- [Eric] Cooking Asian food has always been a way
for me to connect to my roots, and when we first started,
it was always really focusing on authentic flavors,
but as we've kind of grown,
it's really more of my perspective
on what Asian food is in America
and what being Asian-American means in general,
which is really like, cross ethnic boundaries,
and really weaving in the fabric of an American identity
in these Asian flavors.
I don't want to be a spokesperson
for true, authentic Asian experiences,
but I think what we end up giving off is like,
what is a real experience to us.
Spoken English is my fourth restaurant,
and all of our restaurants have a bit of
an Asian food story to tell.
- All my training is modern American and French fine dining,
but it's been very helpful that we're not, as we say,
purveyors of strict authenticity.
I'm clearly not Asian, so we try to make sure
that people know that we want this to be
an American experience, but it's through
these different cultural lenses.
- So there's three sections to the menu,
small plates, kushiyaki, and then the two large entrees.
Doing the kushiyaki allows the chefs
to be more creative on a daily basis
and it allows the guests to really pick and play
the kind of dining experience that they want.
For the chicken yakitori, you get a piece of chicken thigh,
you get a piece of chicken breast, chicken wing,
chicken meatball, chicken skin chips,
you get a cup of soup,
we make a pate from the liver that we serve on toast.
- It's really fun, it's one of the dishes on the menu
that I wish I didn't work here,
because I live down the street
and then I could come in and eat it and have a beer.
Every part we prepare different.
A lot of it is grilled, but the chicken breast
is cooked sous vide first and it's served with two sauces
and shiso and scallions.
Every piece has its own little flair.
I'm pretty addicted to eating the chicken skin chips.
We do a really great chicken heart.
- I forgot about the chicken hearts.
- Has sort of a Korean barbecue
type of marinade on it but yeah it's a lot of fun
and we're always thinking about little tweaks
and maybe we can add chicken gizzards that we cook confit to this.
Maybe chicken feet can we find
new parts of the chicken to serve.
- So we've been serving the Taiwanese Blood Cake
across our different restaurants for a long time now
and the Taiwanese Blood Cake is one of these
Taiwanese night market dishes that was
a code that we wanted to crack.
It's kind of a mix between a classic blood sausage
but you're folding in a lot of rice.
You're basically steaming pig's blood with the rice
and that's how you get it.
And this is definitely like a very rustic,
old school Thai pastry dish that we've put in this
refined environment that people are really into.
- I think in Taiwan, it's usually on a stick
like a fair dish almost like rolled in crushed peanuts
and a bunch of cilantro and we turned it into
a really nice, pretty plated appetizer.
Just took all the same flavors and elements
and added this little bit of a refined touch to it.
- There was never any doubt that the dish
that we were making was good
it was just whether or not people would get it.
But I think as we were building the opening menu,
the whole menu was adventurous, so we were like,
"Let's just go for it."
So our last main staple dish is our
Spoken English Roast Duck.
Originally, we really wanted to do
something that was peking duck.
Beijing is famous for its peking duck.
What I've noticed is that the real high-end
peking duck restaurants were using Italian pizza ovens,
which I thought was super cool.
And I was like, "We have to do this,
we have to bring this peking duck-style roasting
to Washington, DC," 'cause it just blew my mind.
So you can either have really crispy skin and dry ass meat,
or you can have really soggy skin and delicious meat.
There was no in between the two, and I think
we've managed to have great skin
that's not traditional peking duck skin
and incredibly flavorful meat.
- You get a lot of layering of flavor
from the spices in the broth
and the smoke from the wood oven.
We cut all the traditional peking duck skins
super thin, like really like crackling off of the duck,
and we serve that.
The legs that we took out in the beginning of the process
get confited in duck fat and served in a warm salad,
and then we serve it with a pretty traditional
northern Mexican-style tortilla made with duck fat.
Then we serve them with a hoisin that we make,
a ginger scallion sauce, and then the traditional
cucumbers and scallions.
- There's so many different ways to do duck.
We're mixing like French roasting techniques
with Beijing style, so I think our duck
is uniquely our duck.
It has its own really unique flavor profile
and vision to it.
These guys definitely embrace the heart of Asian cooking,
which to me is not the flavor, but it's the idea of
doing the same thing every day
and doing one step to make it better.
There is a passion in being more consistent
while taking new steps to be better,
so things like Blood Cake to duck is like,
there's a real evolution in the process
and you're always trying to figure out
new steps to make the flavor better.