The Art Bar Goes Vegan

An agedashi dog, with twice-fried tofu, truffles, and pickles. Photo: Hugo Yu

It’s been nearly 80 years since the doors swung open on Bemelmans Bar, the Upper East Side’s sui generis marriage of permanent art — the wall murals of Ludwig Bemelmans — and artful drinking. Inside the Carlyle Hotel, Bemelmans has in recent years started to draw an increasingly young crowd — could the city be ready for another such space? At Eleven Madison Park, owner Daniel Humm is betting on it with Clemente Bar, which opens in October and has already begun accepting reservations.

“When we decided to do the bar, I knew I wanted to incorporate art,” Humm says. “I didn’t know to what degree.” His first inspiration was the bar at Kronenhalle, a hundred-year-old Zurich restaurant whose walls are lined with the works of Picasso, Chagall, and Míro — who paid for meals with art. It is Humm’s favorite bar as well as Francesco Clemente’s, the Italian painter and a friend of Humm’s. And it is Clemente’s fresco that hangs above the stairs that guests will take to reach the bar, located on the second floor of Eleven Madison Park.

Among restaurants, EMP’s drinks have always been particularly considered. Its original bar was a hub of creativity during the early years of the cocktail revival, led at various times by figures like Eben Freeman, Cory Hill, Theo Lieberman, and Leo Robitschek. The bar is still there, albeit redesigned with the restaurant in 2017 to become a posher version of itself — so why add a second bar in the same building?

“I think in 2000, there was this huge excitement and push in bars in New York, with Milk & Honey, then everyone that followed,” says Humm. “Now, I feel there’s a new energy of new bars opening, like Martiny’s and Sip & Guzzle — I love that culture, and we feel we have something to contribute.”

He says the bar is a chance to create a space with his friend and to rethink the experience that EMP can offer to the city. “I think people want to use the restaurant differently,” he says. “They may come for their birthdays, for a three-hour meal. If we can create a space where people can drop in and out more, that would be an amazing thing for the restaurant.”

Drinks at Clemente Bar are austerely and artfully garnished. Photo: Hugo Yu

Humm also wanted to give beverage director Sebastian Tollius and bar manager Richard Millwater a bigger platform for their work. “Everything in the restaurant is led by the food and the beverage goes on top of it,” says Humm. “Up there, it’s the other way around.”

Drinks include the Army Brat, a tropical twist on an Army & Navy cocktail made with gin, yuzu sake, and cashew orgeat. It is, like many of the bar’s drinks, garnished sparingly yet artfully, its single ice cube adorned with layered squares of papaya and strawberry fruit leather; the effect is Rothko-esque. The Negroni Colada is crowned with a red, negroni-flavored (vegan) jelly in the shape of a pinwheel while the Koji Café, a boozy rum-and-cherry Irish Coffee, wears a foam of adjoined plain and raspberry cream semicircles divided by a bright line of dehydrated raspberry. Another drink is based on Samoas — Millwater’s favorite Girl Scout cookie — and it does, indeed, taste like a Samoa.

Food (ranging from $12 to $25), to some degree, evokes familiar American treats, like hot dogs and ice-cream floats, albeit passed through EMP’s high-degree-of-difficulty vegan filter. Condiments on the double-fried tofu agedashi dog include black-truffle aïoli, pickled mustard seeds and cucumbers, nori, and scallions (it calls back to the truffle-and-celery Humm Dog once served at PDT). An ice-cream float is based on the flavors of an espresso martini while a deconstructed banana-cream-pie-like dessert, featuring the fruit in granita, macerated, fresh and liqueur forms, comes in a dish of colored glass from the 1930s.

A multilayered dessert of bananas. Photo: Hugo Yu

The team’s drive toward nostalgia extends beyond flavor profiles; it encompasses cultural touchstones like in-the-moment bartending panache that was born during the cocktail revival of the ’00s but has atrophied somewhat since the pandemic. Tollius says that he wants to get back to “an old-school bartending experience where you see everything made in front of you.” He’s not interested in bar trends that favor efficiency over intimacy: “Over the last so many years, all the bars are batching everything,” he says. “It’s become a problem. Even when we reopened EMP in 2021, we weren’t batching, because I was always against it. This is not really what bartending is about.”

That includes techniques that go beyond shaking and stirring, even if it means passing through to another, more exclusive bar (it’s Manhattan; there’s always another door). At the eight-seat tasting counter, sort of like a bar-within-a-bar, a freeze-clarified cocktail will drip through a cheesecloth to completion, in full view of its audience, over the 90-minute course of the seating. Thus, the first cocktail made during the night will become the last one that’s drunk.

“Art brings a lot of emotion,” Tollius tells me. “What we want for the space is to create something timeless for New York City, by also producing this concept of working closely with this artist.”

Unlike Bemelmans, Clemente Bar will offer a cocktail named after the artist in question: the Clemente Martini. “He talked about artists, like Bellini, who had a cocktail named after him,” Humm says. “And he said, ‘Oh my God, I always wanted a cocktail named after me.’ He was kind of joking.”

Tollius and Millwater are making it anyway, a mixture of vodka and gin that’s infused with green curry, Cocchi Americano, dry vermouth and saffron. “That’s the one we’re most nervous about,” Tollius says.