WELCOME , dear reader, to The NoMad, or rather to its cookbook. In the following pages we will welcome you as fully as we possibly can into our little world. We are going to tell you about our food, our cocktails, the wonderful people on our team, and some of the bumps in the road we encountered as we opened our hotel on the corner of Twenty-Eighth and Broadway. It all started in early 2011, when Daniel and I were at DBGB debating whether or not we would order a second burger, and out of nowhere he said: "I think it should be the Rolling Stones." Sorry, I need to back up a bit. This all really started the first time we heard that Eleven Madison Park needed "a little more Miles Davis." If you''ve read anything about our restaurants, you''ve probably heard this story before, but it''s important to tell it here again as it has had everything to do with everything that''s happened since. A few years earlier, in 2006, we were taking our first steps to evolve Eleven Madison Park (EMP) into the fine dining restaurant it is today.

The "Miles" line came in our first review, during a very formative time--we were trying to find exactly what our new identity would be, craving language to help articulate the direction which we wanted to go. With this one line, a reviewer telling us she wished we had a little more Miles--we were given a gift. In the months that followed, we researched Miles obsessively and drafted a list of eleven words that were most commonly used to describe him, among them "fresh," "cool," "collaborative," and "endless reinvention." These became our mission statement, and guided us as we made the hundreds of changes over the course of our restaurant''s continuing evolution. See, some of our favorite restaurants are those that, once opened, are fully realized and will live forever without change. But EMP is not like that. It''s a project that we will never be done with, a concept that is always in motion. Still, in 2010, after four years of very focused attention, we realized it was time for us to begin the process of building our second restaurant.

The prospect of another restaurant is so exciting, but scary as hell. Your second act can determine if you''re the next Rolling Stones or the next Vanilla Ice. We knew we wanted the new place to be more casual than EMP--its louder and looser sibling--but that was really all. So we started looking for a space, figuring where we decided to build it would help identify what it was going to be. We looked all over the island of Manhattan, from Battery Park City to the Upper East Side. But nothing felt right, and everywhere we went, EMP felt so far away. We knew that we needed to maintain a significant presence at EMP, so our next restaurant needed to be close enough to allow for that. The last project we looked at before we discovered The NoMad was another hotel on Madison Avenue, and of everything we''d seen or considered, it was the one we were most excited about.

We''d met with the ownership, we''d started to design the space, and we''d even spent quite a bit of time with a kitchen designer figuring out how we could tweak the existing kitchen to fulfill Daniel''s needs as a chef. But as it we came closer and closer to finalizing the deal, we realized that something just didn''t feel right--even today I can''t articulate what it was. So at the eleventh hour we walked away. It was a hard decision, though we felt confident it was the right one. Still, frustrating to be back at the drawing board. Thankfully, that frustration was short-lived. The next day, the kitchen designer we had been working with let us know that there was a project in the works practically around the corner from EMP. He asked if we would like to schedule a meeting with the owners to check it out.

So, a week and a half later, Daniel and I did something we had never done before: we walked out of EMP and we headed north. We walked across Madison Square Park, took a left on Twenty-Sixth Street and a right on Broadway, and walked to the corner of Twenty-Eighth Street. New York City is an amazing place; within one block or two, your surroundings can completely change. Here we were, after a five-minute stroll from where we had spent nearly every waking hour of our lives for the past few years, and we were someplace we had never been. Here, there were no more fountains and art installations and majestic trees. The mothers and their strollers were gone, as were the bankers on benches eating Shake Shack. The world had shifted to hawkers selling fake designer bags and imposter perfumes, endless rows of wig shops, and the ever-present smell of weed (something that continues to be a distraction every day as we walk back and forth between the two restaurants). Daniel looked at me, confused, and asked, "Will, what are we doing here?" I wasn''t so sure myself.

Already we were both regretting having scheduled the meeting, thinking our next few hours would be a waste of time. Then we looked up. They say you only become a real New Yorker once you stop looking up, and I can say with confidence that we both, a long time ago, became hardened New Yorkers. So, I''m not sure why we broke character, but once we did, it was as if the neighborhood had transitioned from black and white into color. We could see beyond the gated storefronts and gum-littered sidewalks to the grand neighborhood this had once been. Our pessimism dissolved, and we walked into the building that would become The NoMad Hotel to meet with the guy who would be our partner in the venture, Andrew Zobler. Andrew was behind the Ace Hotel a block north of here, and he is definitely the person we credit with having had the vision to realize what this bizarre little tangle of streets north of Madison Square Park could become. We made our way through the debris-strewn construction site of what would one day be the dining room, and met Andrew standing where table 53 would one day be.

We stood together for hours, intensely discussing everything from the building and the history of the neighborhood to our collective ideas about what we wanted to build here. Literally thousands of details needed to be worked on, but by the time we parted ways, a shared vision had come into focus. This wasn''t about creating something new, but about reinventing something that once was. At EMP, the goal had been to create the four-star restaurant for the next generation-- our generation. At The NoMad, we''d try to do the same--this time, for the grand hotel. You see, back in the day, the grand hotels were the center of all things social in New York City. People would flock to The Waldorf, The Plaza, The Palace, or The Carlyle when they sought a place to sleep, to dine, to drink, to commiserate. They were places where native New Yorkers and travelers alike would come to form community.

When you were at The Waldorf Astoria, it didn''t matter if you were lounging about enjoying a feast or a cognac--or if you were even conscious--you were doing it at The Waldorf. But at some point, it stopped being cool to hang out at hotels. Even restaurants in hotels fought fiercely for their brand independence, coming up with their own names and often adding separate entrances. New York City''s great halls of community faded from local popularity, becoming places for tourists to visit. We wanted The NoMad to change that--to be beautiful, rich, and luxurious, but fun, cool, and accessible. We wanted it to be a place where the people who greet you at the front door and check you into your room are the same as those who take your order at lunch, or serve you a cocktail at 1 a.m. With that as the goal, it felt like there was no better neighborhood in which to do it than here, arguably the center of Manhattan.

Ours is truly a city that is constantly changing, sometimes for better and sometimes for worse, and this neighborhood had definitely fallen on hard times. The idea that we could have an opportunity to play a role in reviving it was exhilarating. These streets were once home to Tin Pan Alley, the original "Broadway" theater district, and to Jerry Thomas''s bar. New York''s elite once strolled its streets. But the city grew and people''s attention turned elsewhere, as it tends to, and the beautiful Beaux Arts buildings were left to wither. Gorgeous building lobbies were cut up into stalls and populated by vendors of cheap goods; beautiful hotels were degraded into boarding houses. It, sadly, devolved from a neighborhood people dreamed of being part of to one they crossed at night quickly and with trepidation. It was time for its renaissance.

Both of these lofty ideas--reinventing the grand hotel and playing a role in rebuilding a neighborhood--were wonderful, but they were chiefly about looking back into the past. As our second restaurant, this new venture needed a unique voice, its own point of view; it couldn''t be derivative of what we had already done. Like EMP years earlier, it needed language--an identity, a voice--to help guide it. It needed its muse. So, yes, back to that second burger at DBGB, and Daniel''s suggestion that we should look to the Rolling Stones. I laughed at first because the Stones are Daniel''s favorite band, so it seemed like a pretty lazy suggestion. But he seemed convicted in it. Apparently he had been reading a lot about them recently and encouraged me to do the same.

While I have always loved their music, reading about them taught me to understand and appreciate them on a whole different level. When the Stones were real.