- [Erwin] First thing that we're gonna do,
we're gonna break down our cod
because it's a long process.
As we dry-age the cod for a minimum seven days
to remove the moisture,
Johnny's gonna start to butcher it.
- [Marcos] I mean one of the ingredients
that we have, the most iconic
of the restaurant, is gonna be our cod.
We get the whole Atlantic cod.
I think ours is special because of the dry-aging process.
We are dry-aging the fish to eliminate some of the moisture.
- [John] So there's our first one right there.
(upbeat music)
It's a lot easier to break down the dry-aged fish
because all the proteins have solidified.
It's a long process to cure fish.
Two hours and then you wanna rinse it,
and then you don't wanna serve it
or grill it right after you've rinsed it,
so you need it to dry out again.
And that way when you put it over the fire,
skin gets nice and crispy.
- We receive-- - 140 pounds?
170 pounds or almost 200 pounds every single week.
- [John] Okay, so that's it.
We've broken down our fish, now we're gonna go ahead
and lay it on our cure.
So I've made a bed of the curing salt right here,
and I'll just kind of shape it onto the fish,
and then we'll grab some more cure for the top.
And we'll cure this for minimum two hours.
- [Erwin] For it is a beautiful, beautiful process.
Let's put it in the cooler.
- My father is a butcher, that way I started working
with my father in a butcher shop.
The way my father showed respect for the meat in his shop,
I show the same respect for all the fish that we get.
- [Erwin] This is a cod that we cured this morning
- [Marcos] Right before service,
when everything is ready to rock and roll,
we just put in the charcoal,
get the skin really, really crispy,
and just finish it on the side of the meat
for like two seconds.
The whole idea for Porto
is to make people feel like you are not in Chicago.
That way you are eating fish
right by the ocean of Portugal or Spain.
(upbeat music)
- [Erwin] Let's go.
(upbeat music)
- [Marcos] One of the greatest things,
everybody's super excited to come in in the morning,
is to open the boxes.
It's like Christmas for us, right?
But some of the days we have our contacts
in Portugal or Spain.
We are like, "Okay, just send us whatever you find
in the market that is super cool.
I'll bring it to work."
Some days we don't know if we're gonna get mackerel or not,
or scorpion fish or not.
The first thing we do is open the boxes
see what we can do with the fish.
Always super fun because every day,
almost every week, you can create fun, new dishes,
but you don't know exactly what you're getting.
Kind of fun.
A little (bleep) up honestly sometimes, but it's cool.
But seeing how fresh,
when you see a fish that is like this,
it's just still in rigor mortis.
To be able to have this in Chicago, this is amazing.
It's sardines.
It's about maybe a hundred grams, not even, 80 grams.
There's a lot of work behind it.
We gotta get the whole team on what we call
"a sardine party."
In Spain or Portugal, they basically just serve them whole.
But we want to make it easy for the customers
to be able to enjoy this amazing quality of fish.
The sardine is also one of the dishes
that we have on the tasting menu,
and this is another fish
that is important and emblematic for Porto,
because it's a fish that represents
all the Atlantic cuisine in Spain, Portugal, and France.
- [Erwin] Sardine party, sardine party.
- [Marcos] We got a shit ton of them.
We get most of the team all together,
trying to make it as fast as possible.
- What're you doing?
You scale and we butterfly.
Sabotage.
- Don't be mad at me, chef.
- I'm never mad at you,
but I can see that you always take the easiest stuff.
- [Marcos] This is actually really hard, you know?
- [Erwin] Yeah, of course, yeah.
- [Marcos] You know this is probably
one of the dirtiest parts of the cleaning process,
because you have all the guts,
and all the blood in there.
That way-- - Poor baby, he's bloody.
- Trying to make it clean.
Some of the head, what we do is we make
a sardine barbecue sauce.
The first one, that is just one requirement,
is gonna be actually making the scale.
This is actually super delicate fish,
that the scales are a little hard.
It has to be super delicate.
That way you don't get into the meat.
As you can see, everybody's taking their time.
Chef Erwin, Chef Johnny,
what they're doing is also probably the hardest part
of the process, is actually butterfly the fish.
The bigger the fish, it's easier to butterfly it,
but the smaller it gets, it's a little more fragile,
the spine is a little more delicate as well.
What they're doing is taking the middle
of the spine out, but keeping the butterfly like a book.
After we butterfly all the sardines,
what we do is basically cure them
for about 20 minutes,
enough to get the meat a little firmer,
and the skin a little more dry as well.
That way when we torch it,
the skin is gonna be really crispy,
and there's not gonna be any breaking down,
or anything like that.
A beautiful labor of love happening here at Porto.
- Thank you, chef.
- Oh, thank you, merci beaucoup.
- De rien. Muchas gracias.
- I've never cooked food like this in my career,
I've been doing this for a long time.
It just feels right.
- [Marcos] And this is going back
to ancestral techniques, right?
Taking fish that has been curing in salt.
It's something that's been happening
for thousands of years, right?
Why don't we bring those techniques back?
Chef is gonna take it to the walk-in, we'll wait 20 minutes.
In Spain, sardines used to be a cheap fish.
I think if you treat every single fish
the best way possible,
and you try to make it as good as you can,
it can be any other, even like a lobster.
This is gonna be the sardines.
After we cure them,
we stuff them with sofrito in the middle,
and we are gonna toast them,
that way we can make their skin a little more crispy.
- [Erwin] We came up with the recipe one night,
after service we wer drinking a glass of wine, of course,
but we used to order hot dogs.
- [Marcos] We're gonna drizzle the sardines,
like if it would be a hot dog.
And then on top, I'm gonna put a mustard.
- [Erwin] And I start to say,
"Chef, what do you think if we start to make a sardine
like a hot dog?"
He's like, "Shut up." (bleep)
- [Marcos] What if? What if?
- [Erwin] And he was like, "No."
And he finished his glass of wine,
he say, "Why?"
And when Chef Marcos start to put the finger like this,
he say, "Chefo, what we don't do..."
I'm like, "Okay, here we go.
We're gonna find a recipe."
- [Marcos] Add some drops of the oil.
This is probably one of the ingredients that makes me more,
I would say emotional to have in Porto.
Goose barnacles is something that takes a lot of lives,
to be able to catch them.
About every year, there is about three to seven people
that die actually diving to get the barnacles.
These are stuck into the rocks.
That is really dangerous to be able to grab them,
and be able to, before the wave is splashing to the rocks,
the diver needs to run back again, and then come back.
To be able to have this one over here, this is insane.
How crazy, the first person that ever actually was like,
"Oh let me try this. This is good."
It's so ugly that I cannot believe the first person
that actually did it.
Okay, you got some balls in there.
- This is Chef Shannah, our executive pastry chef.
She's the best.
We call her the queen.
Happy queen, happy Porto, eh chef?
(Shannah laughing)
We just prepare the percebes,
as you can see, they're all attached together.
We just want to remove one by one,
and we're gonna blanch them pretty quickly
in a mineral water with a little bit of seaweed.
- [Marcos] Tonight we're gonna serve it
in the traditional way that they do in Spain.
Blanch them into the water, cook them,
and just serve it warm for people to be able to taste it.
For me, I like to see,
it's almost like a kiss of the sea.
- [Erwin] Chefo, percebes.
Percebes time.
- The percebes are kind of a little sexy thing to see.
Because when you break it, in Spain,
they give you like a bowl of this,
and then you basically grab it from the nail,
it's just incredible.
Here we are trying to make it easy for people to enjoy.
It's a little hard to actually be eating them,
because you have to peel them,
you gotta take the nail out.
We are trying to make all the job for the customers.
They just take the spoon and go right for it,
and also compose the bite,
that way they're not missing any of the flavor combinations
that we want them to have.
I think it's just actually one of the dishes
that every time you eat it,
you got like a splash of the sea flavor
in your mouth, right?
Voilà. - [Erwin] Voilà.
(upbeat music)
One of the last boxes of the day.
But this is something also pretty unique,
it's the monkfish.
It's one of the ugliest fishes
that you can find in the sea.
His head is huge.
We have one over there.
It's almost like a dragon almost,
it's like a huge mouth.
We get it every week,
but there is some that's been in the dry-ager,
that is actually from last Friday.
Those are gonna come to the tasting menu tonight,
but then this one will be ready for next week.
We clean them, we take the skin off,
we clean a little bit of the blood on it, and we hang it.
No cure, no anything.
The natural gelatin of the fish is gonna protect it.
Chef, I think after that, we should work on the mackerel.
- [Erwin] Oui, Chef
- [Marcos] And getting it ready for the dry-ager,
that way they can be ready for next week.
Just a beautiful color on them today.
He loves fish and seafood.
I'm coming from Valencia, the Mediterranean coast.
It's hard to find people
that understand each other the way that we do.
Sometimes we're in the shit, and we don't even need to talk.
We know exactly what to do to help each other.
- [Erwin] He just did the first one for the TV,
now he's watching me, saying, "Okay, you're doing great."
- I said, you do it better than me.
- No, no I can't, I don't do nothing better than you.
- You do it better.
- You just teach me pretty well.
- You have a better smile.
I wanted to be the sexy guy in the show.
- You are the sexy one, you have the beautiful six-pack abs.
- I've been working with a French guy for four years now.
- I start to work, he was one year old.
- Yeah, he has 28 years of experience,
and I'm 29 years old now.
But when I was one year old, he was already cooking.
Pretty badass. Pretty badass.
- It's cool.
(upbeat guitar music)
Thank you, chef.
- The mackerel is actually amazing,
how acceptable it is to put in the dry-ager.
We put it in the dry-ager for seven days,
no longer than that, because it's not too big.
And actually these ones are gonna be ready for tonight,
after a week of dry-aging it.
As you can see, the skin is ready to go,
and then butterfly and cook it over the charcoal.
- [Marcos] Nice, chef, it's fantastic.
- Magnifique. - Magnifique.
(upbeat guitar music)
It's one o'clock, we have like one hour to prep,
and in one hour we're gonna start
to set up the station for the opening.
- [Marcos] Okay, this is the other part of the restaurant.
What we have here is basically the chef counter,
more like an omakase style,
that way people are facing the chefs,
and the chefs are explaining to them all the dishes
that they're eating, how to eat it, the story behind it.
But what we have here is the brioche.
This is actually the brioche
that is gonna be for our uni toasts.
The uni toast is actually one of the more emblematic dishes
that we have in the restaurant.
But the whole idea is utilizing the uni
that is coming in the can.
As you can see it's been cooked in the natural juices
with a little bit of sea water,
that way you can keep all the flavor,
and all the moisture inside of the can.
This uni is probably around almost one year inside of there.
First time that me and Chef Erwin tried it,
we were blown away.
It's like how something that's been in a can
for over a year, it stays so fresh,
and so incredibly powerful.
We make a toast that represents that idea, that philosophy.
A little toasted brioche on the bottom,
a cauliflower puree with a little bit
of our São Jorge cheese from Portugal,
and we finish with the uni right on top.
It's a two bite, but with a full flavor
that is coming up together.
Giving the respect for a product
that maybe people doesn't have anymore,
that is the preservation system in a can.
(upbeat music)
It's 3:45, almost ready for show time.
Chef Erwin is checking all the stations,
making sure we have all the last little details
for the station.
We know it's go-time when Chef Erwin puts on his hat.
We also have John put a bone on the hat,
super fashion on it.
- No.
Mas lacto-fermented, papas are good.
This is one of the last things that we're gonna do,
a portion of our monkfish in the last minute
to make sure that we keep the moisture out,
and we're gonna put in our station,
just portion boning to get like steak idea of the T-bone,
but just with the monkfish.
It's a nice amount of work,
but also it's a pleasure for us
to be able to use a beautiful fish like this.
You can get some monkfish from Maine,
or from a domestic one, but there are like nothing.
To compare this one's flavor profile, it's so different,
and we feel so lucky and happy,
that even if you take time, we spend time.
But when we work,
we feel on vacation, is what we we say.
We are lucky, we are making something that we love.
We have a job, of course, we need to pay our bills,
but we are making something that we love.
We can work like 80 hour weeks, we don't care,
because we love what we are doing.
I will never replace my life for another job.
I started to work when I was 11.
I am 41.
I just want to cook, cook, cook and cook.
And learn.
It's about like 6:30,
we just received a table of six,
six tasting menu.
We just send what we call the first course,
seaweed and conservas.
And now they're gonna wait,
soon it's gonna be their turn to send the matrimonio
and after this is tuna.
We're gonna go with our dry-aged tuna.
We love this dish, because as we know,
Chicago is really famous for steak and potatoes,
because it's a steakhouse city.
- [Marcos] It's funny because a lot of people think
that tuna is something that like is only
in the Japanese cuisine for the sushi,
but actually one of the best tunas in the world
are coming from the Mediterranean coast of Spain.
- [Erwin] We just want to get the smokiness.
This kind of fish should be almost raw,
a little bit of finishing salt that we bring from Portugal,
and because all the steak should deserve a sauce
right in the middle.
- Fire four amuse.
- [Erwin] And we are ready to go.
Vamonos.
It's time to shine, it's time to go, it's time to enjoy.
- [Marcos] I want them to feel
like they are a little bit in Chicago,
or most of the part of you are not in Chicago.
Because the whole decoration, the sign, the smell,
this is nothing like in Chicago.
And you have Chef Erwin or myself or anybody on the team
that is explaining to you, super excited about Galicia,
and Portugal, and the rest of Spain, and France.
- [Shannah] Oh, it's turbot time.
- [Marcos] You have this amazing experience like,
"Oh shit, I'm really in Chicago right now?"
When the fish is coming to you, you're like,
"Okay, I'm not in Chicago anymore."
- [Shannah] Walking in, two tasting menu.
- [Marcos] I really think, and I wanna believe
that what we are doing in the restaurant as a team,
from the kitchen, from the floor, from the wine program,
everything together is a beautiful combination of love
that everybody's putting together, right?
And I think that work philosophy of working hard
to be able to achieve what you want is,
I try to pass it along to the team.
I think it pays off, right?
Like being able to have all these amazing,
incredible achievements that we have for Porto,
all the awards, and the recognition
is not only for me, because everybody's behind the scenes
that people maybe don't see them,
they make Porto a real special place.
(uplifting violin music)