[Christopher] We start the preparation of the porchetini.
In my travels in Italy,
come across the dish of porchetta.
It's a bit of a loin with some belly,
or sometimes it's a whole de-boned pig.
The porchetini we do here is like a baby porchetta for one.
So this is like one of the more this technical
kind of dishes that we do here.
This is the pork tenderloin,
and we're essentially creating
a kind of wrap going over this.
So using the plastic wrap to
help guide it.
We then seal the entire
tenderloin this way.
And we can pull that close like that.
There we have the actual small porchetini itself.
This is going to get then Cryovaced,
and we will poach this.
And then upon the fire
we take it out of the plastic, and we sear it.
What that does is it fully cooks the sausage,
leaves the pork tenderloin about medium to medium well.
And then we brush it with reduced pork jus,
and we roll it in pork cracklings.
I kind of got that same seasoning.
It's this little fine-dining fun way
of serving a, you know, pretty simple dish.
[Upbeat Classical Strings]
[Motor Cycle Engine]
[Christopher] It's 9:00 AM.
Just came from the green market.
The flowers for the day.
And most importantly,
market greens.
These are gonna go for the market salad.
Oh, it's 9:30 AM in the Francie kitchen.
We're starting the pasta program
so we're gonna get started on that.
These are stinging nettles,
kind of in late spring.
We've been making a tortelli outta these
with burrata and red wine.
As a chef, you kind of feel like when things are available
you should use them for your guests.
You know, you should, when things are seasonal.
I don't like to shock people or anything like that.
I kind of like to use things
that they might not have seen, but they can relate to.
This is the current vegetarian option on the menu,
so we do go through a lot of this.
Yeah, it's a popular one for sure.
Yeah, see, right there I just got stung.
Not that every European brasserie
has to have a large pasta menu.
Pasta's just very dear to me.
I generally keep at least six pastas on the menu.
Sometimes we do even more with specials.
So now we're actually gonna
roast down the nettles.
I tell every one of these guys,
it's like, no matter what you're doing,
how minute it is,
you kinda put a lot of care into it.
Here we're just gonna let this cool off.
I like it to get to like room temperature,
and the butter that's in here is gonna solidify.
So when we grind it,
it's gonna kind of come out like a homogenous mixture.
We grind the vegetable.
It kind of has like a meat like texture
as we push it through.
If you do this correctly, it comes out like that
because now the butter is solidified,
and it's grinding with the,
the nettle to keep it with one homogenous mixture.
Now you can see all those nettles that we made
didn't really amount to much.
The burrata we just dry.
For this, I like to just hand mix it,
kinda old-world style.
If you mix this in a mixer, it just doesn't have that same
effect I feel.
So this is like,
four bottles of red wine
reduced down to a syrup.
And this is what cuts through a lot of this.
Well Angel, my pasta maker,
this one never made a noodle before he came here,
and now he's a rockstar.
Now he does it better than me.
He's starting to make the base,
or the inner layer of this, this tortelli.
But this is where it takes it to like,
the next level of pasta-making.
The tortelli is composed of three different doughs:
a nettle dough, a red wine dough
and we have a charcoal-infused dough.
Those flavors are within the actual filling,
and it's wrapping the actual filling.
So it kind of layers up on the whole thing.
No pun intended.
You can see the end result.
It's pretty striking.
It's a beautiful thing.
It's simplistic in nature,
it's got technique behind it,
but I don't think it's got too much.
Just kinda representing what's in there,
and if you don't care, it just tastes good.
I've been cooking pasta a long time.
Even when I was a little kid.
I mean, I got into cooking from my parents.
These are the first things my mother taught me.
It was like, "Get the dried pasta, put it in the water.
Here's some butter. Here's some cheese."
I cooked that a lot,
and as I got deeper into cooking,
and I worked in different restaurants,
I got geeky about it for a very long time.
And when I was in Italy I studied it.
It's just an artform of cooking that I enjoy.
So this is our executive sous chef Marcos Lopez.
He's gonna be making the lobster filling
for the lobster ravioli.
This is the last of our filled pastas that
we're building here today.
This lobster is raw. We just steam it for two minutes
to pull it out of the shell.
[Marcos] Season a little bit of salt, pepper.
In between the process I'm just going to give it
a little swirl to make sure that
all this body is broken down.
- I thought it'd be,
in the sense of being a comfortable brasserie,
to make a lobster ravioli,
which a lot of restaurants have on the menu.
But I wanted it to be, like, the most perfect one we could.
We developed this lobster mousseline
that has chunks of the raw lobster folded into it.
So it has that texture,
but it's cooked à la minute.
- Right now I'm adding just chopped up tarragon,
just for flavor.
And if I keep going any further than this,
then I will break this mousse.
I will be adding just chopped up lobsters,
which is gonna add another texture component
to the filling.
- So every time we make this filling
we always run a tester in some boiling water
and some plastic wrap just to make sure
that that's going to cook.
And then this is ready to get bagged up,
passed over to Angel.
At this phase, we did have to figure out like
the perfect amount to put in there,
so it didn't bleed out the sides,
but you can't, it's like you can't have too much
and you can't have too little.
A lot of the things I wanted to be very
over the top, going to the pass
I wanted it to be like, on display, like the duck.
A diner can see it, and be like, "What is that?"
"I want it!"
Just in its raw form, it's beautiful.
And the other part of this dish is it has such
a rich flavor.
The sauce that we sauce it with,
it's the only pasta dish that involves cream.
Really adds a lightness to the dish and really,
it's very elegant and silky
because I wanted it to almost be like
just perfect, cartoonish.
So I started doing the market salad
at a restaurant I had in Midtown
for a short amount of time called Tenpenny.
I wanted to have some elements of like the continental
American restaurant, which would be, you would
order your entree and get the house salad.
So that's like, why that came together and why
I wanted to take that idea and make it more elegant.
[Shamara] For blanching process,
you always want to have like your water bags
set up right away.
I'm gonna start with Romanesco,
fava beans,
English peas,
So with the English peas and the fava beans that
blanching, like a longer time period,
like five minutes.
This is the most ingredients in a salad that I ever made,
it has a lot of components to it.
- You do a great job at it.
- I like challenges.
Going into it with my snow peas.
The snow peas also a quick blanch,
just to bring out the color as well.
- Being in charge of a dish like that,
you have to be very organized.
You know, she's here caring and checking
every single one of these vegetables every day.
- When they're like really cooked,
we could squeeze from the pods easily.
Spending more time, going in with my thyme carrots.
The thyme carrots take a longer time to cook.
So that's it for the blanching process.
Now we have to move on to the roasting section.
- It's definitely a very labor-intensive dish.
I want to cram in as many different vegetables
in there, and like give the diner
that experience of the excitement we get off of that.
- So for the roasting process, this is my setup.
And with the carrots,
in there we have a lot of sugar to it.
I put a lot of fat in the rondeau so
it doesn't burn fast.
I will start with the Romanesco,
and I'll not put too much fat
because I want a nice sear on it.
So I'm gonna season with salt and chile flakes.
So the carrots have reached the
right cooking point that we want.
Same as the Romanesco, has the right roasting.
We start the next process.
I'm going with my snow peas.
So now the snow peas are nicely roasted.
And that's the process for the
market roasting.
- So these are the dehydrated components
of the market salad.
- We have more steps to the market.
So we season with just salt, but basically I'm
like brushing the oil on it for seasoning.
So the oil will help the salt stick to the
the onions,
and for crispness, now we are gonna transfer them
into the dehydrator.
So now we're pulling out the carrots.
- Here we have, these are the carrots done yesterday.
You can see they're
concentrated in flavor
and they look pretty, too.
And this is gonna garnish the salad.
The market salad itself can have upwards of 25 ingredients.
And that dish has three cooks working on it
in different shifts,
and all the different vegetables are cooked different ways,
whatever we see fit,
and then there's the components that kind of stay the same.
We add texture through the black olive
and sunchoke kind of soil that we put on the plate.
We always have a pickled element on there.
We always top it with greens to kind make it look
like a garden when it comes out.
So it's like taking that and just elevating it.
- It's 4:00 PM so we're gonna start going
through these ducks for tomorrow.
These are fresh ducks.
I'm also extremely lucky to have Alcides.
Say hello, Alcides.
[Alcides] Hello.
- Whom I've worked with for 18 years.
One of the most talented butchers in the entire city.
He butchers these ducks day in and day out to a tee.
These ducks will be sold one month from now.
He's trimming the crown to make this a presentable item.
What happens next is
the crown goes into an ice water bath.
It soaks there,
while we're butchering out all of the ducks.
All of this will be used for stock and sauce.
These will be broken down and boned out.
The bones will actually go to that same thing.
We will utilize this leg meat for other preparations.
After they're done soaking,
we dry them on sheet pans first,
and then we put them into our rotation over here.
And then we start rotating them into the,
into the dates.
These are the freshest.
They stand up there for like a day,
just to get all the extra excess water out.
Because if not,
then it would be raining duck blood all over this.
But yeah,
then we start moving them from fridge to fridge,
from space to space and turning, and turning the birds
so that proper air circulation goes around them.
We're gonna start bringing these upstairs to get loaded
up into the roast station's fridge.
They will start pricking these,
getting them ready for the honey to get roasted.
You know as a restaurant
that kind of does revolve around the duck,
we get in thirty ducks a day.
And we're just doing the finishing touches.
We're just making sure that the product's great.
Then we're gonna clean all this down,
be fully presentable and start the show.
We have all of our ducks in a row.
These are gonna be here up until the beginning of service,
then we are going to prick them with our tool here,
rub them in honey and roast them in the oven.
Here we have lined up our
our two duck presenters for the evening.
We have celosia and wax flowers today.
Some baby eucalyptus is always in the mix.
And this is how we present the ducks.
You know, we make these daily.
I never thought the duck was gonna be the thing here.
I wanted to put that
on the menu because I've been cooking that duck,
that specific duck for a very long time.
I thought I was gonna sell like nine or ten a week.
Like the first friends and family we had,
it was like duck, duck, duck, duck.
I think that's what part of the success of it is,
because it was all over the internet,
and still is to this day, which I thank Instagram for.
I'm the worst at social media.
Really, I'll admit it.
I just wanted to represent the bird.
You know, it's a beautiful sight to see the bird come out.
Essentially, the duck you order is
the duck you get shown, and
there's no smoke and mirrors behind the whole thing.
You order the duck, we put the duck in the oven,
the duck waits, the duck comes to you.
And we present the duck, bring it back,
carve it off the carcass of it.
We slice on a slight bias,
we have the jus,
the pork jus made from the bones,
goes on the bottom of the pan,
and the duck is fanned out.
Some Maldon salt and that's it.
And then we serve it with the accompaniments.
I just
wanted to
represent
the bird,
and you know, it gave its life for restaurant,
and give it proper justice to what it is and,
and show the work that goes into it.
You know, it's a beautiful sight to see the bird come
out and, and then when we slice
and present it
in the serviceware that we had made,
and you know, it's just a nice thing.
From the diner's perspective,
if you aren't into food and all that,
it's just good, great food.
If you are into food,
you can understand the technique that goes behind it.
We don't do too much avant-garde stuff.
It starts at 7:00 AM every day to, to get this food done,
and then once service starts, it's a very
orchestrated, serious service to get it out to the diner.
[Sandra] So right now I'm setting up my station.
There are all my squeeze bottles.
I've got red wine vinegar,
a red wine reduction.
this is my finishing oil,
olive oil,
bacon fat over here.
So right now it's a five o'clock.
I weighed all my pastas.
This is where I keep all my rigatonis and my conchiglies.
There are similar nine extruded pastas.
I keep my raviolis.
It's three raviolis for each order.
I grab my pappardelle and my tortelli out of the reach-in,
and I set it up over here.
Whenever something gets fired, I grab one of these trays.
I put all my pastas on it,
and then I drop it in the water.
Start doing the sauce as it's finished.
- Your typical Michelin-level kitchen,
there's a lot of follow up.
You can see in the kitchen
that everybody in there's got a lot of passion.
Passion is probably more the word behind
that level of cooking.
Like once you start hearing the roar, it's on.
Fire bread, souffle cake, bomboloni, three prawn,
then a cucumber.
Then a conchigile, ravioli, pappardelle.
So this is our conchigile,
littleneck clam,
bacon and white sesame.
We top it off with our white sesame pangrattato.
We're an a-la-carte restaurant,
we are not a tasting menu restaurant.
And so it's kinda like, choose your own tasting menu.
Fire bomboloni,
then a conchigile split, then a duck.
Everybody goes to fine dining restaurants once,
but I have people coming back, you know,
sometimes once a week,
you know, or more.
That to me is,
I feel that this is the success of the restaurant.
Full speed on the mortadella souffle cakes.
Two and two.
After what we went through,
I'm glad the restaurant's still here.
Listen, I'm in the business of making people happy.
Fire single rav.
That's why I cook.
It's why we have an open kitchen,
so we can watch everybody be happy and have a good time.
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