- When we come up with dishes, we don't think that closely
about is it going to be exactly like
what you would find in Mexico?
- Just want to get it pretty much into a single layer.
One, so that we get a lot of smoke all over the caviar,
and then two, this is on ice,
so I want to make sure
that as much caviar as we possibly can is touching the ice.
- So the banana and caviar dish is something
that I wanted to make years ago.
And it was something that like, I dunno,
it was kind of like a weird combination of flavors
and I could never figure out exactly how it would work.
- [Kedar] It's not that long
or hard of a smoke to perfect the color.
- It's basically a cold smoke.
You've got a mixture of a fruit wood and oak in there.
We take these bananas, skewer them, grill them,
glaze them in a little butter,
and then the savory dulce de leche,
it's basically a date and fresh coconut sauce.
- [Kedar] 20 Minutes in now.
- It's ready for the bananas.
13 grams of caviar, it's like a sizable amount.
We weigh it out,
so every person gets the same quantity of caviar.
And I think like, you know,
most people like are not used to eating that much caviar
and it's just like a treat I think for everyone.
Altogether,
it sort of creates this like savory sweet combination
that's like, people think it's going to be too sweet,
but then it's not,
and it just like somehow works together.
When we drop the banana,
I want people to feel
like that they have been like hooked up, you know?
Like they're a friend of the restaurant.
(dramatic music)
So the first thing we do in the morning is we start
to process the corn, you know,
the foundation of our cuisine,
and one of the most important elements that we serve.
- Basically the goal of nixtamalizing the corn is
to remove the outer husk from the corn
to basically release the nutrients,
allow us to grind it, and create masa.
That's the gist of it.
- If you take this dent corn
and cook it without the cal
and without nixtamalizing it,
then you don't like unlocked the nutrients of the dent corn,
so you have to nixtamalize it
so that the B vitamins become bioavailable.
Whenever I was like cooking in fine dining,
it was almost no one treating Mexican ingredients
with like the kind of respect that I thought it deserved.
And, you know,
I thought it was just as worthy of treating it with care
and respect as any other cuisine.
You know, this is our sushi rice here, you know?
Make a little....
(man laughs) Just kidding.
So this machine is a Molinito created by Masienda,
which is an LA-based corn importer.
So we'll load up the hopper here.
(machine whirs)
Corn is an amazing and delicious and healthful ingredient
that has like become abused and over-farmed
and become like genetically modified to not a good place.
The goal of the restaurant is to preserve that cuisine,
preserve these vegetables that could be lost
if no one's serving them.
- It comes out pretty smooth.
I mean, at this point, we just mix it
with a little bit of fat as well as salt.
- [Val] What's up Jeff?
- [Jeffrey] Hey, what's up Val?
- Jeffrey's here.
- Do you sell to any other Mexican restaurants, Jeff?
- No, you're definitely my first.
(Val chuckles)
So, special treat for you today.
Matsutake mushrooms, this is the season.
- Obviously we're just a little jump from Japan
and so I feel like we get the freshest stuff
because we're probably the first stop, right?
- Mh-hm.
- We're going to be the envy of all New York, you know?
Cause we get the nice shit
and they get it like 24 hours later.
- Yeah, when it's all brown. (men laughing)
- Here, we have our Hokkaido uni.
- Yeah. So we, you know,
we had this urchin infladita
that we have we've had on the menu for a long time
and we sort of phased it out during the summertime,
just because the urchin was getting too bitter
and we just weren't happy with it.
So you want to try a Jeff? - [Jeff] Sure.
- Yeah. We like the Hokkaido,
and it's a little bit sweeter than the Santa Barbara.
Just in general.
It's nice. It's creamy, plain, salty, little salty.
Yeah. It has a nice finish. Sweet finish.
Yeah, this'll be great.
- Here's our tai from Hikime.
They were Ikejime, freshly packed, and shipped 24 hours ago.
- [Val] Beautiful.
- So we use the madai here,
the Tai snapper for our al pastor.
I mean, this is like sashimi quality fish
that you could literally serve raw.
I love fish tacos.
We've had like all different variations of fish tacos
on the menu and it just sounded like it would be delicious,
like fish al pastor and light and summery
and grilled fish.
So from here, Ricardo is gonna take the skin off.
He's going to portion them into perfect little planks
and then a marinate them in a adobo paste al la minute.
They're going to get skewered and grilled over oak charcoal.
Try to get a lot of nice color.
That adobo paste like really gets a little bit burnt,
which we like, you know,
has that like charred caramelized flavor,
it just goes really perfectly with the smoked pineapple.
This is a brand new comal.
It's just a beautiful thing, I think.
I don't know,
cooking the tortillas on like this like handmade clay vessel
and cooking the corn in that traditional way
with the nixtamal,
it's just like a natural way
for it to like balance in your stomach
and still be like healthful and really good for you.
You know, honestly, we haven't been traveling a lot.
I haven't been to Mexico as regularly
as I have been, you know,
generally I try to go like several times a year,
and so, you know, really I miss those flavors, you know?
And so a lot of the current menu right now
is like flavor memories that we just missed from traveling.
Yeah. I get pumped to serve tacos here, you know,
like tacos or like, you know,
to go back to Japanese cuisine,
it like our own nigiri.
Every single bite needs to be perfect
and that's like how we like approach it.
So right now we have three taco courses on the menu.
We start with tlacoyo, which is pre-Hispanic street food.
We use a blue masa that we bring in from Mexico
and fill it with some fresh cranberry beans
and smoked queso Oaxaca.
And then we wrap it with hoja santa,
which is a very anise-y wild herb
that you would see in Oaxaca.
The last taco is a squab arabe.
Tacos arabes is like from Puebla,
so there was a large Lebanese influx into Mexico.
They brought the rotating spits with them
and they brought flour pitas or tortillas.
And so basically this is just a play on that.
We use local California squab marinated in Lebanese spices
and we make a sourdough tortilla
and the one we're making right now,
I think, is like absolutely flawless.
It's like incredibly delicate flower tortilla
that's so beautiful and soft.
It's like a Krispy Kreme of flour tortillas.
We serve that with Aleppo pepper sauce,
cucumber crema, and then a squab broth.
- It's like 10:30 in the morning.
We're getting started on the big protein breakdown
right now.
First up,
we're going to break out the dried beef,
for steak or our famous dried ribeye
that we dry-age in house for about 35 days.
It's a F1 cross, which means it's 50% Wagyu,
50% black Angus.
I think it just works really well for our menu.
We don't like the full-blood Wagyu.
It gets a little too fatty,
but we do offer that as a supplement as well.
So this is the top cap, or the spinalis, so the ribeye cap.
We'll separate this out from the eye of the rib
and we serve both parts.
Sometimes we'll do a tasting on the menu.
We'll only do a little piece of cap and a piece of the eye,
just to feature a couple of different cuts.
So the cap is going to be a little bit more fatty
and also a little bit more aged flavor to it
cause it is on the outside.
Whereas the eye of the rib is kind of inside, you know,
so it's a little more protected.
So now we have our eye rib here
and this is primarily what we serve on the,
on the carne asada course.
I'm going to clean this rib up,
take all the fat off,
take all the silver skin,
and then we're going to portion it.
So we shoot for two ounces of meat per person.
And then we like cooking them in four ounce blocks.
And what happens there is you have a bigger piece of meat
to work with.
It's a little bit nicer to grill.
This is the slow smoked heirloom tomato
and it's the garnish for the beef.
- We change the menu every season, you know.
We're always like moving with the seasons.
Like even in summertime,
like things might change like halfway through,
or winter might change halfway through,
but we're always R and D-ing new dishes
and working on new things as ingredients come and go.
So this is like a dish that we've been working on,
like legitimately for probably almost a month now.
- So this is the abalone that's been rested,
massaged, sweet talked.
We shaved the outer skin off.
That's kind of the tougher part of the abalone.
This is a agar that be colored
with a little bit of green juice.
So it's the color of the sea.
And then what we do is we just glaze the abalone shells.
So what it does is it just kind of
creates this barrier on the shell, fills up all these holes.
So then when we put the agua chile in the shell on the ice,
it's not going to spill out all of the holes.
- You know, I really encourage
and try to mentor a lot of my chefs on R and D and creating.
Creativity is something that is like an exercise.
You have to exercise it.
You have to practice it. You have to work on it.
- [Kedar] I really wanted to add like some height.
Maybe like some persimmon could be cool in here.
- [Val] Persimmon? Yeah. - [Kedar] Yeah.
Maybe we could do like a seaweed oil or something.
It'd be dope.
Should we try it? - [Val] Yeah.
Yeah, the texture is awesome.
- I liked the agretti is really nice.
- Yeah. I like the agretti.
People are going to be like,
how did you not make it leak?
- You gotta do the shooter. - Yeah.
- Yeah. This is Kaylin Denise.
She's one of our sous chefs here.
She's been with us for several years. She just turned 26.
(both laugh)
But she has basically like the world's most amazing resume.
- Okay. So I have some pork belly here.
It's been air drying and there's also salt here.
So all of the moisture should have come out of the skin.
So I want like a crispy outside,
soft, braise-y on the inside kind of.
You can see the skin is nicely crackling.
So the first technique we tried was just deep fry.
Now we're trying a base over mostly just the skin,
put out both, and see what chefs likes. (chuckles)
It's all trial and error.
- Getting ready to move into fall and winter obviously.
So I wanted to switch up the protein.
So we're always looking at different stuff.
So these ducks are from Root Down farm.
So we're going to do a hot smoke test with them.
Timer went off, it's been 20 minutes.
We're gonna check the ducks now
and see how they've come along.
Took on some nice color.
- [Val] Yeah, it looks good.
- [Kedar] It's kind of a lofty goal
to render a duck all the way through, on a grill
without flareups, but you gotta, gotta give it a shot.
- [Val] Sometimes they'll come up with stuff out of the blue
or sometimes, you know, we'll say, all right,
what do we want to move to?
And we'll talk about it,
and we'll create a plan, and we'll work on a dish together.
And it'll usually take two to three iterations
before it's ready for the menu.
- Do you wanna taste the pork dish?
- [Val] Yeah, let's do it.
- This one was the deep fried,
and then this is the basted.
- What's in your pumpkin sauce?
- So pipián rojo,
it's usually pumpkin seeds, allspice, coriander, cloves.
It's just grilled cabbage alongside that too.
- What are the herbs?
- [Kaylin] Watercress and lambsquarter.
- Pork is really good.
Yeah. Really good.
I think it needs like some sweetness
and then maybe a little bit less cabbage probably.
- Okay. - Yeah.
Let's try it again tomorrow.
- [Kaylin] Okay. - Yeah.
- [Kaylin] That's good.
- Kaylin and chef, you guys want to try the duck?
- Yeah, I'd love to.
- [Kedar] So we have a two breasts here.
This one, they both been aged,
and then this one here has been brined as well.
- [Val] Oh, it's so juicy.
- [Kedar] Now this is the grand finale, right?
Until we get into dessert so...
And I don't know of anybody that's smoking ducks
and then grilling them all the way.
I think we're the only ones doing,
trying to do it. So... I like the brined one.
- That's really good.
Could be even smokier.
- Smokier? - Yeah.
Yeah, tell him we want all the duck
and not to sell to any other restaurants. (chuckles)
- No problem.
- Nobody else gets ducks.
- It's our ducks now.
- [Val] Hi Lee, Wayne.
- [Lee] Hey.
Val, I brought you your dark fresh masa.
- There you go. - (laughs) Thank you, Lee.
Wayne and Lee are a brother
and sister farming team of Tierra vegetables.
So today we're going to,
we've got some beautiful sea urchin,
first sea urchin that we've gotten this fall.
Then we're going to use it
to put the sea urchin infladita back on the menu
And we'll use this corn.
Here, we've got these, a beautiful black masa infladitas.
So this is black corn, no colors, no dyes.
This is just the natural color of it.
Will punches these into tiny coins
and then launches them into 400 degree oil,
which is like dangerous.
And then just gently spoons oil over them until they puff.
- [Will] These are like legitimately
like the biggest pain in the ass to make.
- It's all right. (Val chuckles)
No, not that it's...
- [Will] Hour, hour and a half of the day.
Just like sitting there ladling oil, ladling oil.
- [Val] But the end result is so worth it.
- [Will] Yeah, 30 perfect shells.
- The urchin infladita is a dish we came up with
and it's like sort of a classic and I love it,
but we took it off the menu.
The urchin gets a little bit bitter,
and so tonight's going to be the first night
that we have it back on.
Should be nice? - [Chef] Yeah.
- Yeah. So we're just going to lightly char this urchin.
Just warms it up a little bit.
It takes the chill off
and gives it a little bit more flavor.
We just glaze it really lightly
with this little salty sea glaze.
That's it, grab another one,
Chef Kaylin!
We're entering the Twilight zone.
This dish is like very delicate to prepare
and Kaylin is like the only person
that's like a master of it.
So that's a guajillo chile atole.
It's like a corn and a guajillo sauce.
It's got to go like flying out of the kitchen,
otherwise it'll like get soft and won't be any good.
- Happy Thursday to you all.
We've got 28 on the books tonight.
One vegetarian,
and chef Val's dad is going to be in tonight.
Super exciting.
Do you have anything else to add for the day?
- Yeah, obviously just stay relaxed
keep your stuff tight,
and it's going to be a great day.
- All right, here we go, Thursday!
- (staff shout in unison) Thursday!
- After staff, about 4:30,
we just said did lineup for the evening,
and now it's getting a little heavy in here.
Everybody's getting set up.
We're doing final station checks,
basting all the sauces,
and getting ready for a busy service.
Should be good.
In about 20 minutes,
we're going to have all this cleared off.
Everybody will have their station mise en place out,
the grille is going to be ripping,
we'll have the comal on the stove,
ready to cook the tortillas,
and we're getting the plate warmer all plugged in
over there,
and we're rigging up our sourdough flour tortilla station
as well.
- So this is Sophie Hau.
She's our pastry chef.
She's been with us for several years now,
Sophie and I started talking about this chocolate stuff
like three years ago
and just slowly developed it
and she's really taken it and ran with it, you know?
- It's difficult and it shows a lot of skill.
So, we definitely don't hold back with it.
- Chocolate for me is like one of my favorite things to eat.
It's a native Mexican ingredient, you know?
It's a Meso-American ingredient
that I think gets lost in European and French cuisine.
And I think that's a shame
because you know, chocolate started in Mexico
and there's no reason that we shouldn't embrace it
and be using it all over.
- [Will] All right, so right here we have our chicharron.
It's one of our first bites of the evening.
- You know,
we start the meal with a series of five bites and they're
just a reflection of what's going on in the season.
You guys doing okay with this?
- It's good.
- How are the carrots, Walter?
I'll try some scrap?
Some bits of carrots.
They're meant to be is just like a really delicious way
to start the meal.
I think there's a lot of anxiety with fine dining.
People think they're going to come in
and spend all this money
and still go out, leaving hungry.
And so that's like a way for us,
to like right in the beginning,
like every station picks up a course.
So it also like ignites the whole kitchen.
Everybody has to start focusing,
You get like five pretty awesome bites, you know,
you're at least like, okay, I'm calmed down.
You know, people come in here hungry,
and there's anxiety,
and they're think it's going to be
like everyone here is going to have their nose in the air.
And you know,
I really want to like break that down right away, you know,
help people relax,
help people feel like it's going to be a fun,
enjoyable experience, you know.
- [Host] Who's got one ceviche?
- [Chef] One ceviche!
- [Host] Ice?
- (kitchen staff in unison) Ice!
- We're almost done with the first term here,
just wrapping up the last few tacos,
and then we're going to get reset,
and start over for the second term.
Today, we had the urchin on.
It was really nice to see it again.
We've got some really amazing R and D dishes
that we ironed out today
that we'll probably be putting on the menu
within the next couple of weeks.
My dad is Mexican and my mom is from Venezuela.
I grew up in a small town in Texas.
We moved there
because my dad wanted to start a Mexican restaurant
with his brother, and so they did,
I guess that like early exposure really like stuck with me.
My whole family was working at the restaurant, you know,
my aunts, uncles, cousins, brother, you know,
and it was really just like a beautiful experience
to be involved with.
- Everything was great, especially the arepa.
Ah thank you.
- No complaints. (both chuckle)
A little bit different
than what we were doing back in Texas,
but really impressed with what he is doing here,
in San Francisco.
So really no comparison and so proud.
So proud. Just can't say enough.
- Aw thank you dad.
Californios is what the Mexican people of this area
called themselves, whenever they settled California
in the 1800s, so we play off that name,
and also, you know, try to represent Mexican
and Latin American identity here at this restaurant
I think.
Yeah, I think, you know,
with our cuisine and the restaurant and the experience,
my goal is for people to just enjoy it, you know,
to have an amazing experience,
to have a beautiful experience,
and hopefully people understand that it's a labor of love,
but we don't want to beat people over the head with it
as well.
Yeah, I want people to come in here
and have an amazing time and eat amazing food
and think, "Wow, that was awesome."