Clemente Bar Is For ‘Hard-Drinking Vegans’

A 5th Leaf cocktail: pisco, pear brandy, smoked sunchoke, shiso, and very fancy ice. Photo: Hugo Yu

Where does a plant-based man or woman of means drink these days? It wasn’t necessarily a question I had given much thought to, but within 20 minutes of arrival at Clemente Bar, the new outcropping of Eleven Madison Park perched above its main dining room, I had seen the error of my ways. I owed one of my long-suffering magazine editors a meal, but L.S.M.E. is a vegan (that’s not why he’s long-suffering; I am), which makes treating him an occasionally dicey affair. Then Daniel Humm’s new cocktail bar-with-bites — imagined in collaboration with the painter Francesco Clemente — propitiously appeared. “I like how the place is going for the ‘hard-drinking vegan’ crowd,” he told me as we sat down, “which describes a Venn diagram with a bigger overlap than you might expect.”

Leaving aside the question of whether the retrofitting of a private dining room into a bar is a worrying economic indicator — and don’t worry too much, EMP has kept its largest PDR intact — Clemente Bar is a warmly wood-paneled, dim, mostly windowless aerie, dominated by two large murals by Clemente. They depict, broadly, a pilgrimage. On one, a parade of mostly faceless humanoids climb up a giant foot into some kind of bell; on the other, over the bar, two people make love in an almond suspended over a Hokusai wave, as a zephyr blows. A giant eyeball and a camel dot the landscape. In faded, seemingly weatherbeaten colors, they’re nearly frescos, a little Ancient Egypt, a little Surrealist.

The cocktails are similarly surreal. The namesake Clemente Martini is Vesper-like, with gin and vodka, but also an infusion of green curry and saffron. It has a dangerous, lactic softness — it drinks sneakily easy — with (to me) more of a green-melon sweetness than curry, which is not a complaint. L.S.M.E. tries a crystal-clear negroni colada, with rum, bianco bitter, vermouth, and pineapple, which he described as tasting mostly of vermouth, crowned with a pleated medallion of frozen Campari, which bleeds into the drink as it melts.

The food is a more approachable way to try Humm’s plant-based creations, given that Eleven Madison Park’s tasting menus start at $225 and climb up to $365. Up here, there’s a ballpark-of-the-future bent: Getcher agedashi tofu dog on a homemade potato bun and a heady scattering of black truffle shavings, for $29, or a “fried chicken sandwich,” a tempura-battered portobello with “Nashville hot” seasoning, for $25! There are no peanuts here as there might be at the restaurant’s bar downstairs, but there are sake-marinated pickles, made from the distinctly un-half-sour kohlrabi and celtuce in addition to the usual cukes. (Clemente Bar has a tasting menu of its own, at $225 for five courses with cocktail pairings, served in the next-door, eight-seat “Studio.”)

The mashup of the surreal (the mad-science drinks), the easygoing (the snacky menu), and the cosmopolitan-sophisticated (the low-lit ambience, the décor, the art) feels a little scattershot at present. But the sterling-as-usual Eleven Madison Park service carries it off. My vegan guide preferred the simplest item we sampled: pepper toast, little planks of focaccia topped with a tangle of Calabrian peppers and a surprising hit of coriander. “Like all the best vegan food,” he told me, “it didn’t stray too far from ‘buy good produce and cook it well.’” I myself was partial to the best reimagining of the espresso martini I’ve had yet: a bitter, fruity float, scoops of espresso martini ice cream topped with Maraschino cherries, espresso liqueur, and Coca-Cola, creamy enough that I had to check if it really was as plant-based as advertised. The hard-drinking vegans will be pleased, as well as the hard-drinking omnivores. I noticed during my visit that, of the 30 seats in the room, two were occupied by butts clad in leather pants.