On a March morning last year, the chef Daniel Humm and members of his team from his three-Michelin-starred restaurant, Eleven Madison Park, in New York City, climbed into several pickup trucks and drove into the scrubby mountains of Crete. For two hours, along winding roads and up steep hills, they followed a local goatherd to his mitato, the stone hut from which he tends his flock.
What happened next, Humm says, “was like a spiritual experience.” The group participated in the humane slaughter of one of the animals, prepared the meat together, and shared a meal with their hosts. “It was inspiring to watch this process, and the seriousness about it,” he tells me. It was a profound lesson not only in the island’s agricultural traditions but also in relating to food and the earth. “There is a sense of respect everywhere in Greece,” he says. “Respect for water, the ingredients, the animals, the environment—everything.”
Humm and his colleagues were in Greece for a two-week culinary immersion, inspired by a lunch Humm ate at Taverna Oikonomou on a previous visit to Athens. “We were 80 percent through the meal and we had basically only eaten vegetables,” says Humm, who has long been a proponent of sustainable, plant-forward cooking. (Eleven Madison Park was entirely plant-based from June 2021 to October 2025.) “I was like, Oh my God, I need to bring my team here.” He connected with Oikonomou’s owner, Vassilis Bakasis, as well as Manolis Papoutsakis, the chef-owner of Pharaoh, a popular restaurant in Athens with an extensive natural wine selection and a great vinyl collection. They designed an itinerary that explored various facets of Greece’s complex cuisine, bringing Humm and his crew to Papoutsakis’s home island of Crete and the smaller Cycladic island of Tínos, then doing a deep dive into Athens’s dynamic food scene. The research trip will inform their work at Eleven Madison Park and the new restaurant Humm plans to open later this year in Manhattan’s West Village.
After the pandemic Humm used his platform to challenge the manners in which we acquire and consume food. That includes questioning our industrialized food systems and the environmental impact of meat production, and considering what can be gained by reorienting the way we eat toward the connections between food and place. He’s also an advocate outside the kitchen: Humm helped cofound the food-equity nonprofit Rethink Food and, in fall 2024, partnered with UNESCO as a Goodwill Ambassador for Food Education, a role in which he focuses on the intersection of global foodways, biodiversity, and the natural world. “When you look at a place like Greece, or wherever there’s such long food traditions, there’s a lot to learn,” he says.
