Only 16 People a Night Can Eat This 17-Course Omakase | On The Line | Bon Appétit

wow Royal Sushi and isaka is a passion project Under One Roof you have a bustling isaka with great food talk behind the norn curtains of the iseka I have my service Omas Omas literally means I'll leave it to you so it's a chef experience where you can see the chef's vision and there I make my 17 $300 Omas dishes for 16

people

a

night

, eight

people

per seat. Every chef's dream is to have both things right. You want a fun, loud place in the same space. having my very serious chef tasting meal where I can make the food I want, you know, I can control everything and that's what I think a chef should have both.

Hi, I'm Jesso, the chef owner here at Royal Isaka, 10 hours before omasi service. The fish is arriving right now from Japan. Let's bring it. He is the owner of Yama Seafood and distributes to some of the best Japanese restaurants in the area. He was captured on Sunday in Japan and packaged on Monday in Toyosu. They brought an airport. and then it arrived last

night

at JFK a few hours later, they brought it to you today is Tuesday,

this

build is pretty big so it's time to set up two 400 pagers, it's not the biggest but yeah, but that's just for today , there are three more deliveries, lofin tuna, yes.

Oh my God, it's heavy, it's 9:00, the fish just fell can't stay on the ice for a long time, otherwise it will damage the fish. I have to take it out, cleaned, gutted, peeled, prepared, some will go to the dry Ager, some will go to the walk-in and much of it will be used for tonight's service. Here's some farm-raised mackerel. Mackerel is my favorite fish. It's oily. It's greasy. I also gravitate toward fish which I think challenges the American palate growing up in my father's house. restaurant mackerel was a fish that many customers immediately said no to, they probably had a bad experience.

It is a very technical fish because of the oil content it has to be extremely fresh. The fish is cured with salt and soaked in vinegar. I like a good challenge. I like it. to let diners know that things they maybe didn't think they liked, they actually love,

this

is the Kua Japanese long Toth coer. This will age for at least a week. You can see that it is already in rigor. You have to handle it carefully. Because this could easily ruin your whole day, so what they've done here is this little cut and there you see there's a little hole here.

This is the electrocardiogram process, which is a Japanese technique. They place a metal rod in the spine to kill the nerves. It prevents the fish from breaking down so quickly that you can notice an immediate difference when working with an EKG fish and a non-meat fish. Tears a little for the ones that haven't been processed that way, whereas this one if it were to cut it today it's like it's so pristine so tight I have a bunch of fish that I have to break up right now I usually have a couple of hands more but since we have so much fish I arrived a little early to start but between three sushi chefs we usually spend around 4 hours breaking down all the fish and sorting plus a couple more hours of peeling, cutting and preparing for service.

I always start my fish preparation with fish that needs to be salted or cured first because that takes time. We're going to start with the Spanish mackerel, so in the first part of the cleaning process we always cut the fins, you just want to get as much of the guts out as possible, that's what really rots, very quickly, cure with salt , what it does is it essentially takes a lot of excess moisture out of the mackerel, it's important because we're going to put vinegar in, so later it will allow the vinegar to penetrate easier and better, so the curing will stop for about 20 minutes, so let me get the squid out, this is the aori EA big fin reef squid I love using this squid specifically from Japan, this one is super meaty, sweet, delicious, you can't get it from America, this squid yes, this is a squid from $72 to understand this cost, court, here we go, ink sac intact, you don't want it for Pop That this is the spine this is the

only

type of bone in this squid I guess it's not a bone it's like cartilage the squid It has millions of layers of skin but you just take a towel or a paper towel and if you just go like this, you see this movie like this, you want to remove this layer, rub the skin of the squid, put my hand in the stomach of the fish to get all the guts, so that's my zen time, so ishigaki D, spotted knifejaw bream, also known as bar knifejaw.

Bream because of these crazy spines it has, this is one of my favorite fish to work with. I am using it for the Omas this season, this one is going to age so it has to be cleaned very well, this suiki process is the peeling of the knife. remove the scales from the skin of fish like this, this ishigaki, you have to do it this way because the scales are so compact that if you use another tool to remove the scales they just won't come off and they will end up all over the cut. board you have to do everything by hand so this will take a little time to grow my dad's restaurant my dad is from kushu Japan he is a classically trained Japanese chef my mom is from sou Korea they opened a restaurant in 1979 one of the The first Japanese restaurants in South Jersey were called Fuji.

I started working there when I was 14, so I learned everything, like the basis of what I know there. We kept these fish heads and the necklaces and we are going to use them on Hezekiah. We are going to fry it, it is a dish called kabut, served with panzu sauce, obtaining the best meat available at an excellent price, so we use many things so that there is no waste, it is 10:00. I'm going to shred the tuna. Upstairs I did what I had to do Down here This weighs like 120 pounds It's from a 500-odd pound fish from Spain Alright Here we are This is the sushi bar This is where the yass happens I make two seats a night 17 dishes I got you two three oh my God that's a big ton this is the belly cut all of this right here this is Otoro this is the super fatty tuna belly and everything here this is going to be choro and this is the akami the lean part this is the Kama, so this has K Toro here, this is good if you grill it or burn it, it has a lot of muscle tendons, it's very chewy but delicious if you cook it.

When I do this I'm measuring a cut of Saku so this is like the length of the fillet you want to work with for sushi when cut into that long rectangular shape this is the size so I'm just going to cut it into usable bits, parts that are chewier at the end of the tail. or final parts to be delivered to one of my Sue chefs, some will be dry aged, some will be used today and some will not be dried DEA, will be stored for use tomorrow this tenderloin here is $2500 yes this is $2500 a fish, tuna is a quintessential sushi fish, just for the flavor, I mean, when you eat bluefin tuna like this, there's nothing that tastes like this, the Umami, the depth of flavor, the fattiness, richness this combined with a nice sour rice and soy sauce it's like the perfect bite this is a special paper called Muro paper each roll is $10 I mean it's a very absorbent thick paper that maintains the quality of the fish, especially for tuna, but we use it for everything so 12 20 pounds of that bluefin that we are going to go through in 5 days are truly wild birds so this is Edwin he is one of our sushi apprentices here he will wrap all the tuna to store it in the sin appointment, that's it for the breakdown from now on, it will continue during the day, but I'm going to start preparing the rice, since that takes some time, okay, it's 11:00, let's start washing, we make three batches of this a day. but my Omas rice I used special special grain vinegar this is called hit bore means love at first sight this is my akazu rice vinegar it has to stay closed and contained to maintain the acidity of the vinegar you can't keep it open this is the washing process of the sui rice the rice is a little sticky it's mainly just the natural starch in the rice you see the starch coming off right now you don't want it to be too sticky when you unmold it and you don't either I want it to be too soft, too hard, that's why it's Very technical to do this part right.

I always compare ngiri to working with clay, which is what I love to do in Ceramics. You're just molding the rice and the better the rice, the better the clay, the better. your product, but this is the most technical part of the day, in reality rice is much more important than fish, obviously you need excellent fish, excellent product to make excellent sushi, but if you don't have good rice, it doesn't matter how good the fish is. so the rice is strained for 8 minutes hey, the timer just went off, I have to cook the rice. This is the rice net.

We use the net to be able to take it out easily, otherwise the rice will stick to the pot. Cook for 36 minutes on this gas stove. Always double check that the flames are lit. At first I hit that switch and the flame didn't light and then 36 minutes later you're left with some very wet raw rice and a really messy day while the rice cooks. cooking, let's go here, this is another sushi apprentice, Elmer, he's been with us for over a year, started as a dishwasher, super skilled, he's taking all that Toro, that muscle part that's super chewy, scraping everything up and then he'll be back to go in to bring out even more connected tissue, so it's like a very laborious process, this takes a lot of time and a lot of effort, but if a restaurant like can do this, this is how you cook a whole tuna rice while it's cooking, This is the dry Ager.

Dry ager created for beef, but I mean, I think and fish, dry aging, what it does is concentrate the flavor, this is the kuay you saw one of these before, so you can see how it's completely dry, leather, this is the ichigaki D the way we cut it we retain the file that we will use later so it seems that I am like the fish Hannibal Lector in a way, this is the age of the bluefin tuna, beautiful piz we are going to use tonight I'm going to cut it, I have 15 minutes until the right rice is ready and I'm going to have to make the shizo, so let's break this down.

I don't use AG tuna every day. I just started incorporating it. very different than beef, there's no fungus or mold that you're trying to grow that doesn't form here and you don't want it. This will be eaten raw through rice if you are here, the rice is cooked. this is the Shizu this is the incorporation process separating my rice vinegar mixture into the rice it has to happen right now when it is steaming this process is important for germs the acidity prevents mold or bacteria from building up the other process It encapsulates each grain of rice and protects the flavor and makes it super malleable, so this hiri is made from Japanese cypress wood that is super rot and mold resistant and doesn't have as much fragrance, so it's great for making rice.

In it, this thing itself, the size is like $500 $600, so these things that you try to keep for years, what a lot of people don't know about sushi is that Sushi actually means sour rice, so originally, Before nigiri, sushi became something that was pressed and shaped. but I do it in omasi. Sushi was a fermented fish. They took fish, they took rice salt vinegar and they essentially kept it in barrels for years and the lacto-fermentation of the rice would ferment the fish and then they would roast it later, so come on. let this sit for about 10 minutes, air it out, turn it over and then put it on the warmer.

Alright. 1:00 There's still a lot to do, but the caviar should be here any minute. Gary, yeah, what's going on? I have the products. Oh, I brought you some of the delicious ones. gavar, we got the premium MRA from Italy, very nice texture, we will use them in the next 5 days between Omas and isaka, so in any piece you will probably get a lot more cavier, I don't believe in I hate when you get two Grands and I think: What's that? It is so amazing. It is perfect. Thanks, as always. It's 1:30 time to cut up some of this fish.

Prepare for service. So first I'm going to start. With the real New Zealand salmon belly, this is a single bevel Japanese yagi fish slicer, it is a special Damascus metal. You can see that the design is made of noi. It takes one or two years to achieve it. I like it because it's just very snappy, I make a lot of unique cuts based on the fish based on the way you eat the texture, whether it's going to be burnt or not on presentation, you'll see some pieces are double cut either by appearance or also in case there may be a thorn that broke off, so if you make a double cut you will catch it, that also looks very nice.

I say Omas Sushi is just raw fish, so you have to make it look pretty. It

only

has eight seats. It only has 16 seats a day. night it's just one of me it's 2:45 we're at the isaka I'm here with Chef Justin he runs the iseka menu I run Omas Justin and we've been working together for a few years now he's super talented you know they depend on each other for other people's opinions on food, it's good to have thatbackup or that person to brainstorm, so we're making Yaki Gan, which is grilled beef tongue, we raise the beef tongue and then it's marinated in mirin soy and sake and then there's two sauces, there's a matcha sauce and then there's a shio Nei, which is like the traditional Japanese garnish for this dish, charred scallion, raw garlic, sesame, a little bit of lime to tie the two sauces together, that sounds really amazing, so while I'm a make-a- sushi chef restaurant tour.

I also love photography and I do all the social media photos for the restaurant so let's go upstairs to take this photo so we're in my office right now standing right above the isaka this is where I do all my photos for do all the specials.photograph the menu I have my softbox here um big diffuser this is my Canon R6 Mark II uh I just updated I'm finally going to get up close and personal normally if we have an isaka special I'll set aside about 1050 minutes to get it is photographed. I have to upload this to my computer, edit it.

I'll send it to my general manager Nicole and she'll upload it to Instagram. It's 3:25. We still have much more to do. What I'm working on now is the Omas menu, it's dated so I do it every day and obviously there may be some changes. I have to do it right now to give it to the team so they can print it, fold it, seal it and be ready to go. come on 4:00 Let's go to the kitchen this is my father Masaharu Ito he is from Japan he taught me everything I know Sushi Master making the tamagoyaki for tonight this is something very technical he is much better than me I don't exactly think He is doing very well, I think a couple more years in his prime time, he had to think about what he was going to do with the rest of his life, but now I am very happy to work with my dad in this context, it is much more easy, you know? the day he was teaching me I was a stuck up and resentful kid now it's great that he can go home early I handle all the problems and it feels good this tamago Yaki is essentially like a sweet and salty omelet, it's the egg omelet more technique you can do just because of the movement required to do it, you can see he's doing this flipping movement on a square copper tamagoyaki pan, so it's very technical, very difficult to achieve that movement, okay, it's 4:30 .

I'm going up to take a 20 minute break, this is the only time I have, so let's go have lunch, okay, 5:00 I prepared my break for final preparation, we have one hour, 30 minutes left until the shift previous, so I only have a couple. things I still have to cut I have the squid I have the ban on live scallops the shrimp they have been doing this for a long time but there is a lot of pressure to execute it is 5:30 time of the previous shift I am here with Samantha she my waiter omasi my partner she has been here for seven years working with me what do we have tonight so two allergies tonight one guest at 6:00 has an allergy to mackerel and another guest at 6:00 can't eat shm that's it today we are booking Tuesday February 20 and Wednesday February 21 is quite far away it's the first date we have available great for tonight the shimaji the KU the ishigaki nuro and the akami and Toro are all dry aged for complements I have the A5 wagu cavier Toro Hokkaido uni like this I have a very special one in case people want to buy it, we have the spicy and crispy tuna Tamaki Toro uni caviar Tamaki and my dad's payment it's 5:40 we have 20 minutes until service starts Samantha we can start seating 10 UPS, so in 10 minutes, otherwise you know we're about to do what we do every day, the show starts soon, it's a performance in the sense that everything leading up to it is very hard work. physical, technical, fast paced, precise and the clock just runs, runs, runs and it all leads to this moment where the show starts, the guests are seated and we get going, at that point everything is pretty much set up, just is to assemble the nigiri, but the assembly part is for me it's like a dance kumoto oyster with Toro tartar to start using. your hands make sure you make a bite, okay it all starts in 30 seconds, the C is also a performance in the sense that I am interacting directly with all my clients, I am live for them and if there is any kind of emotion in the day or any kind of things that I have in mind I have to clear that up and I have to be prepared for the nice charred Japanese katua tataki these people have waited months to be able to experience this with me they are paying a lot of money and it is important Make sure you have energy and personality.

I am also there to be with them. I want it to be a great experience and part of what makes Omas great is that you are there with the chef who you are watching as they prepare each piece. They can explain to them what's going on, you see the process and they can explain to you the best way to eat it in their minds and that is a very special connection.