Restaurant review, Eleven Madison Light.

In the old, genteel world of restaurants, maybe you hired a few more cooks when you hit the big time, or, if you were feeling rash, expanded into the space next door after a year or two. But in the upper echelons of today’s ­multimillion-dollar restaurant industry, success is almost more complicated than failure. After a chef has his first big triumph, he will be all but obligated by his business partners and investors to expand. But which among the thousands of suitors begging you for franchise deals do you choose? How many cookbooks should you write (or have written for you)? Should you open a lavish branch of your smash New York restaurant in ­Vegas or Macao, or capitalize on your newfound fame by lending your name to a string of profitable, though potentially humiliating, burger bars in New Jersey? How, in short, do you “monetize” your good fortune (i.e., make piles of cash) in the most effective and tasteful way, without ruining your brand?

Many of these delicate calculations are on display at Daniel Humm’s posh, coolly impersonal new restaurant, NoMad, which opened recently off the lobby of the NoMad Hotel on Broadway. NoMad has clearly been designed as a “casual” bookend to Eleven Madison Park, which Humm and his partners purchased from Danny Meyer last year after Humm helped turn it (in the estimation of this bilious critic) into the finest restaurant in the city. Instead of trying to appeal to a single new audience, however, Humm (who was named James Beard Outstanding Chef last week) and his partner, the restaurateur Will Guidara, have decided to jam a hodgepodge of styles under one roof. There’s a glass-ceiling Atrium for the ladies who lunch and a clamorous, stand-up bar area for the cocktail crowd. If you wish to sit with your bespoke cocktails and French wines and pick at casual snacks, you can do that in the Library, and if you’re looking for something more intimate, there’s the Parlour, which is appointed, like a Victorian sitting room, with burgundy-colored rugs and velvet chairs trimmed with gold.

Read more at http://nymag.com/