5-STAR5 FAST FOODF
Can’t afford to eat at Eleven Madison Park? Spend $15 at this new restaurant instead
CAN you enjoy a $295 meal for less than $20? Not exactly — but Made Nice, the new fast-casual spot from the team behind Eleven Madison Park (EMP), where a meal costs nearly $300 per person not including drinks and tip, offers a persuasive whiff of the real thing for peanuts.
EMP owner Will Guidara and chef/partner Daniel Humm always wanted to create “a restaurant you can go to every day,” Guidara tells The Post. Translation: supercheap, unlike EMP — ranked No. 1 this year on the prestigious World’s 50 Best Restaurants roster — or its lessexpensive but still pricey sister spot, the NoMad.
Made Nice’s colorfully composed, aggressively seasoned dishes start at $6 for a “side” of soulsatisfying chicken velouté soup, and mains range from $11 to $15. You give your order to a smiling young woman who taps it into an iPad, and dishes are ready minutes later at the open-kitchen counter.
Besides Made Nice’s world-class pedigree, what makes the new NoMad eatery different from a zillion other good, modern graband-go places, such as Sweetgreen around the corner? For starters, chef Danny DiStefano, a former EMP sous-chef, serves his creations on plastic plates rather than in bowls — so you see what you’re eating rather than an undifferentiated, heaping mess.
You also taste it, thanks to first-rate fresh ingredients. I marveled over a quinoa-falafel combo — that’s a pickled beet! that’s a yogurt-marinated cucumber! — for all of $11.
Most dishes are anchored by meat or fish, although there are vegetarian options as well. They don’t set out to simulate actual specific EMP or NoMad dishes, but they do take fervent inspiration from them.
Cod Provençal taps into the fennel, tomato and olives playbook of many warm-weather dishes at EMP. The khao salad is built around deep-flavored hanger steak, a normally chewy cut that emerges from the griddle impossibly tender. It comes with roasted broccoli, crispy rice, Parmesan, chili and crispy shallots — a combo based on Humm’s meatless, warm broccoli salad at EMP.
Most are ridiculously good for the price, such as the $15 salmon rösti that comes with more than $15 worth of smoked salmon, plus gloriously fresh frisée, soft-boiled egg, potato croutons, cucumbers, radishes and pickled onions — all held together by a light buttermilk vinaigrette. If dishes like this were more elegantly composed and offered on a waiter-service restaurant menu, I’d spend twice as much and not feel cheated. None of the dishes are particularly “light.” But if you have room, don’t miss “milk and honey,” a slightly lightened version of an actual EMP and NoMad dessert. The unbearably luscious stack of soft-serve milk-flavored ice cream, honey brittle, oat shortbread, milk meringue and buckwheat honey is only $6. For anyone with a sweet tooth like mine, that’s almost too nice.