- It's 10:30 AM.
We are marinating silken tofu
for Toad in the Hole.
This is one of the first projects that we start
during our morning prep time.
- Toad in the Hole was inspired
by my favorite breakfast growing up.
Honestly, you know what, I hate tofu,
and I wanted to make it taste good,
and that was my goal.
- This gets pressed overnight.
It's getting wrapped in cheesecloth,
and there's a marinade that has two types of miso.
The marinating is just getting all that savory flavor
into the tofu.
- So this is the entire prep space
that we have to work with.
This is actually where our guests sit,
and so we'll take all of the mats off the bars,
and make this the most intimate, sexy room
that you can put yourself in in D.C.
- These are going to marinate in the walk-in.
Later we'll pull them out,
take off the excess marinade,
and then they get cut.
- This is our hot line.
This is our hot line chef.
Chef Christian's been with us for a very long time.
- This is our honey maple air,
it's a mixture of honey and maple syrup
that we get from Pennsylvania.
So equal parts honey and maple syrup.
I mean working here is comprised
of many tiny little things I have to do every day,
and just making sure that you're always ahead
of your own schedule
'cause otherwise you're gonna fall behind really quick
with, you know, 20, 30, 40 tasks
that you gotta do every day.
(bright music)
- [Sarah] In service that gets dusted in potato starch,
and then seared really quickly,
and then bruleed with sugar.
(bright music)
- So this is Toad in the Hole or eggs in a basket.
It's inspired by your favorite breakfast dish
because who doesn't want breakfast for dinner?
You have a miso tofu
with some maple honey air cascading along the side,
a Jidori egg yolk cooked in clarified butter,
and more Kristal Caviar.
So we suggest you pop that egg yolk,
and enjoy alongside the other ingredients.
- As chefs, you don't get
to see people enjoy your food a lot.
So you put all that work in for 12 or 14 hours a day,
and you don't see the end result and the reward,
and we get to see it every single night with every course.
It makes it worth it.
It's the reward for all the hard work almost.
You get to see what the end result is,
and what the reactions are,
and watching people get their minds blown every night
is super fun.
(bright music)
- We are breaking down monkfish.
We get this from Japan.
Basically they're pulling the skin off,
taking off all of the unsavory parts.
They're gonna break it down into kind of like a filet.
- A monkfish is the biggest butcher project we
have right now for sure.
- This is one of the products that we like to get done
before the PM prep team gets here.
In five hours all these mats will come off,
everything will get cleaned,
there'll be a complete transformation.
It'll look totally different
and the guests will actually be dining at this counter.
We do a lot of communal products.
It's just more efficient that way
to have at least three people working at once.
- You're trying to get as little membrane, as little veins,
'cause it all shows up in the final product.
So you want a pristine white piece of fish,
and the closer we get to that, the better.
- This looks like a lot of fish right now for only 12 guests
but it'll just continue to get smaller, portion-wise.
- [Sarah] They get cured every morning.
We'll bath them to surface.
(bright music)
So this is the mushroom leaf
that's gonna go on top of the monkfish.
We cut it into these leaf shapes,
and then fry it into the leaf shape.
I would go crazy if I didn't actively prep or be in service.
It's not the kind of chef I am.
We'll temper 'em right before service,
and then we make a beurre monte,
and get really, really nice and tender,
and then they'll come out, rest, and be portioned,
and then we'll finish the plating on the bars.
(bright music)
- This is Claudia.
She's our morning lead prep cook.
She is frying our corn butterflies.
So this is one of the opening dishes.
It's actually a cracker batter,
but we're using this rosette mold,
which is in the shape of a butterfly.
The batter, we actually make our own freeze-dried corn.
The timing is really hard
'cause you actually have to like set it in the batter,
and then it goes in the first pot of oil,
and then you fry it again and you have to shape it.
And the two different temperatures help
with making it crispy and shaping it.
(drums thrumming)
- This is the puree that goes
under the butterfly that you saw earlier.
Just gonna keep this here until we get it nicely grilled,
and then I'm gonna cut it,
and then we're gonna blend it with some cream
for the corn puree,
and then strain that into piping bags and cool down.
(drums thrumming)
- [Sarah] We start shaking a cocktail, it distracts you,
we'll have walked the butterfly,
they're already ready and they're on the flower.
And then you get this beautiful yellow butterfly,
and then you're told that it's completely made of corn.
Okay, and you're just looking at it,
and you're like, wow, how?
(drums beating)
This is the rest of Minibar.
So here is Barmini, our cocktail lab,
it's basically minibar except with cocktails.
And then right down this hallway,
it's like 20 feet of hallway,
we have an oven, an ice machine,
a little bit of prep area.
That is Minibar,
other than what you see out in the show kitchen,
which is why we do all of our prep out there.
- [William] We have our A4 Wagyu that we're gonna thin slice
for our aburi dish.
We get these fresh every couple of days,
sliced fresh every day.
This one of our bigger dishes,
this is part of the main protein course.
This goes along with the monkfish.
- Then he's trimming the excess fat off of the sides
which we will save and render down.
What he's doing right now is he's scoring the meat,
so he is not going all the way down,
and he's gonna do that all the way across,
and he is gonna do it the other way all the way across.
What this allows is when you're cooking it,
you're searing it,
it basically allows all of the fat to start melting.
It gets all the way through,
it melts in your mouth essentially.
The concept of this dish started out
with a take on shabu-shabu.
We serve it with a a sphere of beef consomme.
- [Melissa] We make our own beef consomme from beef cheeks.
Right now she's using a spoon to drop it in an algin bath,
and this creates a reaction,
so that there's a skin that forms
on the outside of the sphere,
but the inside is still liquid
and the other two containers are just water
to rinse the sphere off before it goes back
into beef stock to be held for service.
- [Sarah] You get that nice caramelization on the A4,
super nicely seasoned, super simple.
The beef consomme is very, very clean.
We add the Minibar twist to it by sphering it,
and making it look like an egg yolk.
People love it so much,
and A4 is beautiful, so why not?
It's just super tasty.
It's noon, PM service team is getting here.
So now we have all of our team here, AM and PM.
The kitchen gets very crowded and busy, noisy.
- All right, so this is the first step
of one of our more well-known desserts, the Strawberry Milk.
Starts out with some acetate sheets,
and strawberry tuile base
that we'll be spreading very, very thin on the acetate.
Gets made the day before so that there aren't a ton
of air bubbles in it.
Biggest thing is making sure it's thin enough to get nice
and crispy in the dehydrator,
but not too thin that it's too fragile to work with.
One of my bosses was like,
"You know they make machines that can do that."
And I was like, "Yeah, but this is way more fun."
And then from there,
we'll pick them up one-by-one.
It's very important you don't hit any of those edges,
so you get those nice crisp corners.
So yeah, these will sit out overnight to dry,
and then they will go into the dehydrator
for about 48 hours,
and then at that point they'll be ready to shape.
You know when you're working in a closed kitchen,
you can do stuff a little bit faster.
With this it's, you know, it's the show of it,
to be in front of the guest.
- So you basically have ice cream in a piping bag,
and we're piping it into that fragile, fragile glass tube,
and then hoping to God that it doesn't break.
A Minibar dish has to be whimsical,
it needs to challenge your senses in some way,
and it needs to taste good.
(bright music)
Our prep should be theoretically done for service.
Let's go, 2:45.
(kitchen crew cheering)
So right before family meal, the 15 minutes before,
the entire kitchen stops our prep,
this whole kitchen is gonna get deep cleaned really quickly.
- And we get ready to set up for family meal.
Everyone sits down and eats.
(bright music)
- So we just wrapped up family meal and lineup,
and this is our last communal project for the day.
Just picking the herbs.
The chrysanthemum is actually for the Wagyu Aburi dish,
and that's the one that has the most herbs.
Three chrysanthemum leaves, seven Thai basil leaves,
five small pieces of mint, calendula flowers,
and also plum swirl.
So that's only for one person.
It's almost like 20 pieces of flowers
and herbs for one dish.
- So Christian here is making our shiso taco shells.
This is puree that's been spread and dehydrated,
and then what he's doing is dropping it
into the oil so it becomes malleable,
and then just shaping it while it's still hot.
These will get stored in the dehydrator
and then use 'em for service.
And we're just doing like final checks,
touch ups and details.
We're 15 minutes from doors.
Make sure I taste those truffles.
Make sure you test these.
How are you doing, chef?
- Good, chef.
- Amazing. Christian, how are you doing?
How many extra did you fry?
- [Christian] I have two extras.
- How did they come out? - Three extras?
- [Christian] I haven't fried here yet.
- Is there only one batch?
Try to find the thinner ones.
The thicker ones are probably what's giving you problems.
- Our taco shells are finicky and our dehy is finicky.
So sometimes by service they're not perfect.
So I decided to pick a few of them out.
Just fry some more right before service.
It's how it goes.
And I already got my calluses back from this morning
so they're not as hot as they were this morning.
- I do think of Minibar as a theater.
So curtains open at 5:00 PM
that's what we say, you know, curtains at five,
because once curtains are open,
we're zoo animals,
and the guests are watching our every move
and can hear every single thing we say.
- Favorite prep part of my prep day
is cutting these C-folds that we use at command,
and they don't fit in the command drawers,
so we have to cut 'em in half,
and I spend a lot of time making sure
that they are perfectly in half.
What chef Julia's preparing right now is a play
on a frozen and hot doughnut.
It is first frozen,
and then fried to make like an outer shell,
like almost like in a batter,
and then set in the freezer again.
- So the last thing, we're opening doors,
and so the last thing we do
is batch out the cocktail really quickly.
Get it all set.
We're all ready to intake guests and start the show.
Chefs, opening curtains.
- [Kitchen Crew] Yes, chef.
(curtains tapping)
- Good evening and welcome to Minibar by Jose Andres.
Chefs are gonna be plating directly in front of you.
Without further ado,
sit back, relax, and enjoy.
- [Sarah] Chefs, happy Wednesday.
- [Host] Happy Wednesday.
(cocktail tools clanking)
- [Sarah] It's very interactive, so the whole time,
we are talking to you the whole time we're plating
in front of you.
Like once it starts, it's, there's no breaks.
It just really comes down to the communal dining experience.
You know, everybody kind of takes the ride together.
- [Cook] Slicing monkfish, come get it, please.
- [Server] This is monkfish and mushroom.
It's a butter-poached monkfish.
You have a nasturtium jelly disc to top it off,
and you have some mushroom tea.
We suggest you crack into those mushroom leaves,
incorporating that mushroom and that broth.
And do not be afraid to pick up your bowl
to enjoy all that mushroom tea at the end.
(bright music)
- [Christian] I'm gonna start the charcoal right now.
Bar taco.
- [Sarah] What we're doing here at Minibar
is showing chefs techniques that they've never seen before,
and that they're not comfortable with.
Yeah, we have a saying, it's a two month rule,
when you start, it's gonna take two months,
no matter how good you are, where you came from,
for it to click because it's such a different kind
of kitchen and it's such a different kind of standard.
That first two months is very challenging,
and it tends to beat down on people's egos.
So we say if you get through the two months,
you're gonna make it, it's gonna click,
and all of a sudden, you're gonna look back at
where you were three months ago,
and be like, "I am a much better chef than I was."
If you make it, if you don't make that two month rule,
then you let it get the best of you.
You let the constant critique,
the constant push for excellence,
the constant that's not good enough.
What we do here is we make you feel uncomfortable,
and then we push you and there's that special period
in that evolution that you become better,
and it pushes you to do things
that you've never thought you could do.
That is what's so special.
If you get past that two month rule, is that evolution.
- [Server] This is Wagyu Aburi.
It is A4 wagyu that's been grilled over Japanese white oak.
Beside that, you may think it's an egg yolk,
but in fact it's a beef consomme sphere.
So we suggest you pop that beef consomme sphere,
and drag the meat alongside, enjoying alongside those herbs.
- [Sarah] Everybody is here to get better
and do the best that they can,
and they're at the peak of their career,
and they want to be pushed to be better.
And so that kind of environment is intoxicating.
It's very rare to find that
where every single person is on the same mental drive
just like everybody else,
just wants the best,
be better than you were the day before.
That's an intoxicating atmosphere to be in.
(bright music)