- We cook over wood fire,
influenced by Argentinian cooking styles.
I've always been passionate about cooking with wood fire.
You know, who doesn't love grilling out back in the summer?
This is kind of that on steroids.
Standing in front of that fire, there's nothing like that.
- This right here is one of our steaks
that we get from Bear Creek Farms.
This one's about 27 pounds.
We usually try to cut them in about 18-ounce steaks.
- All this marbling here is why we love Bear Creek so much.
That's just such a beautiful cut of meat.
The marbling is absolutely gorgeous.
This one specifically is 35-day dry age.
Dry aging gives it a little bit more beefiness
and kind of enriches that flavor a little bit more.
Makes for a really, really great texture of the steak.
- [Trevor] When we throw them on the grill,
that's when we brush them with our black garlic puree,
and with a generous seasoning of salt on there as well,
to really add that flavor.
(upbeat music)
- First thing, we come in, first we'll get coffee.
Everybody gets clocked in, kind of check in and say hello.
We come in and take a look at our prep list.
This is all of our prep that we need for the day,
from the night before,
based on what we burned through the night before,
based on what we know is low.
A lot of our bulkier things like
Zach breaking down the pork loin, you know,
he'll break down four or five pork loins in a day.
This is a double-cut pork chop
that we are going to bag up and sous vide.
And then we finish that on the grill.
When we're talking about the double cut,
you can see there's two bones in this one.
To see that fanned out on a plate is really impressive.
So our pork chops, we rub down with a lot of
"nunya damn business."
It's sugars, chilies, a bunch of different aromatics,
some salt.
It just gives it a really good crust,
really good depth of flavor,
once it starts soaking in that meat
in those sous vide bags.
We really try to pack as much flavor into it as we can.
But you can see how long that would take to cook from raw
on a grill in the middle of a Friday night service,
a 40-minute cook time on something like that
is taking up a lot of valuable real estate
as far as line time goes.
So sous vide-ing that with some seasoning, some butter,
getting some extra fat in there,
makes it really unctuous, really tasty.
- Yeah, I had honestly stopped eating pork chops
because my family made them so much growing up,
but they were always so dry and overcooked.
And then coming here, I saw that they weren't,
and when I first tried it, it was like, wow!
My family's come in here quite a few times
and they've been just astounded by it.
- [Nick] Make your mom dinner, man.
- I've got to be home long enough to do that!
- He's going to drop the pork chops
in the sous vide bath, in the water bath.
We're going to bring that up to 125
for about an hour, hour and 15 minutes,
and then they'll be cooked off, up to temp.
A fun aspect about our menu is
we try to go seasonal on everything that we do.
That allows us the creative freedom to R&D new dishes.
I've done string-roasted chickens in the past.
I really like the visual of it.
I like the way that the chicken comes out,
the texture, the flavor.
So I've had this chicken in the cooler overnight.
I'll truss these up and then we'll hang them over the fire
and let them cook for the next few hours.
This will be a fun one.
This sauce is fire-roasted tomatoes, carrots, onions,
roasted garlic, a little bit of vinegar and citrus.
So I'm just going to slather this all over the chickens.
These have been cured in some shio koji overnight,
and rubbed down with salt.
Koji is a spore that is inoculated with rice,
and shio koji is a further fermented version of that,
blended up.
And it becomes this really, really unctuous,
sticky, umami bomb.
That's why I did this last night.
I wanted a little bit of that, just kind of funk
to this chicken.
And then that's going to be highlighted
with these brighter fire-roasted flavors in the sauce.
And then I will truss them.
(upbeat music)
I've got to get the fire started.
This is actually our wood oven.
This is white oak from here locally.
We throw some charcoal in that to get the fire going.
And then we burn the wood down to embers,
and that's what we'll slow cook these over.
These are the egg crates from our egg cases.
This is another one of those ways
that we try and utilize waste.
This burns fairly slowly because the fibers are so compacted
and it burns at a rate that allows the coals to ignite
without going up too fast.
We have these rattan fans.
This is our high heat, low heat switch right here.
I actually had somebody right before we opened,
we were telling them kind of the concept
that we were going for, and we were sitting over at the bar
and they just kind of pointed, they said,
"That's cool, but that's hard."
I think that a lot of them think
I'm crazy for doing it this way!
Everything we do is cooked in a brick hearth.
I think it's a unique way of cooking.
It not being a conventional way of cooking,
it teases the brain a little bit.
So you really have to pay attention to what you're doing.
Cooking this way really forces you
to learn to be a better cook.
If you think about rotisserie-ing a chicken
versus throwing it in the oven or putting it on a grill,
it's just a more delicate heat.
And that's what this is going to provide,
just a slower, more controlled way of doing things.
But it also allows us to get a little bit
of kind of that barbecue flavor by lightly smoking.
R&D is not pretty.
We'll pretty it up after we've figured out
if this even makes sense.
So right now everybody is lighting their fires.
These are all going to be really high heat right now.
So it'll take us about 45 minutes or so, an hour maybe,
to let this all burn down to a manageable temperature.
So, this is our entire cooking setup.
This is our hearth.
Everything happens here.
As summer's rolling along,
we focus a little bit more on grilling.
We've got our vegetable and seafood grill.
It's our smaller grill.
This is what we consider our meat grill, our steaks.
Again, as you see, everything is on bricks,
so it's completely modular.
Everything that you see here, except this brick oven,
can come off.
We're just checking our fire at this point,
seeing where we're at.
We want these charcoal briquettes to disappear.
So we'll just let those burn down a little bit longer
until we've got embers.
So yeah, it's one o'clock.
Everybody's just kind of coming in, getting prep started.
Service starts at five.
Right now, just kind of getting into the throes
of mentally preparing for weekend shifts,
try and keep it lighthearted.
Everybody's so quiet today.
What do you have cameras in your face or something?
So this is a beginning process of the carrot puree
that we use as a base sauce for our pork chop dish.
Will you grill those up for me?
- Yes, Chef.
These are going on the grill for the carrot puree,
so I'm just going to lightly char them
and get some color on them.
And then pretty much once that gets done,
we're going to blend it all up together,
and that's, what's going to make this nice puree.
And this just incorporates stuff that we do.
So, you know, with being the wood-fire grill
and cooking over a hearth,
this just adds that little bit of an extra touch
and it takes it that step further
and makes it that much better.
- All right, so these carrots just came off the grill.
Now we're going to blend them up
with some of the cooking liquid,
and then we'll strain that out through a tamis
so it's really smooth.
(blender whirs)
It's five o'clock now.
We've got the fires roaring.
We'll start getting busy here in about 30 minutes.
Winter, it's beautiful back here.
You get cool air blowing on your head,
40 degrees outside, you've got this warm and toasty fire.
It's beautiful.
Summer is pretty bad.
- There you go, just gotta keep Chef cool,
do whatever he wants.
That's the real reason he bought these fans.
- So we're going to finish this on the grill.
I'm going to cut all the butcher twine off of it.
(upbeat music)
Baste that one more time in a little more chicken fat.
That's our garlic scapes toss in some shallot oil.
Let those char up real fast.
I've got a hot zone right here and a cooler zone right here.
My chicken here is at temp.
I've just got a little spot right here that's not.
So I've got it manipulated so that
it's sitting off on the cool zone,
but I've got it sitting over the hot zone,
right where I want it, so I can get it up
those last couple of degrees.
So the chicken dish is done.
Let's cross our fingers that we didn't do
all that work for nothing.
This is a pretty rough, rough draft, if you will.
We'll pretty it up.
The timing aspect of it is just not
where I want it to be yet.
The real test.
There's a few tweaks I would do.
I would add a little bit more acid to this.
But overall, an excellent first draft.
I'm really happy with the flavor.
I think everything melts well together.
We can do a few more things,
add a little bit more dry brine to it,
but I'm happy with it.
I see a future for this dish, for sure.
Hey Trevor.
- (bleep) me, this is good.
- This is kitchen people.
I pick this apart and immediately know
what I would do differently.
They taste it and see something completely different.
- So is this dinner tonight, or--
- So it's eight o'clock.
Service is well underway,
and we are getting pretty hammered back here
in the best way possible.
Most important thing right now is focusing on quality
and making people happy.
And staying hydrated.
I feel like the pork chop is just
one of those looked over menu items in so many restaurants.
I think just historically the pork chop, you know,
it's a thing that you had from your dad
that just was cooked until it was shoe leather.
You needed ketchup to get it down.
Not mine.
I think we succeeded at that because
it's one of our best-selling items on the menu.
(funky music)
When you come and eat here, when you walk away,
I want you to have just had a good time.
That's what we focus on.
You know, we consider ourselves more fine-casual.
I want this to be a place that
if you come in for a date night
and you feel like wearing a sport coat and a dress, great.
But if you want to come in in shorts and a ball cap,
that's fine too.