- First thing in the morning,
lamb necks, we take them,
we trim any kind of really excessive fat off.
This is a marinade that we make,
that's made of confit, garlic, rosemary,
and olive oil and lemon.
And then we're going to put them
just kind of sitting on top of some tin foil,
'cause it's more like a rack.
So then we'll take this and we'll wrap it in tin foil
and we'll cook it really low and slow overnight.
This one will be cooked Thursday night.
We will press it on Friday
and then we'll serve it on Saturday.
(fast-paced percussion music)
So this is what the lamb neck looks like
when it comes out of the oven.
It needs to be hot. It has a lot of fat,
so if it's not hot, it's like a, it's a neck.
And you have to be able to pull it off and then press it.
If it's cold, that's going to be very impossible.
So for the lamb dish,
we had a lot of big ideas on how we were going to
make this arrosticini be really delicious and yummy.
And we tried a few different things.
We tried kind of pressing a lamb belly
with a braised shoulder and we kind of came
to the conclusion that pressed neck was the best situation.
I like keeping it intact.
If we kind of tear it apart
it loses all those little fatty, gelatinous pockets,
and that's like the part that's really texturally pleasing.
And I'm going to stick this in the fridge with a little bit
of weight on top of it, and then we'll cut it later.
So this is for today's service
and this was pressed overnight.
As you can see, there's a lot of fat,
and just pieces kind of pushed together.
What we're going to do for service is cut this
into square pieces and there's two pieces per portion.
If you look at the cube
you can see all the pieces of both protein and fat,
and when we were testing this
it kind of made the most sense
because it was the most cohesive
and also the most texturally pleasing.
All the fat makes everything kind of crispy and moist.
When we started working on this restaurant
(fancy orchestral music)
we kind of decided that we wanted to change often
because we wanted to invite people back in
for something new.
So one of the big projects
or every day is breaking and wrapping the fluke,
and Mindy our fish roast, is going to do that with us.
So the fluke dish local to us and the season
it comes from Montauk, Long Island.
- [Mindy] We changed the menu on Tuesday.
So this is my third day breaking down the fluke.
I've worked with it as a crudo, but not breaking it down
in the way we are, the technique,
and the way we are cooking it.
- [Melissa] Mindy's a pro though.
She knows what she's doing.
- [Mindy] Change is good and challenging
and it's exciting to
see something different every couple months.
- [Melissa] At least we learned with the last menu
it takes a few days for it to kind of neutralize.
- Chef, should we start wrapping these fluke?
- Yeah, let's do it.
- Cool.
- [Melissa] I guess. So we're still trying to figure out
the best way for this to happen.
And we've kind of adjusted it as we've gone
for the whole three days that we've been doing this.
Season with lemon thyme and lemon zest,
we give it a layer of an escabeche zucchini,
and then the whole thing gets wrapped in blossoms.
Fluke's really great for a crudo,
and not that it we're slow kind of baking it, essentially,
or slow cooking it.
It's a little bit like a confit.
Let's see what it looks like when we wrap it.
- [Mindy] Okay.
- [Melissa] Okay, and if you do it well,
it should come together on the other side,
we're going to lose that one,
and that's it.
Just like a nice layer,
and then we're going to wrap it one more time
just to make it nice and tight.
- [Mindy] The first day I was a little wonky
with the plastic wrap, but day three, I'm a wizard.
We got six or seven more to go
then we're going to portion them.
I would say like a fillet, like this.
I try to gauge it with two to three fingers.
We should be able to get six portions out of this,
and then get ready for service.
- [Melissa] We actually cook it with the plastic.
It separates itself.
So if you look on the bottom side
there's like a gap in between the leaf and the fish.
So we just lift in, we can cut that way.
There's definitely two trains of thought.
People go back to restaurants
for specific things and specific dishes,
and that's great.
And then people don't go back
to restaurants because nothing changes,
and it's the same thing
and they don't, they're just not interested
in having the same thing over and over again.
This is the second part of the lamb dish.
(fast-paced percussion music)
But most importantly, this is James Brown and he's the best,
and he's very quiet.
He's just Frenching the racks.
So he is pulling the cap off
and then cutting against the bones here
and then taking off any of the additional fat.
Jason is on the meat roast, he's over there.
He's doing the finishing portioning on the lamb,
cleaning it up,
getting the fat so that we can render it for lamb fat,
that we used to cook and sear the arrosticini,
which was the cook and the press that we did.
We made a play on an Abruzzese street food
called arrosticino.
It's a meat skewer that's usually made of mutton
or sheep or lamb.
And it gets served with a lamb chop and a dandelion salad.
Traditionally it has tuna fish in it
and we use a tuna bottarga to finish it.
Do I want you to feel transported to a very specific place?
Yes and no.
I want you to feel like it touches on that place
but I don't necessarily need it to feel like I just stepped
off an airplane and this is what I got.
This is Renee.
(upbeat orchestral music)
She's my sous-chef on the pasta line
and she's processing razor clams
and they go on the corn cappelletti dish.
We cut them into little discs,
so that they're pretty and fancy.
We use the trim for the brown butter
and black truffle sauce.
The third course on the menu starts with the pasta courses.
So this menu is a corn cappelletti
made with grano arso,
which is like a burnt flower corn and black truffle.
So this is Carlos.
We're going to make this pasta,
it's called a culurgione.
So the culurgione, which was
on our last menu was such a favorite of everyone
that we've decided to kind of keep it around.
These are the culurgiones,
so it's a it's Sardinian dumpling
and it is like a dumpling process.
It's like a push and a pinch.
- [Carlos] Push and repeat
- [Melissa] And repeat
- The same for six, seven times.
When you're finished, close.
That's it.
- [Melissa] Carlos, How long have we worked together?
- It's a long time.
- He was a mechanic previously.
- Yeah, a mechanic.
- So he likes to tinker.
- Yes.
- So now he just tinkers with dough.
This was the one thing that I've ever taught Carlos
because he's like a pasta savant
and it took a little while to get used to it.
- For now, it's easy.
Everything before you do it.
- [Melissa] You have to over stuff
and you have to be okay with the fact that
some the filling's going to come out,
it's not going to ruin it.
From here, we'll bring these upstairs to the pasta station
so that we have them for service tonight.
They'll get cooked and then they get sauced with a
jus of clams and mussels
and served with razor clams and caviar.
My partner, Jeff and I, did something a little crazy
and we opened two restaurants instead of one,
(funky strings music)
and they're totally different.
Mel's is a casual, loud, vibey pizzeria,
that is wood-burning only.
So we're in the Al Coro dining room.
It's about 3:30 and we're going to go
over to Mel's to do a little work on some pizza.
This is Tony, he's the chef at Mel's.
So we opened this together
and then I stepped away to open Al Coro,
and so he is here every day
making sure everything's awesome because he's awesome.
It's a naturally fermented dough.
I think it's like 10% full wheat.
It's a three day process.
We try to keep all the toppings and stuff, fun and seasonal.
Tony, self-proclaimed, has eaten a slice of pizza
every day.
- Every day in my life.
- [Melissa] Did you eat pizza on the days when we were not
doing pizza development?
- [Tony] Every day.
- At some point you just don't eat the crust.
- [Tony] So our newest pizza on the menu,
corn cacio e pepe.
We're going to let 'em taste it for the first time.
Put a lot of Pecorino on it,
corn that's cooked with black pepper.
What do ya think?
- It's excellent
- Everyone here tastes,
and the same thing goes with next door.
I need to know what you think about this,
so we know if it sucks or if it's great.
This is Kat Rock.
(fast-paced percussion music)
Most importantly, she's my chef de cuisine.
She does everything.
And these are our Santa Barbara spot prawns,
and then we process them,
which some people maybe think is not so nice.
- What you're looking at here is about a third
of what we actually received.
So this was about 10 pounds.
We got 30 pounds in for this week.
That's fairly standard at this point.
- So we are cleaning them
so that we can break them down for a crudo.
I like cleaning the shrimp
because it's like quiet
and you can space out for a few minutes
and get something done,
and it's kind of therapeutic, I guess.
So we make a prawn oil with all of the heads
and the shells.
We blend them with a grape seed oil
and it makes this really aromatic oil.
- [Kat] It's going to get loud.
This is going to go for a while.
Also checking to just see and hear
that all the juices from the heads have sort of evaporated
and fully cooked off into the oil.
We have our first tables at 5:30
so I'm just finishing up some of the protein fabrication
and I will be mincing the spot prawns
that chef and I fabricated earlier.
- [Melissa] Every time we start a new menu
the biggest challenge is definitely sourcing,
and availability is probably always the biggest challenge
but it's just a bigger challenge
because it's a much shorter window of time.
You know, you want to find products
that feel right for the menu.
You also wanna find things that are interesting
and delicious and beautifully made.
(heavy drums music)
One of the biggest courses that we have is
our aperitivi course, which consists of small dishes.
The whole team, both here and at Mel's are all here.
Each line is a different thing.
This is the aperitivi line and then pasta, meat and fish.
We'll start seeing the meat roast and the fish roast come up
from the butchering room to start getting ready for service.
So most of the aperitivi stuff
is a lot of final finishing things,
and then it'll all kind of be put together
at 5:30 when we open.
I mean the calamari is one that's fun
and it's a people pleaser,
and it's also one of those things
that's really simple.
- So I'm just giving a quick blanch to the calamari.
I'm not really trying to cook.
You can see it's just a second or two.
I'm just opening up the tubes
so that when we fry them, the rings are nice and open.
- Danielle's going to fire our tasting of aperitivi
so that we can taste everything
before we start sending food out to the dining room
- Fire one.
- So I kind of like those things as projects,
and calamari's kind of that.
It's really nice calamari.
It's not like the manufactured rubber bands.
It's fried really nice,
and individually, you're not getting a plate full
of little tempura or batter pieces instead
of an actual ring or tentacle.
So this is the sauce for the calamari.
It's just a very lemony, peppery butter sauce.
You wanna taste this with me?
Cause the last one's a little salty.
So I'm going to add a little pickling liquid.
But it has a lot of pepper in it,
chile peppers or pickle peppers and they're hot.
Well we have every day to make it perfect, right?
So we have until September 27th to dial it in,
and we're just about getting ready for service.
It's 5:15, everyone's setting up their stations.
We open 5:30, we'll put up tasting of the aperitivi.
If you look around there's about two plus cooks
on every station and just making last finishing touches
for service this evening.
(fast-paced orchestral music)
They're about to bread some stuffed olives,
tomatoes are going towards the salad
and slicing prosciutto for the melon.
Oh, this is part of the melon and prosciutto,
and it's the melon's going to be kind of dehydrated
to a almost fruit roll up consistency,
and that's part of the dish.
This is first, that was the herb pizzelle
with scamorza and herbs.
This one is a fried olive,
it's stuffed with anchovy and has a lemon parsley aioli.
It's good.
- Cantaloupe, fresh dehydrated with prosciutto
and lemon verbena oil.
I feel like this actual fresh melon is not so sweet
or ripe as it has been.
- And I feel like it needs a little marinating
- And across the board,
I feel like it could have more olive oil.
- [Melissa] This is polenta crisp
with peekytoe crab and chile like this.
You get a little lemon juice.
I feel like it's a little soft.
- [Kat] This is our baked fairytale eggplant
with semisecchi cherry tomatoes,
capers and bread crumbs.
There's a little Pecorino fonduta on the bottom.
- I feel like you need to season the eggplant a little more.
- I do almost feel like I want a touch more acid.
We were talking at one point
about spritzing it with the vinegar.
- It definitely needs more acid, a little more salt too.
- [Kat] Okay.
- You wanna taste the tomato?
- I didn't like it, but I think that's because
it was too spicy last night.
- But it needs more everything.
It just tastes like tomatoes that need salt and acid.
Your spice is fine.
I mean, it could even take a little more
but the seasoning is really off and you need more acid.
It needs everything, to be honest.
It's just very flat.
So let's remix the whole thing.
So everything's pretty much very close
to where we want it to be.
The tomato seasoning needs adjustment all around
but that's very easy to fix.
Everything else is in a good place.
So we're good to go for service.
Running service in a place like this is a little shaky.
(fast-paced orchestral music)
There's a lot of moving pieces.
It's a lot of people.
It's a very big space.
- [Kat] So I need five eggplant and five calamari.
- [Melissa] I have four lines in the kitchen
and they're each dedicated to one thing.
I try to run a reasonable kitchen.
I know that sounds very silly
but no one's running around like a psychopath.
No one's yelling.
No one's doing anything that I wouldn't be doing.
I'm very, very hands on.
If you need help with your prep
I'm the person that's there helping you.
So it's very much
like a team effort and it's a very loose brigade.
Okay. You have the 10 tap in, the honey allergy.
- All right.
Can we have hands for aperitivi please?
- I feel like everyone in the kitchen,
regardless of experience, has something to learn,
no matter what, including myself.
Can you fire one taste culurgione, please.
The way that we decided our to change our menu
is a little crazy.
So we decided to rip the whole bandaid off.
It's kind of fun.
Fire prawn on 203, please.
I don't feel like I'm pushing against fine dining.
I just think that I have some different views
on how to go about it.
I mean, I've been cooking
in fine dining restaurants for 15 years, most of my career.
And there's a lot
of things that you learn that they just are,
it is this way because that is what the expectation is.
And I was like, well, I think the expectation
of how we dine and what we dine and what we believe it to be
like has definitely changed a lot.
I don't think
that anything that we're doing is so obtuse or so against.
I just think it is going
at a different beat in a slightly different direction.