven Madison Park.

The address matters as much as the name. Eleven Madison Park is a Grand Award-winning dining room built around a tasting menu and, for several years, a fully plant-based one. Humm is built around a wood-fired hearth, shareable plates alongside individual dishes, and a menu built for repeat weeknight visits rather than a single, occasion-only dinner.

French designer Pierre Yovanovitch and Italian painter Francesco Clemente worked on the room itself, a pairing that signals Humm still wants a designed space, even for a restaurant pitched as more relaxed than his last one. Michael Duffy, previously wine director at Rezdôra and Massara, is running the wine list.

After a quarter-century of tasting menus, the neighbourhood restaurant is the real risk.

Early menu details point to endive salads, oysters and roast chicken: dishes chosen for how often a kitchen can repeat them well, not for how they photograph on a tasting menu.

A deliberate step down in formality

Chefs who spend decades at the top of tasting-menu dining tend to open something looser next, and Humm fits that pattern closely. A neighbourhood restaurant with a wood fire and a shorter, cheaper menu is a different business from Eleven Madison Park in every respect that matters: covers per night, staffing ratio, and how often a regular can justify coming back.

It is also a bet that Humm's name alone, after 25 years at Eleven Madison Park, can fill a 435 Hudson Street dining room without the three-hour tasting menu attached to it.

The West Village keeps drawing chef-led openings

The West Village has become a landing spot for chefs stepping out of long-running kitchens, from John Fraser's Ondine on Bedford Street to Tribeca's newly opened Ludico a short walk away. Humm's arrival adds a considerably bigger name to that pattern, on a bigger site than most of what has opened around it.

What happens next depends less on the wood fire than on whether Humm, cooking without a tasting menu for the first time in decades, still tastes like the same chef once the format changes underneath him.