- I don't want to be arrogant enough to say it's better
than fish and chip shops you can find in the UK
because there are a lot of people
who would disagree with that and @ me for that.
But I'm proud of the version
of fish and chips we've created here
and I think it stands up to the test.
So I start on my day at eight o'clock,
get to the restaurant, unlock everything, open up the doors
Home sweet home. Smells like fried fish still.
That's our life.
Patrica is my partner in business and life
which I think is the cutest way of saying that.
I'm like the window dressing, if you will
but she's like the backbone to the restaurant.
All right, let's make some fish and chips.
- [Sherri] Hello!
- [Ed] Top of the morning Sherri!
- [Sherri] Good morning, how are you?
- The fish delivery,
Sherry from Liepper & Sons who drops it off,
awesome fishmonger to work with.
She'll bring whatever she has that day that's great.
Especially now she knows we're recipe testing,
cause we can work with anything.
Oh f*** it is heavy!
(grunting)
That's my workout for the day done.
- [Sherri] You got your live lobster, Glidden Point oysters,
you got a hake.
- [Ed] Thank you, Sherry.
- [Sherri] Thank you.
- We're gonna make you famous.
- Oh, yeah.
- For our fish and chips we use hake,
which is a local flaky white fish.
Super delicious.
A lot of the cod you get on the east coast of the U.S. comes
from Iceland which is a long way away and they don't swim,
like they get caught in Iceland and put on a boat.
So the hake is a little more local.
We go through a lot of this stuff, like 150 pounds
on the two days we do the fish and chips on the weekends.
I think the difference between hake and cod is
that hake's a little flakier and a little richer
in its flesh, like cod can be a little milder
which is great for some preparations,
like if you were ceviche-ing it or something.
But I think for frying, hake holds up a little better.
If you're adding something to the deep fryer
you don't really want it to be oily to begin with.
You could use oilier fish to do fish and chips
if you want, like there's really no rules.
You can do pretty much anything
but it works out a lot better,
the texture's a lot better
with like a flakier leaner white fish.
I think the fish and chips thing came about like almost
as an accident, 'cause the fish and chips
was the real pandemic pivot.
We have spent the last, what was meant to be like,
you know, two, three week pop-up,
We didn't really know how long it would be when we started
last June, 2020 has now turned into like a 10 month gig.
We didn't think we'd be selling hundreds
of pounds of fish a week.
We thought we'd be doing like three
or four orders every hour kind of thing.
The trick with pin-boning is you use like,
commercial pliers.
We'll probably get eight orders of fish out of this side
and then eight orders out of the other side too.
So a total of 16 per fish, but I mean,
it really depends on the size of the hake.
Zest of a lemon to give it like some aromatic quality
and then the mix of salt and sugar
and you can be quite generous with.
We're going to rinse it off before we fry the fish.
It's just, you know, there to draw out some
of the moisture in the flesh
and then just make sure it's all in.
The batter is a version of Heston Blumenthal's recipe.
I think every
seafood chef,
everyone who makes fish and chips seriously
agrees that his batter recipe is the best.
So this AP flour goes in. We use sweet potato starch.
AP flour alone will not be as crispy,
the rice flour makes it really crispy.
Rice flour is a lower moisture content and less gluten,
well, basically none.
Put baking powder in.
Beer, important that it's cold, and vodka
We make the batter to order,
so every time someone orders fish and chips
you make a new batch of batter.
Because you don't really want to have your fish swimming
in hot fry oil, you know,
you want it to be steaming inside the crispy batter.
And that's like a big part of tempura cooking in Japan,
like you don't cook the ingredient you cook the batter
and the ingredients will like poach very gently inside.
All right, and it's got to stay cold
like the flour starts cold,
the vodka's room temperature, but the beer's cold.
So the temperature difference when it hits the
fryer it just speeds up the cooking process.
So it's much, much firmer than it was when it was fresh
which we want a nice firm piece of fish.
Goes straight in the batter, like no dredge on it.
So it just go straight in leaves it like that.
You can see how like frothy and bubbly
the batter is, very important.
And that's 375. It's gotta be hot.
Right, so the batter's like, it's almost like souffleed.
It's best not to disturb it so much.
Also like cook the fries simultaneously.
You test it with a meat thermometer.
Our busiest days, we do upwards of a hundred
fish and chips a day, which in those tiny little deep fryers
is quite a challenge, cause you fit like, two pieces
of fish in there at a time, which can be pretty tough.
We spend a lot of time trying to make this crispy, right?
Would be a shame to ruin it at the last minute
but we still want to give it the aroma
and flavor of the malt vinegar,
so we use the spray bottle.
People in England don't eat fish and chips that much
like it's not a common part of your diet in the UK.
So I thought there's no way it's going to be popular
in America, and their response was just overwhelming
straight off the bat.
So most of my cooking to this point has been
with meat and now I'm opening my first restaurant
as the owner and we've decided to cook with seafood.
So I'm learning a lot as we go along.
So if I get in early in the morning
I can do a bit of recipe development
before we open for service, which is really great.
So we're going to test a dish today
with these whole lobsters for two,
it was meant to be a Dungeness crab dish
but apparently don't Dungeness crabs don't exist anymore,
or they're just too expensive.
And we're going to split them in half, devil the tails,
beer batter the claws
and make a kedgeree out of the knuckles.
So one lobster, three techniques.
So with the lobsters, we're going to split them alive
down the head and then through the tail, twist the tail off.
All right, we're going to prepare the chili butter sauce
for the lobster, a little Dijon mustard.
It was one of the magic ingredients
like the fermented shrimp and chili paste.
And you get this at like, a Hong Kong supermarket,
adds a lot of umami and depth to it.
A little bit of smoked paprika too,
just to have some smokiness in the sauce
but also in the lobster too, from being
on the grill and then some silk chili.
All right, grill's hot, so we'll grill the tails.
We cook them shell side down to protect the flesh,
cause it's quite a delicate meat.
We don't want to over cook it.
So you do it on the shell side.
It'll add a lot of smoke to the lobster,
but it will cook the flesh quite gently.
So it's going to take a while.
Whereas if we cooked it the other way,
it will be cooked instantly
you wouldn't really have any flavor
and it would become rubbery real quick.
So it's just a little safer.
This stuff is like liquid gold.
It's like butter and lobster juice is accumulating
in the head.
Well these are nearly done
we're going to finish them in the oven just
so we can put a lot of butter on them.
We can blanche these claws.
The claws come out and into ice water.
- So we're going to deep fry,
like an amazing dish at Wu's Wonton King where
they take a whole Dungeness crab, deep fry the whole thing,
has a shell on, but you like bite through the shell
and get the crispy bits and then you like suck out the meat.
That's a lot of the inspiration for this dish,
is that dish in that restaurant.
And we'll just crack these with the back of the knife.
See, it's still raw on the inside
but like approaching cooked.
Take off a bit of the shell
so the customer has an easy time pulling it out
once it's been fried.
And the claw meat is going to go into the kedgeree,
so whereas you would normally mix in like, smoked haddock.
Kedgeree is an Anglo-Indian rice dish normally made
with rice, curry powder,
hard-boiled eggs and smoked haddock.
So we cook the rice already, like steam it
with curry powder, little saffron and some bay leaves too,
and then season it.
And then in one of these fancy copper pots
we'll take the heads out and put that in the kedgeree.
That's homily.
That'll give it a little richness.
And that's another part of the animal
we wouldn't have been using otherwise.
Oh my goodness, I got lobster everywhere.
Me and Dago have this joke,
if one of us does something silly we look at each other
and be like, "Don't tell the chef,"
because there isn't really one here.
I mean, we both have to do everything.
This is Dago,
- Hi - my heart and soul.
- So he's like the sous-chef, line cook, porter, dishwasher,
head chef, delivery driver, like pretty much everything.
So Dago's really the straw that stirs the drink,
kind of thing.
All right, lobster's coming out.
That's nice and cooked.
Let that rest.
Claws are done.
Finished the rice.
A real privilege to be able to use another kitchen
for a few months whilst we build out
a permanent space next door
because oftentimes you take over your new space
and you don't have your kitchen ready
until a week or two before you open
and you don't have the time to do that development.
So I feel really lucky.
- It's hard to go wrong.
- Yeah. That actually came out pretty well.
Like a lot of times the first thing you make is pretty crap.
That looks all right, like where you might end up
taking the shell entirely off the claws
to make it even easier for the customer to eat
but one animal used three different ways.
There are a lot of these seafood restaurants
that serve basically sushi or just like cut up raw stuff
and then it's not good.
Like if you want sushi you should go to an omakase place,
or go to like a real sushi restaurant.
Lobster rolls in New York, not great.
So we don't really...we're not going to cook
like the staples of seafood cookery it's going to be,
I hope to bring a more interesting perspective
- I get bored easily, so this is the perfect plate
for me with all the different textures.
- All right.
So the monkfish is another one I've never tried before.
So I have no idea how it's going to come out
but I think it sounds good on paper.
Today it's going to be three techniques on the kebab
but going forward to the restaurant, I think five
if we can source some more monkfish for it.
And so these are monkfish tails.
We got these from Viking Village, Barnegat Light.
Unfortunately, a lot of the fishermen
discard the heads at sea cause you have weight quotas
for what you can catch.
The head's a weight that you can't really sell for meat.
So they toss them overboard.
That's something we're trying to change.
I'm going to take the monkfish livers
and soak them in salted water to remove some
of the blood and some of the sinew before we prep them,
then let them sit for an hour or so.
Looking good, nice and fresh, firm.
You want some of this, some of these bloody spots too,
shows it's recently killed and not decaying and rotten.
One of the reasons I like monkfish so much is its texture.
It's a very firm fish.
People, I think, dismissively call it a poor man's lobster
but it has a more unique texture
than lobster does, it's much firmer.
And it holds up really well to grilling
and I want to be the kind of seafood restaurant where
you know, the grill is a central part of the kitchen.
And we'll make a meatball.
I'm going to put the tail and equal quantity of liver.
A little more meat to it cause it's a little loose.
I don't want it to fall apart whilst we're cooking it.
Okay, that's a good texture for a meatball.
Chives and parsley.
I'm going to season it up here too.
We want it to be
airy and like, mousse-y.
I think with seafood, more than else, you have to really be
on top of the technique you're using to cook it
in order to make it delicious on the plate.
There are a lot of fish that are much better served raw.
There are some that are better grilled,
some poached very gently, some fish you can deep fry,
like you would not want to put mackerel
in the deep fryer and you do not want to serve hake raw.
All right, so you can see what these like
what looked like a very soft and like loose batter
has now formed like a nice squidgy little meatball.
I think you'd probably use an ice cream scooper to get
like the perfectly round shape
but this is really more just to see
whether the flavors work, so I'm excited.
We're going to cut our nuggets.
I'm going to season them and then poach them in an oil
that we've infused with garlic and long peppercorns.
So this is the whole monkfish kebab
that we've made a meatball from the liver,
put the poached tail on the skewer.
Just been on the grill to warm through,
you know grill and smoke and all animal utilization,
like that's what we're about. So that should be,
that might be on the menu
when we open six weeks from now, we'll see.
I got six weeks to make it perfect.
You can hear the glamor of MacDougal street.
Wow!
This is the open kitchen.
This is where I'm going to be cooking for you guys.
- I can't wait for it to open. I can't wait.
Every day is like a new thing comes together
and it's like the final, final month, final five weeks.
And there's lots to do, but we've come a long way.
- The reason me and Patricia went out on our own
and don't work for other people now is
because we wanted the final say in the decisions.
We put our lives, like sweat and blood and tears
and everything gross that you put into work,
like we'd do that like at other restaurants
and now this one and it's, you know
we want to be able to call something our own.
We opened the kitchen for service at 12:00 PM.
That's when I start portioning the hake,
if I'm surviving and managed to get there in time
and we'll cut anywhere from 50 to 100 orders
to start the service and go along as we need.
Pandemic has left a lot of chefs untethered
and that's allowed popups and people like us
to really blossom and start cooking their own food.
As we come into opening our first restaurant as owners,
me and Patricia, like the pressure is on.
It was important to us when we open our first business
that we want to narrow that pay gap between the back
and the front of house.
It's part of who we want to be as restaurateurs
because it's like we own this restaurant,
we have the freedom to make these decisions.
You know, we're going to use our privilege and our position
as restaurant owners to help people more than just
you know, outside the four walls of the restaurant.
Our mission as restaurateurs is to give back
to our community in more meaningful ways
than just cooking them dinner.