How One of New York’s Best Chefs Runs His High Volume Michelin-Starred Restaurant — Mise En Place

We started the preparation of the porcatini in my travels through Italy I came across the porchetta dish, it is a bit of loin with some belly or sometimes it is a whole boneless pig, the porkatini we make here is like a baby porchetta for one , so this is like One of the more technical dishes we make here is a pork tenderloin and we're essentially creating a kind of wrap over this, so using the plastic wrap to help guide it, then we seal the entire tenderloin. way and we can take those clothes out like this and there we have the little porkatini itself, this is going to be cryovated and we will poach it and then we will take it out of the plastic and we will brown it in the fire.

Is sausage cooked completely? Leave the pork loin medium or medium well, then brush it with a reduced portrait while rolling it with cracklings. I have the same seasoning. It's this fun, elegant little way to serve, you know, pretty simple. foreign dish Market the flowers of the day and, most importantly, darker green vegetables, these will be used for the market salad. Oh, it's 9:30 in the fancy kitchen, we're starting the pasta program, so let's get started on that. nettles in late spring we have been making tortelli with these with burrata and red wine as a chef you feel that when things are available you should use them for your guests, you know you should do it when things are in season.

No I don't like surprising people or anything like that. I like to use things that they may not have seen, but that they can relate to. This is the current vegetarian option on the menu so we went through a lot of this, yes it's a sure popular one, yes look I got stung, it's not like every European Brasserie has to have a big pasta menu. Pasta is very dear to me. I usually have at least six pastas on the menu. Sometimes we do even more special ones, so now we're actually going to roast the Nettles. I tell every one of these guys that no matter what they're doing, how am I new?

You have to be very careful here, we'll just let this cool down. I like to bring it to room temperature and the butter in here will solidify, so when we grind it it will come out as a homogeneous mixture. We grind the vegetables and it has a texture similar to that of meat. push it if you do this correctly it comes out like this because now the butter is solidified and is ground with the nettle to keep it with a homogeneous mixture now you can see that all those nettles that we made didn't really make it to a large extent, the burrata that we just dried for this, I like to mix it by hand, Old World style, if you mix this in a blender, it just doesn't have the same effect.

I think this is like four bottles of red wine reduced to a syrup and this is what goes through a lot of this, so Angel, my pasta maker, this one never made noodles before you came here and now it's a star of rock, now he does it better than me, he is starting to make the base or the inner layer. of this this tortelli, but this is where you like the next level of pasta, making the tortelli is made up of three different doughs, a nettle dough, a red wine dough and we have a charcoal infused dough, those flavors are inside the actual padding and it's wrapping around the actual padding, so it's overlapping the whole thing, no pun intended, you can see the end results, it's pretty, it's quite amazing, it's a beautiful thing, it's simplistic in nature, it has a technique behind it, but I don't think so.

There's too much to it, it just represents what's there and, if you don't mind, it just tastes good. I've been cooking pasta for a long time, even when I was a little kid. I mean, I started cooking because of my parents. These are the The first thing my mother taught me was how to get the dry pasta, put it in the water, here's some butter, here's some cheese. I cooked it a lot and as I got deeper into the kitchen and worked in different

restaurant

s, I geeked out for a long time. When I was in Italy I studied it, it's just an artistic way of cooking that I enjoy, so this is our executive sous chef, Marcos López, who will prepare the lobster filling for the lobster ravioli.

This is the last of our filled pastas. We are, we are building here today. This lobster is raw. We just steam it for two minutes to get it out of the shell. Look at them, a little salt and pepper between the process. I'm just going to give it some little swirls. make sure this whole body is decomposed. I thought it would be in the sense of being a comfortable Brasserie to make some lobster ravioli that many

restaurant

s have on the menu, but I wanted it to be as perfect as we could. We developed this lobster musolin that has pieces of raw lobster folded in so it has that texture, but right now it's cooked every minute.

I'm just adding chopped tarragon just for flavor and if I keep moving forward with this. then, I will break this mousse. I'll add chopped lobsters which will add another textural component to the filling, so whenever we make this filling we always run a tester in boiling water and a little bit of plastic wrap just to make sure it's going to cook and then it's ready to go. pack up, pass it on to Angel Foreign. We had to find the perfect amount to put in there so it doesn't bleed into size, but you can't. Like you can't have too much and you can't have too little, many of the things.

I wanted it to be very exaggerated going back in time. I wanted it to be on display, like the pier, a diner can see it and be like I want it Justin is raw Farmhouse is beautiful and the other part of this dish is that it has such a rich flavor the sauce we sauce it with is the only hosta dish that involves cream really adds lightness to the dish and it's really very elegant and silky because I wanted it to be almost cartoony perfect so I started making the market salad at a restaurant I had in Midtown for a short period of time called Ten Penny.

I wanted to have some elements of like the American continental restaurant, where you would order your entree and you would order the house salad, so that's why they came together and that's why I wanted to take that idea and make it more elegant for the blanching process that you always want to have, like your Warrior bags. prepare it immediately. I'm going to start with the Romanesco Baba English beans, so with the English beans and the fava beans that belong to a longer period of time, like five minutes, this is the most hearty salad I've ever made that has a lot of components, you do a great job.

I like a challenge when tackling it with my piece of snow. The peas also equipped Blanche just to bring out the color and be in charge of a dish like that. You have to be very organized. I know she is here caring for and checking each of these vegetables every day when they are actually cooked. You could squeeze them out of the pot easily. Still need more time to get in with some carrots. Some carrots take longer to cook, so. That's it for the scalding process, now we have to move on to the roofing section, it is definitely a labor intensive task.

I want to get a lot of different vegetables in there and give the diner the experience of the excitement that we get from that, so for the roasting process this is my setup and with the carrots, Dad puts a lot of sugar. I put a lot of grease on the Randall so it doesn't burn quickly. I'm going to start with I'm not going to put too much fat because I want it to brown well, so I'm going to season it with salt and cool it so that the carrots have reached a point of fried doneness that we want just like a ramen and the proper roasting at the beginning.

I'm going with my peas. So now the Smokies are nicely rolled up and that's breakfast, so these are the dehydrated components of the market salad. We have more steps to the market, so these are just salt, but I'm basically like rubbing the oil on them to season it, so the oil. it will help like the salt will stick to the onions and for Christmas now we are going to transfer them to the diagram so now we are taking out the carrots, here we have these are the carrots that were made yesterday, you can see them. They are concentrated in flavor and also look pretty and this will decorate the salad.

The market salad itself can have more than 25 ingredients. That dish has three cooks working on it in different shifts and all the different vegetables are cooked in different ways, regardless of what we want. we consider it adequate and then there are the components that remain the same. We had texture through the type of black olive and sunchoke soil that we put on the plate. We always have a pickled almond in there, we always top it with greens to make it look good. It looks like a garden when it comes out, so it's like taking that and just elevating it, it's 4 p.m. m., so we'll start reviewing these ducks for tomorrow.

These are fresh ducks. I'm also very lucky that the mayors salute Sadies, who I've worked with as one of the most talented butchers in the entire city for 18 years. He kills these ducks day after day. These ducks will be sold within a month. He is trimming the crown to make this item presentable. What happens next is the crown is put in a bath of ice water and soaked there while we kill all the ducks. All of this will be used for broth and sauce. These will crumble and pit. The bones will actually go to the same thing as us.

We will use this leg meat for other preparations after they finish soaking, first we dry them on baking sheets and then we put them in our rotation here and then we start rotating them in the dates, these are the freshest ones that stay standing. there for a day just to get all the extra excess water out because otherwise it would be raining a lot, but yeah, so we started moving them from refrigerator to refrigerator, from one space to another and turning and turning the birds. to get proper air circulation around them, we're going to start lifting them up to load them into the cooler at the roasting stations, they're going to start skewering them and getting them ready for honey roasting, you know, like a restaurant rotates. around the duck, we have dirty ducks a day, we're just doing the finishing touches, we're just making sure the product is great, then we'll clean this all up, be completely presentable and start the show we have. all our ducks in a row these will be here until the beginning of the service, then we will prick them with our tool, here we will rub them with honey and roast them in this oven.

Here we have aligned our two ducks. presenters for the evening we have Celestia and wax flowers today, there's always some baby eucalyptus in the mix and that's how we present the ducks, you know, we do them daily. I never thought duck was going to be what I wanted to put here. on the menu because I've been cooking that specific duck for a long time. I thought I was going to sell nine or ten a week like the first friends and family we had. It was like duck, duck, duck, duck. I think that's part of the success because it was all over the internet and it still is to this day, I think Instagram because I'm the worst at social media.

I mean, really, I admit, I just wanted to represent the bird. I know it is a beautiful sight to see the bird come out. Basically, the duck you order is a duck they show you and there is no smoke and mirrors behind it all. If you order the duck, we put the duck in the oven. Duck waits, the duck arrives. to you and present the duck, bring it back, cut it from the carcass and cut it with a slight bias. We have the Jewish meat, the Jewish port made with the bones goes to the bottom of the pan and the duck is fanned.

We take out a little Malden salt and that's it and then we serve it with the achievements. I just wanted to represent the bird and you know, he gave his life in a restaurant and gave it proper justice to what it is and show the work that goes into it. You know it's a beautiful sight to see the bird come out and then when we cut it up and present it in the serving clothes that we had made and you know it's kind of nice from the diner's perspective if you don't like the food and everything. which is just great good food, if you like food you can understand the technique behind it, we don't do too many cutting edge things, it starts at 7am. m. every day to prepare this meal and then once the service starts, it's a It's a very orchestrated serious service to bring it to the restaurant, so right now I'm preparing my station.

These are all my squeeze bottles. I have a red wine reduction, vinegar, red wine, this is my finishing oil, olive oil, yondu, bacon fat over here. So now it's five. I waited for my pasta. This is where I keep all my rigatons in my conquest. They are extruded semolina pasta. I save my ravioli. There are three ravioli for each order. I grabbed my pappardella and my Fratelli. out of the region and I set it up here every time something goes off, I take one of these trays, I put all my pasta in it and then I drop it in the water, I start the sauce and when I'm done, your typical Michelin level cuisine does a lot of following, you can see in the kitchen that everyone there has a lot of passion, passion is probably more than a word behind that level of cooking, like once you start here in the roar, apply our bread, soufflé cake, bombaloni , three prawns and then a cucumber. then a conquigli ravioli popper dolly, so this is ourhouse, a little clam bacon and white sesame.

We complete it with our white sesame bread gratato. We are an a la carte restaurant, we are not a tasting menu restaurant, so it's kind of like choose your own tasting menu fire bombaloni so a full split, then a duck, everyone goes to fine dining restaurants a time, but I have people who come back, you know, sometimes once a week, you know, or more, that to me is that I feel like this is the success of the restaurant at full speed in the Mortadella soufflé cakes. two and two after what we went through I'm glad the restaurant is still here listen I'm in the business of making people happy buy a single rad that's why I cook that's why we have an open kitchen so we can see everyone be happy and have a good time good time abroad