Copycat Eleven Madison Park Granola (The Parting Gift from a $385-a-Head Restaurant, Made at Home)
Prep time: 10 min active Cook time: 45 min Makes: about 7 cups (14 half-cup servings)
Every guest who dines at Eleven Madison Park leaves with a jar.
Not a business card, not a receipt — a small glass jar of granola, sealed with a lid, carried home in whatever coat pocket or bag you arrived with. You eat it over the following week and it keeps reminding you of the meal. That is the point.
Eleven Madison Park sits at 11 Madison Avenue in Manhattan, in the landmarked art deco lobby of the old Metropolitan Life building, with 25-foot ceilings and views over Madison Square Park. Chef Daniel Humm arrived as executive chef in 2006 from Campton Place in San Francisco, and together with front-of-house partner Will Guidara (who later wrote the hospitality book Unreasonable Hospitality), bought the restaurant from Danny Meyer’s Union Square Hospitality Group in 2011. By 2017, EMP had climbed to number one on the World’s 50 Best Restaurants list. It holds three Michelin stars.
Dinner currently costs $385 per person for the full tasting menu — before wine, tax, or gratuity. A table for two, with a modest wine pairing, will comfortably reach $1,000.
And at the end of it, they give you a jar of granola.
Why the Granola Matters
The recipe has been printed in the EMP cookbook (published 2011), adapted by Sam Sifton for the New York Times (published May 2020), and reproduced on hundreds of food blogs. It is not a secret. And yet most home versions miss the texture and restraint of the original, because the recipe looks deceptively simple and people improvise in ways that push it toward something more ordinary.
The granola has three qualities that are unusual among home-made recipes: olive oil instead of butter, virtually no spice (no cinnamon, no vanilla), and a high-salt content relative to its sweetness. Each of these is a deliberate choice, not an oversight, and each one is easy to undo by instinct.
The Three Things Most Copycat Recipes Get Wrong
1. Swapping the olive oil for butter. Butter tastes rich and dairy-sweet — it is delicious in granola, but it is also familiar in a way that makes the granola taste like a home kitchen instead of a restaurant. Extra-virgin olive oil contributes a faintly fruity, very slightly grassy note that you cannot name but that shifts everything. It also makes the clusters crisper: butter contains about 16 percent water, which creates steam during baking and softens the oat bed; olive oil has no water, so the oats fry rather than steam. Use a good oil — not a neutral canola, not a blasting-hot peppery Sicilian. A clean, fruit-forward one.
2. Stirring during baking. Most granola recipes tell you to stir the pan every 10 minutes for even browning. EMP granola is pressed flat before it goes into the oven and left completely alone until it comes out 40 minutes later. Every time you stir, you break apart the bonds forming between oats and nuts and return everything to individual pieces. The clusters form because the syrup coating fuses everything it touches into a unified slab — you have to trust it and leave it.
3. Undersalting. The recipe calls for a full tablespoon of Diamond Crystal kosher salt, which is about twice what you would use in a standard home granola of the same volume. The salt is not background noise here — the salty-sweet tension is the central flavor mechanism. It prevents the maple syrup and brown sugar from reading as flat sweetness and turns them into something with friction. Do not cut it.
What Happened to EMP in 2020
In May 2020, two months into the COVID-19 pandemic, Humm closed the dining room and turned EMP into what he called the Community Kitchen, partnering with the nonprofit Rethink Food to produce 3,000 meals per day for New York healthcare workers and food-insecure residents. He kept the kitchen staff employed throughout.
It was also the month that the granola recipe circulated most widely. Sifton’s New York Times adaptation spread across the food internet at a moment when people were baking obsessively. The association between the granola and that specific period of pandemic cooking is now part of its history. If you made it in 2020, you were not alone.
The Texture Goal: Big, Irregular Clusters
What you are aiming for is not a fine, loose crumble. You want large, irregular shards — some the size of a playing card, some smaller, with dried cherries embedded in them — that snap when you break them and hold their shape in a bowl of yogurt for several minutes before softening. The coconut chips are part of this: large, toasted sheets of coconut that crunch in a way that fine shredded coconut cannot.
| EMP Restaurant | Homemade (full batch) | |
|---|---|---|
| Per serving | ~$27 (⅟₁₄ of a $385 dinner) | ~$1.75 |
| Full batch (14 servings) | ~$385+ dinner | ~$24 ingredients |
| Parting jar (½ cup) | Included with dinner | Free |
The math is what it is.
