- This is a caviar.
The caviar dish is based off of instant breakfast soup
that you have a lot in Japan or Taiwan,
it's called corn potage.
We get a Kaluga hybrid caviar from China.
Chinese caviar's for sure getting more popular.
It's an interesting way to have caviar
because in Chinese food different textures are appreciated.
Crispy isn't the first texture you resort to
so our caviar course is different levels of softness.
That's basically a different texture of egg yolk
but we just use it as like a pedestal
to kind of keep everything upright.
So it comes with a smoked onion cream, a soft yolk.
People always have an image of what fine dining should be.
I think it's super interesting for us
to challenge those notions and do stuff our way,
seeing if it gets rewarded in the same manner
that stereotypical fine dining does.
Some milk that we cooked with corn cob.
I mean, I grew up in an East Asian household.
Your parents are always like if you're gonna play,
you might as well win.
So in food, yeah, three Michelin stars is the goal.
I don't think you'd expect to come to a strip mall
and have a nice tasting menu
but we make do with what we have.
It's 10:30, we're waiting for our fish to get here.
I wake up with night sweats, I'm like,
our entire restaurant hinges on a seafood order.
We can't really do anything until the seafood starts--
Seafood's pretty late today.
(laughs)
This isn't staged or anything.
That's our fridge for everything.
600 plates of food every night, that's our fridge.
Yeah so he's finally here.
Hello. (laughs)
(mumbling)
- You can set it up over here.
We're just working with so much fish
and it's like a time crunch,
so seafood comes in, we're racing to break it down
and store it properly.
This is what we get in every day.
Turbot, sea bream, lobsters, crab, oysters,
abalone, yeah, we're good.
We basically have the next five hours
to fabricate everything and turn it into a tasting menu.
Yeah, this is spiny lobster.
They're seasonal, these are from Santa Barbara.
It looks like the thing from Alien.
It's not as fat as a Maine lobster, it's really lean.
They're closer to giant shrimp.
They're really strong and they're covered in these spikes.
(exciting music)
So that's the tail.
It's a lot more vibrant than a Maine lobster for sure.
We're gonna make an oil out of all this
roasted head fat and stuff.
The tails get lightly poached in rice wine and dashi.
Basically we let it sit in the warm poaching liquid
and then he's gonna take it out of the shell and portion it.
This is Lalo, he's very handsome.
This is really lightly cooked so on the outside
it's still a little bit translucent
and it kinda looks like it's fully cooked
but when you bite into it's a really interesting texture.
It's just barely set.
There's no give.
So then it gets a roasted sesame vinaigrette over the top.
It's just the sauce that was kinda based
on my mom's cold noodle sauce.
So this is Alex, he's doing a sea bream
for the raw course today.
He's really good at it.
This is a sea bream from Japan.
Yeah I was pretty bad when I first started.
We'd have to get extra fish just so we'd be able to have
enough for service 'cause I would just wreck fish.
(laughs)
We're always willing to at least make that investment
in letting someone get better.
'Cause other places if you f*** up once,
they're like, gimme that, you're not gonna do this
for at least two months and then you get to revisit it
and like, how the f*** are you supposed to get better
in another two months, right?
Everyone gets to touch everything.
- So I could just--
- No.
(laughing) No I'm just kidding.
I feel like people here are closer and they get better
a lot faster than other places for sure.
So this is gonna cure for 10 minutes
and then we'll rinse off the sauce
and we'll cure it in kombu.
- So you just wrap it?
- Yeah we always try to call things
by the Chinese version here.
But Chinese don't really eat raw fish
so we use English, just raw fish.
We always say nope, it's not sashimi, it's raw fish.
(orchestral music)
This is farmed Spanish turbot, this is for basically
our most important dish on the menu right now.
I've never really felt like we're a Taiwanese restaurant
until we started doing the steamed fish.
I was always scared to do food I grew up eating
because you just take it for granted.
People always have a skewed perception
of the value of Chinese food.
You always wanna use a live fish
so they always use a live tilapia,
which is the only live fish you can get at the supermarket.
So we just wanted to use something
that was a little more luxurious, I guess.
This is like the rack in the center
that we make a tea with ginger.
Have to do like 10 a day every day.
So I try to get the fastest way.
Everyone has their different style.
He goes around the center of 'em.
I hope you go viral for this, dude.
(laughs)
Fastest turbot.
That's everything that we do here.
You teach someone the basics and they take it further.
Basically every Chinese household does a version of this.
- It's kohlrabi.
- So after shaving you get these nice little ribbons.
- Traditionally it'll be steamed and then they'll put ginger
and scallion over the top.
- Get a little bit of relish
and then this would get wrapped around the turbot.
- And then they'll pour soy sauce over it,
so the hot soy sauce essentially creates a broth
for the fish.
- This is for the turbot dish, this is the broth
that gets poured.
This gets about seven to 10 different types of soy.
It was probably the hardest thing to learn, for me,
was this broth.
'Cause I was like okay well what's the recipe?
They're like, ah there's no recipe.
A difficult thing to try to master.
- The first time we put it on was maybe two years ago
and you never really know, putting something like that
on the menu, if you can really convey the same feeling
that you get when you eat it,
but I think people really got it
which was a pleasant surprise.
Ever since then I felt more confident
calling ourselves a Taiwanese restaurant.
Tony, you wanna start steaming crab?
This is Dungeness crab.
This goes into our chawanmushi.
- It's pretty big tonight.
- Yeah that's a huge f***** crab.
- That's a big boy.
- This is Tony, close friend of ours slash roommate
slash sous chef.
(laughs)
He'll reserve any of the steaming liquid left inside
the carapace and then he'll save all the head fat
and then pick everything else.
We have so many staff that we can't necessarily all fit.
If something's not temperature-sensitive
we'll prep in the dining room sometimes.
He has to make sure to flip it backwards
so all that juice stays in there.
That's gold.
All that's delicious,
that's arguably the best part of the crab.
There's a dish in Taiwan where it's like tofu, or egg tofu,
either or, and it's smothered with crab fat sauce.
This is our version of it.
- This is gonna be all pigs.
I'll break through all these, kinda go through that after,
and check for shells just for the second and third time.
Then these are abalone.
This is one of my favorite dishes.
It's like our version of three cup chicken.
- So I tell people I work with abalone every day
and then they look at me and they're like,
what's an abalone?
I'm like, ah, it's kinda like a gigantic snail.
- Abalone Tony?
- Yeah, what's up, bro?
(laughs)
- So we go through about maybe 45 for a day.
And that's a three-hour to four-hour process.
Just doing the last touch-up, just cleaning off the edges,
take off the, I don't know if it's mucus kinda thing.
- For sure don't say mucus.
(laughs)
- But it's like a sticky texture on the outside.
And then this is dashi in the pot over here.
Two hours to three hours braising on a very low simmer.
- Dried abalone is really big in Chinese culture.
It's one of those luxury ingredients
that Chinese people really value.
Getting diners used to having abalone
and treating it as a luxury
ingredient's like an education process.
It's called Three Cup because it's equal parts sesame oil,
rice wine, and soy sauce.
So we make our own version here and we turn it into a syrup
and we marinate the abalone in it.
So it's basically the same flavors but with fresh abalone.
I think it's important to not necessarily adhere
to one culture's perception of luxury.
That's part of sharing our culture, right?
Sharing what we value.
These are Boniato yams.
They're like Japanese roasting potatoes.
When I grew up my parents ate these all the time
for supposed health benefits.
So this is our CDC, Dara, also another roommate.
We've lived together since the restaurant opened.
- I think we've been living together
for almost four years now.
We get along pretty well, we don't really fight
or anything like that, which is nice.
- Dara, you wanna move that up here?
It just gets boiled and turned into a tapioca dumpling.
It's gonna be our version of shaved ice or boba milk tea.
It's almost the exact same flavors but just rearranged.
Yeah, people go ape shit for this thing.
- I'm slowly folding it in.
- This gets mixed with a certain ratio of tapioca starch.
It gets cooked until they're completely tender
all the way through
and they're getting soaked in muscovado syrup.
And then we make our fresh cheese that gets whipped
and placed on top of the boba and it gets shaved
brown butter sablé.
(jazz music)
Yeah it's like 4:30 right now,
we're gonna get ready for service.
We'll do tasters around five
but right now is when everyone has to hustle.
This is the cordyceps for our beef dish.
So our meat dish is basically our version
of red-braised meat.
Red-braised meat is a braise of meat in soy, sugar,
sometimes chiles, five spice.
Ours is a slow-grilled beef and then other components
of that dish are red-braised.
So we're gonna add the cordyceps.
So over the next 30 minutes
we'll keep continuously rolling it on the grill.
It doesn't look like it's doing anything
but internally the heat travels inward.
It's 5:00.
5:00 every day we taste everything, make sure it's okay.
Your liver's a little salty.
Throw a little sake glaze in your tuna.
Yeah, and this is the turbot soy.
Go a little salt and sugar in this.
Just a little bit more, I don't have to taste it.
Yeah you're good.
Line up, please.
Okay we're at 44 today.
It's fairly smooth, there's only a seven cover bump at six.
Okay.
Are we gonna do it?
- Yeah.
- Yeah. (laughing)
- We play Heads Up every day before service.
It's a bonding exercise.
Wait who lost last time?
We did, right?
(bright piano music)
- The chocolate bar that's caramel
on the inside. - Our Galaxy!
- Twix?
- No, Galaxy. - The other one.
- Ooh, that's cold!
- People were eating it--
- It's for laundry? - To make them hot.
It's for laundry.
- Oh Tide Pods.
- Yeah! - Yeah.
(laughing)
- It's a mint. - It's a mint.
(talking over each other)
- Fresh mint Mentos.
(talking over each other) (laughing)
- I love the humor.
- It's red, it's red!
Uh, f****** Degree?
- Old Spice?
(talking over each other)
- You suck on it, green flavor, watermelon?
- Apple, sour...
- No.
- No! - What is it,
it's rectangle, it's kinda hard, fruity?
(shouting over each other)
- What!?
(talking over each other) (laughing)
- It was Jolly Rancher!
- Oh!
- I was close.
They're like, the two-star restaurants don't do that.
(laughs)
It's 5:45, we're about to hit our rush
and we're gonna start seeing some plates come out now.
The first course is a set of three snacks.
I always say this restaurant has been an exercise
in me understanding my culture and finding my identity,
so the limitations are good.
It's pushed us to be creative
with a lot of the things that we do.
I think they expand how you think and how you execute.
It challenges us to be the best that we can be
and represent our perspective well.
But we wanna move into a new space
and shoot for three Michelin stars and do the food
that we really wanna do and we just don't wanna compromise
on things anymore.
(orchestral music)
Yo, we're going on seven lobsters, yeah.
You don't need to record slow-mo,
he's going pretty slow, honestly.
(laughing)
Yes, order on one rice.
This is grilled black cod for the rice course.
Cooking isn't a glorified career in East Asian cultures, so
I just wanna not disappoint my entire family and--
(laughs)
Fire up two sea bream, yeah.
I was on a different career trajectory
when I was in college and I just suddenly dropped everything
and started cooking so I don't want my parents
to feel like they wasted their efforts on me.
Fire seven chawan.
The steamed egg custard, it's where all the crab went into.
It's always a risk going against the norm.
But it's also that point of friction
where exciting things happen.
So it's exciting to be in uncharted ground.
- Can I get an extra seven please?
- It challenges us to be the best that we can be
and represent our perspective well.
It just feels like you're championing your culture
and sharing a under-realized cuisine with everybody.