The Frescoed Room Above Eleven Madison Park
Daniel Humm's cocktail bar upstairs from EMP hides two experiences under one Resy listing. The Lounge takes walk-ins. The nine-seat Studio does not.
A frozen disk of Campari sits on top of a coconut-clarified Negroni, slowly melting into it, and the drink you take a first sip of is not the drink you finish. That is the Negroni Colada, and it is the clearest single argument for what Clemente Bar is doing on the second floor of 11 Madison Avenue — cocktails built to change shape while you drink them, in a room built to hold your attention long enough to notice.
Daniel Humm opened it above Eleven Madison Park in the autumn of 2024, with Sebastian Tollius running the bar programme and the Italian painter Francesco Clemente commissioned to line the walls with frescoes and murals. It landed at No. 11 on North America's 50 Best Bars in 2024, its first year, and won Best New Opening; it placed No. 15 in 2025. Two rooms, two bookings, two different nights out — The Lounge on the walk-in side, The Studio a nine-seat counter running a pre-paid tasting menu — and most people arrive not knowing which one they want.
Humm sent the elevator upstairs and it opened into one of the most considered cocktail rooms New York has built in a decade.
Editorial Deep
The drinks are built like the tasting menus downstairs — layered, temperature-managed, and engineered to reveal themselves in stages. The Negroni Colada is the party trick that earns its place; the frozen Campari disk melts across the sip and the drink shifts from coconut-forward to bitter over about ten minutes. The Clemente Martini, made for the artist himself, runs vodka and gin against green curry and saffron and lands closer to a savoury dirty martini than anything on the shelf next to it. The Army Brat pulls yuzu sake, cashew, and a papaya disk into an Army & Navy frame. The 5th Leaf works smoked sunchoke, pear, and shiso around a pisco base.
At six, the light is still coming through the windows and the frescoes read as decoration — you notice the room the way you'd notice a hotel lobby, in passing, on the way to a seat. By ten, the lamps are doing the work, the murals have taken over the walls, and the low banquettes have pulled the volume down to the register where two people can talk without leaning in. Clemente's paintings wrap the room in a specific palette of reds and ochres and gold leaf, and the effect at night is closer to a private dining room in Rome than to a bar in Flatiron.
The crowd is EMP-adjacent without being EMP-formal — people who couldn't get the tasting menu downstairs, people who already ate it and came upstairs after, and a working set of hospitality regulars who know Tollius's programme. Ties are rare, phones stay in pockets, and the volume never crests the way it does at the newer Flatiron cocktail rooms two blocks over. It reads like a room full of people who have made a reservation on purpose, which is what it is.
The Studio is a different equation entirely — five pre-paid, non-refundable courses over two hours. The bar snacks are the line item that overdelivers; the espresso martini float is the one that doesn't.
This is the best version of a hotel-adjacent cocktail room the city has opened since the Aman — a considered programme in a considered room, at prices that don't insult you for showing up. Come back on a Tuesday, take a banquette at nine, and order the Clemente Martini and the Negroni Colada in that order. Don't come back if you want a scene bar or a room where the drinks are secondary to who's in it; the energy here is quiet on purpose, and a big group looking for volume will find the wrong room.
Order this
Drink this.
Clemente Martini, then Negroni Colada
“Humm's upstairs bar is the most considered cocktail room New York has opened since the Aman.”
Go for the Clemente Martini and the Negroni Colada, take a banquette after nine, and treat the two-drink sit as the evening. Skip if you want a scene bar or a room where the drinks are secondary; the energy is quiet on purpose.
The Verdict
