- So this is what we make pretty much like on a daily basis,
our three different kinds or four different kinds of dough.
Basically a hundred sheets of lasagna every day.
And it's a lot.
I mean, if you pick this thing up,
I don't even know, it probably weighs
30 pounds maybe.
I mean the crazy thing is, we almost didn't put the lasagna
on the menu and now it's like, the thing
that everybody comes to the restaurant for.
- What's unique about this restaurant,
every single one of our pastas...
- [Scott] is handmade.
- [Angie] There is a bit of like an Instagram curse
with this lasagna dish.
It's not like we developed it to be photographed
and it just so happened that people ended up
liking taking photos of it.
The rest was history, I guess.
- What I do is, I fold it like this
and you can see how long this thing has gotten
'cause we just made it super thin, right?
Straighten it out.
And then we make each one about 12 inches.
And then what I do is I fold them all on top of each other.
And again, this is just one step in making the lasagna.
It's insane, like, the amount of work that goes into it.
If you're gonna make fresh pasta,
there's no other way to do it.
Now we're gonna cut and then you end up with the sheets.
These sheets are for tomorrow.
We're gonna, once we're done sheeting,
we're gonna wrap them, put 'em in the walk-in,
and then we're gonna take out the ones
she made yesterday and start blanching them.
We have to blanch each sheet individually,
and there's no other way to do it.
And this is boiling very, very heavily salted water
because we're imparting that seasoning into the pasta,
and then salted ice water too, to like reinforce
'cause if you just use salted boiling water,
then you put it into unsalted ice water,
it just basically washes out all the salt.
So, salted, salted.
It literally takes probably two hours every day
of someone just doing this.
We only ran out of it once,
and it was like the first week we were open I think, right?
- Yeah.
- But since we did that,
we always put on the menu "limited availability"
just in case something ever happens.
But it's never happened since then, so.
(upbeat music)
- So this is Chef Denver.
He's our executive sous chef.
He's been holding down the fort this morning.
He's gonna show us how to make the lobster butter.
- We use two things for it.
So, first one, the tail will be used as a lobster meatball
that goes as well with the pasta.
And then on top of that will be the lobster butter,
which we'll be using the lobster body.
The liquid gold in our restaurant.
So, what we want to do is just transfer everything here.
So we have the garlic, the Calabrian chile,
and also the butter that we'll be using for this one.
First thing, we'll be putting in the butter.
So this is a total of four pounds of butter.
Before here I was working at Panda Express
and then started here not knowing how a kitchen runs.
And we worked our way from there.
Right now that everything's in there,
we basically just let it simmer for about two hours,
and then after that we strain it through a chinois.
And then after the chinois,
we pass it through a coffee filter,
to make sure everything's ready
and then that's when we store it in cups
in the freezer and then whenever we need it, we take it out.
- Now I'm gonna stuff the lobsters for tonight.
This is like the main element of our Lobster for Two dish.
It's a two-pound lobster that we basically prepare
kind of like Thermidor-style, quickly blanch them
just to like, get the meat to detach from the shell
and we remove the meat, we chop it up,
and then we mix it with our smoked vodka sauce.
We often joke that this is basically like, I don't know,
like a cheese restaurant.
I mean it's like, the amount of like, dairy
that we go through in this restaurant, it's pretty wild.
So this is gonna then get baked
for like, around 12 minutes.
So there's a ton of effort that goes into this in advance.
During service, like, it comes together relatively quickly.
We're just basically gonna like roast off this lobster.
It's like the most expensive thing on the menu, basically.
We only make a few a night.
- So our next major project that we do almost every day
of the week is our caramelle pasta.
It's two different types of dough.
So we use our classic egg dough that we use for our lasagna
as well as we use a black sesame dough,
and then Carmen cuts it into strips
and we basically apply it to the top of the egg dough.
The whole idea is that it gives it like a tie-dye effect.
When I make it
they don't look as nice as when Carmen makes it.
Carmen, do you ever do a specific pattern
based on your mood of the day?
- Is there like subliminal messages
in the caramelle? - No?
You don't write like,
"I hate Chef Scott" or anything like that?
- No, no! (Angie laughs)
- I say, "I love Chef Scott."
- Oh thank you.
(Angie laughs)
Thank you Carmen.
Carmen's worked with us since day one.
She's literally touched every single piece
of pasta in this restaurant
except for when she goes on vacation.
Then I touch the pieces of pasta.
So she's gonna start sheeting it
and she's gonna put it through once and then click it
and make it smaller and it's gonna look awesome
when she starts going through.
It's gonna just explode with all the different colors
and kind of like, takes life
and looks like something totally different.
And you see she doesn't fold it.
When I do it, I always mess it up in the end zone.
But she does it perfect every time.
I don't know how you did that so fast.
- Well you just. - So fast.
It's more challenging to do this
than it is to do another pasta
'cause if you do make a mistake, you can't reuse the pasta.
There's a couple tools we use in making pasta every day.
One is the expandable cutter which comes in super handy.
One side is fluted, the other side is straight.
And then we also use a ruler.
That's the way we make the consistency
and everything the same.
We measure everything before we cut it.
You can't just guess on this kind of stuff.
That's how we keep it looking the same every time.
- So this is filled with a buffalo milk ricotta
that we import from Italy.
So we intentionally flip this dough over
and we fill it on sort of the backside
so that when we create the shape,
the black design is on the exterior.
This is basically, we're forming the caramelle shape.
"Caramelle" means candies in Italian.
The shape basically resembles a little candy wrapper.
So at this point, we put them in the freezer.
We intentionally freeze this pasta.
When it cooks in the boiling water
and the exterior cooks at like a perfect rate
and the interior is like runny
and not overcooked, essentially.
- Caramelle.
It's a cool looking dish.
I think that's why it's kind of been
such a popular dish since we opened.
- [Angie] And then the pasta itself is served
in a brown butter sauce with honey pickled persimmons,
a little bit of black sesame oil,
and then the dish gets finished with some black sesame puree
and some opal basil.
- So this is like one of the last big projects
we do every day before service.
We actually make this for the following day.
The dough is very simple.
It's just flour, salt, olive oil, and water.
It's a process where we make all the dough,
and then we portion all the dough, roll it,
and then we flatten it out,
and then we actually stretch the dough
like almost like pizza.
We take a little 10-inch pizza pan
and we actually stretch the dough on top of the pan.
When you stretch it, it looks like the top of a drum.
Well how many are you doing today, 50?
(Aleida speaks indistinctly)
Okay, 45?
So she's gonna do 45 today,
and then we're gonna fill all of 'em with cheese
and the garlic chives and then we're gonna stretch
another one on top of it and then it rests until tomorrow.
It's crazy right?
- I feel like with all of our recipes,
when we develop 'em like you always like come up
with efficiencies and smarter ways
to like achieve the same end result.
And with this particular one,
like, there's like no other way to do this.
So Alei's gonna lay down an even layer of that.
This is a sofritto made with Japanese garlic chives,
garlic, and chiles and olive oil.
We usually make it a day in advance
to make sure it it cools.
Parmesan, this is actually a top-secret cheese blend mix.
We don't typically share the the secret of that one.
So basically for efficiency's sake,
the move will be to like top all these at once.
After that the next move is to top that bread
with another layer of the stretched dough.
We're doing like 50 of these a day,
which is a lot considering
how labor-intensive this little task is.
There are a few dishes here
that are kinda like all-hands-on-deck
because it's like such a big prep project.
So the chrysanthemum greens,
picking of the greens is a big thing
because we literally are like picking like leaf by leaf.
- We get over 200 pounds of chrysanthemum in a week.
We've definitely put a dent in the chrysanthemum
that's shipped to the east coast
'cause it's all grown in California mostly.
Each leaf has to be iced down.
We spin it in a salad spinner,
and we have to pick like, 30 pounds of it a day
and we have to make sure we don't pick anything
that's dead or brown.
After we let it sit in here
for about 20 minutes or so.
If you can see underneath we raise it up
with like this little raise thing.
This way air can kind of get underneath it too
and it stays nice and fluffy
and any liquid and stuff can go to the bottom.
This chrysanthemum salad that we have on our menu,
we make the dressing every day.
Once the salad's done it gets the shaving
of Parmesan over the whole thing,
looks like a heavy snowfall.
The station sells so much of this salad
that like the people that work garde manger
are just like, oh my God, you learn this one dish,
you basically know 90% of the station
'cause we sell so many of 'em.
Your arm gets so fatigued from shaving it
that I s*** you not,
we have three cooks that got a tattoo
that says "Parm arm" on their arm.
(gentle music)
- People always ask us like, oh are you sick of the lasagna?
I love that, you know, it's become like, you know,
this thing that people recognize
from this particular restaurant.
- I think it's awesome and I think
for the volume we do like, it's,
we make it the best we possibly can.
- This is the process for rolling the lasagna.
These sheets have been blanched, cooled down.
There's three sauces that go into the lasagna,
the Italian sausage Bolognese, the other sauce is bechamel,
and then the third one is the San Marzano tomato sauce.
So now it's a scoop of,
Scott just put a scoop of the Parm on there.
So then the same move with the mozzarella,
a quart of mozzarella.
- [Scott] Two things we don't skimp on ever:
tomatoes and Parmigiano Reggiano.
- And how much Reggiano are we going through?
- I would say two full wheels a week.
- We just go through like copious amounts
of all different types of cheeses.
Parm, mozzarella, stracchino are the big ones.
This gets another layer on top.
We just put down a little bit of bechamel on the top.
That's again gonna just like seal the whole roll up
when we're done here.
So this is our Italian sausage Bolognese.
This sauce needs to be made a day in advance and cooled.
Very important.
If you try to do this with warm sauce,
it'll just like totally fall apart.
It's a little chunky.
Next move is just to roll this.
So after the lasagna has sat in the walk-in
and kind of chilled and set up for a bit,
now is the time that we cut it.
So each of these logs basically yields
like one and a half orders of lasagna
'cause each dish gets six pinwheels.
- This is only four lasagnas,
and we sell about 60 to 70 a night.
This is our lasagna dish that we use.
We spray each one of them.
We put six ounces of our tomato sauce in each one,
and then we just put in the lasagna.
It cooks really fast, it eats a lot lighter,
it's really easy to serve to individual people,
and the whole entire top gets crispy.
And when we were growing up, like everybody would always
fight over the corners of the lasagna, the crispy parts.
But this, like, everybody gets a crispy piece.
We put a piece of like, deli paper on top.
We stack two on top of each other
and then we keep 'em in the walk-in until service starts.
On the weekends we're open for lunch and dinner
we sell over a hundred and we only have a 50-seat restaurant
so it's pretty intense.
- So it's 2:20.
Basically the whole squad's rolling in
for tonight's dinner service.
So this is like usually the most hectic part of the day
'cause we have like crossover
between the morning team and the PM team.
- And we just have a lot of people running
around in very tight quarters, so.
- So one of the desserts we've been doing here
since we opened is our fior di latte mochi.
Basically kind of just like stretching and flattening this.
We basically like pound out homemade mochi every day
and we make our own like fior di latte gelato.
We wrap the mochi around it by hand,
and then it's a pretty like, simple dish
but I think it's like, pretty complex
in flavor and pretty interesting.
I feel like we just like, work really well together
because we kind of like, compliment each other's
like, strengths and weaknesses and stuff.
- But when we first opened,
in the morning I would open every day
and then Angie would basically expedite
almost that five days a week.
- I would close the restaurant.
I'm like a night owl and he's the morning guy, yeah.
- So it works out good.
We're lucky because like, most restaurants
only have one leader or one chef in the back of the house.
But we kind of have two.
So it is 4:05 probably.
We open at 4:30.
We have already a line started.
Have you been to the restaurant before?
- Yeah, a few times.
- You have?
- Yeah, I live around here.
Am I getting in today?
- You're the first person on line, of course you are.
Well thank you so much for coming back.
- [Customer] I appreciate it.
- Hi, how are you guys?
- Hey good.
Yeah, we came from Phoenix.
We saw this on TikTok.
- I hope it lives up to the excitement.
- [Customer 2] It will.
- Yeah, thank you.
Now we're gonna walk over to the private event space
and we're gonna go see Angie.
She's making a new amaro.
So let's go see how it is.
- The beauty about this private event space
is that during the day it's like our menu development.
Love the Italian tradition of like, weird elixirs
and like, after dinner drinks.
I've been messing around with one with broccoli rabe,
we'll see what happens.
So it's like a two part process.
First part is steeping a bunch of aromatics and liquor
and then the other part is mixing it with syrup at the end.
So this has Calabrian chiles, black peppercorn,
orange zest, lemon leaves.
It also has some lemon juice, water, and sugar.
Soon as that's cool, mix this all up
and then get the final product.
- It's pretty good.
It's 4:15.
We're gonna go downstairs
and have the meeting with the cooks.
- This morning, everything was really tight
with walk-in organization and everything.
Has that been going pretty well
with the new sort of structure of that?
- Keep the mise en place really tight.
Just remember to, you know,
FIFO everything, organization,
make sure we're keeping everything really neat.
- Cooking, cleaning, breaking down.
Whatever you guys do, make yourself proud.
And I believe whatever you guys are doing
is making yourselves proud right now.
I would love to be part of this team
of like line cooking beside you guys.
- Let's have a great service guys.
(team claps)
- Part of the daily mise en place
for the cooks is also their hydration.
So we got electrolytes, yerba mate.
- Please sponsor us.
- I told Lauren she needs to buy stock in this company
'cause she drinks like four
of these every day so. - Yeah.
- [Chef] They gotta stay hydrated.
It's hot down here.
- This is the pasta station here.
We have this nifty container here.
It insulates our pasta so that it stays
really cold, really fresh.
- [Chef] You know, this is our bread and butter here,
but we have our lasagnas coming off
of the plancha or the flat top.
During service, the cooks know exactly what to expect.
There's a very big push in the beginning.
It's just getting a lot of food out very fast.
- Order in, steak mid-well.
- Pick up three lasagna.
- I just want to have a restaurant
that people want to come back to.
- We want our food to be like kind of interesting and unique
and like surprising, but we don't want people to have
to like think too hard about it.
- Crudo master, he makes some sick crudo.
- [Chef 3] Coming up, corner, corner up.
- [Chef 4] Pick up lasagna solo.
- [Chef 5] For 201, the salad? - [Chef 6] Yeah, yes.
- It's my Parm arm.
I put in many hours to get this stamp of approval.
- [Chef 7] Just do the cauliflower trivet
and then the regular lasagnas.
- [Chef 8] And then we have one caramelle.
- [Chef 9] Yeah, that's everything right there.
- [Chef 2] Our food is hopefully
like soulful and like comforting.
You guys have a lobster on order, right?
Even though the restaurant's super full
right now, super busy, you know,
the team has everything under control.
It's like a nice, nice flow.
- Pick up flat.
That's three.
We're very lucky.
Like we've been open six years
and there's still almost every day a line
of people waiting to get in.
People want to come here
and that really makes me excited every day.
(classical music)