- It's impossible to know
exactly how much work
goes into specific details.
Because sometimes there's so much work
that goes into something
that doesn't necessarily
come across as an ingredient
that we have to spend a
significant amount of time
sourcing or dish-developing.
(grooving electronic music)
Restaurants are all about problem solving.
It's always about problem solving,
every single day there's
something going on
that you have to figure out.
It's an ingredient not showing up,
you have to find a way
to solve that problem
in the best possible way.
He's not there, truck's here.
So every day we receive
a variation of seafood.
Normally we receive scallops every day,
today we're not receiving scallops
because the weather's so bad up in Maine,
where we get them from.
I hope you're all right.
- Good?
- Yeah, good.
So we're receiving hake...
(upbeat music)
Like that.
And razor clams.
- Yes, sir.
- The only thing that always
bothered me with this,
is not having the head on.
Because the head is so big,
that we would probably
need an even larger box.
Which would be even more wasteful,
but again, looking back at
what fish we would receive,
you know, 15 years ago, I
think we're in an okay place.
So every morning we like
to get this bulkier work
out of the way, clean the clams.
I think the razor clams
are very good introduction
to the menu.
It's just like a sweet, delicious meat.
The texture is phenomenal.
It has like a little bit of a bite to it,
but it's also very
tender at the same time.
It's the perfect give.
We have to spend quite a
bit of time washing these.
And then we separate
the meat from the muscle
and the body of the clam.
And then we're going
to just sear them off,
super quickly in a hot pan.
Essentially keeping it raw in the inside.
And then the plating for this dish
takes a fair amount of time.
Often, so many of these dishes,
tie back into memories
of places I think of.
A beautiful coastline, these
dark Scandinavian waters.
We wanted it to have this
brininess from the ocean
but also taste the pine
trees up on these cliffs.
It's not obvious, but if you want to think
that it looks like a pine
cone, yeah, it sorta does.
(upbeat music)
Here are langoustines,
they're a little bit jet-lagged, I'm sure.
We are going to look through these
and start processing them for tonight.
We want guests to experience
a sense of discovery with our food.
We serve everything, we
serve the brain, the tail,
and we serve the claw meat, as well.
But we also want to somehow
make it recognizable.
(bouncy orchestral music)
This balance between
discovery and the familiar,
it's sort of like a goal
that we want with every dish,
to achieve with every dish.
We found ourselves in the place
where we did not receive
our live scallops.
We had to make time to change the menu,
come up with a new course to
replace this scallop dish.
We have this king crab from
Norway, received them in alive.
We'll know in the next two
hours how this will shape up.
If it makes sense, we put
it on the menu tonight.
At this time of year,
this ginkgo tree is
dropping all it's fruit.
And every year we would clean them out,
essentially throw them out,
even though it's a delicacy
in some Asian cooking.
And then inside they have these nuts
that we essentially burn and toast.
And it has this very specific
texture, which I love,
almost like a gummy bear.
Typically we used them
for our scallop dish,
so we'll see if they make
it onto the menu elsewhere.
Okay, so at this point,
I don't see us going with the king crab.
I think the king crab's
going to make it on the menu
in a few substitutions
where we have pescatarians dining tonight.
We're trying a few things with, honestly,
some of my favorite ingredients.
These small sweet onions, pine mushrooms,
which I've seen in season
now, sliced on the plate.
Ramps from spring, ginkgo nuts
that just fell off the tree.
We're not trying to just get by,
we're trying to make a
new dish that makes sense.
- We could align the garnish on each petal
before it hits the bowl.
- Yeah.
Chris brings so much joy to the table.
- Wow.
- Every day.
- Thank you, chef.
- This is almost like a luxury,
it's not every day that we have time.
And like today, we have to do this
because we don't have an ingredient
that we're used to working with.
(gentle music)
We'll taste them and see what happens.
You have to take everything
into consideration,
how much time can we allow ourselves
to spend plating or cooking this dish?
The guests' perception of the dish.
- We're taking the scallop dish,
and right now working
with something vegetarian.
- Yeah.
Sometimes for us it's obvious,
an onion can be as valuable
as a piece of fish,
or meat, or caviar.
Not everyone is expecting to go
to a two-star Michelin
restaurant and eat an onion.
- It's a 14 course menu,
but you can still feel
cheated by a 14 course menu.
- At this point, there's
a lot of things going on.
I think we should try it one more time.
I think something has to go.
- I think the ginkgo has to go.
I think it came too late to the party.
- Let's try that.
In general, people have no
idea where food comes from.
The quail, it's preparation of the bird,
that we receive from Vermont.
We receive them whole.
99% of all birds basically all arrive
without the head, without the foot.
To me, the bird comes with their claw,
it's the most natural thing ever.
It has a foot on it, like most animals,
it should have a foot on it.
The process, breaking them down,
is somewhat time consuming.
So the quail has these
very small, fine feathers,
which can rip out.
We serve the breasts on the plate
and we serve the leg to be
enjoyed with your hands.
And the guests simply are encouraged
to grab the leg by the foot
and eat it with your hands.
Some guests, when they see the foot,
on a rare occasion, do
not want to touch it,
do not want to eat it.
Like they don't want to know
that they ate this bird.
I think it's an honor
to eat this little guy.
(gentle music)
These are birds that are aging.
They have been here for a couple of days.
It's a lot of work for one bird,
but it's like why we do
it in the first place.
I think it makes the bird
taste better, in the end.
They shrink, and when they lose moisture,
the aroma intensifies.
And you can just smell these,
and they smell delicious.
When, in the end you cook it,
you have to be very, very
careful not to overcook it.
And to serve at the right temperature.
(chicken fat sizzling)
You need the skin to be crispy,
the meat to be perfectly medium-rare.
In the end of the day,
it arrives on your plate
being a rather simple preparation,
but the time that goes into
the dish from start to finish
is like a 10 day process.
What you consume in a minute's time,
may have taken many,
many, many minutes to,
or days, or weeks to essentially assemble.
We have about two hours
until the first guests arrive
and we are trying this dish
for the third time now.
Made some changes, we
removed our ginkgo nuts.
Just looking to see if you can actually
taste all those things on the plate.
Can you taste the ramp seed at some point,
can you taste the pine mushroom,
how do they work together?
Yeah, I think it's super tasty.
Great, good, so we're good.
We need to process pine
mushrooms, need to process onions.
- [Producer] Does it always
come down to the wire,
when it's like this?
- Yeah, this is actually early.
(laughing)
There needs to be a thoughtfulness
behind everything you do.
A dot is not a dot, a
sauce is not a sauce.
You have to be mindful with
how you're using ingredients,
how it plates in the context
of everything you do.
Even if initially the
plating, it took a significant
amount of time to place
all these mushroom leaves
and onion leaves and little
onion petals in this bowl.
By the end of the service,
a plating that took X amount of time,
probably took a fifth of that time.
In the end of the day,
we just had to pick
specific sized mushrooms
and specific sized onion shells
to make the dish make perfect sense.
So basically by 5:00 p.m every day,
mise en place is supposed to be done.
5:30 p.m. we do a brief meeting.
No scallop today, so we
have a new dish on the menu,
it's a vegetarian course, super tasty.
Onions, and then a broth
made from grilled onions
and it's white birch.
Have a good service, everyone!
- [All] Yes!
- And then six o'clock
we open up the doors.
Then it's just, essentially, go time.
(gentle music)
(kitchen staff chattering)
(meat sizzling)
I never want to use the
term, "Make it work."
(gentle music)
(meat sizzling)
Yes, we will make it work,
but not at the expense of anything else
not going the way we want it to go.
So we're going to find a new way
of addressing the current situation
in the best possible way.
(gentle piano music)
