- So, this is a pork shoulder from a Llano Seco ranch.
- This has been hanging up for two months.
That is super special to us.
That's like a singular thing
and it's an incredible amount of effort and time
but it allows us to serve pork at a super high level.
(gentle tribal music)
- So we get in half pigs,
I'll cut the shoulder and the leg off
so you just have the shoulder, leg and loin.
Kind of the cool part about the way we do this
is normally people cook shoulders whole, slow cook them,
but we break apart each individual muscle
so there's no connective tissue left.
So you can just grill it like you would
a steak or something.
- When we're taking one large part of the animal
and seaming out muscle by muscle.
Tonight during service, Tuna will pass them up
and we'll have to cut a little piece off of each one
and check for texture,
and then that will determine how thin or thick we slice it.
We're totally okay with everything not being the same,
which sounds a little strange
when you talk about consistency,
but when I refer to not being the same, it's like,
it doesn't have to look the same on the plate.
It's gonna taste the same, but we're gonna change
the way we cut it.
- So the rest of this, we can hang back up.
And because there is the shoulder blade there,
all that meat is still gonna be protected.
It's not gonna dry out.
- It's just super soft and tender.
In the cool room,
we have a little bit of like a meat calendar.
So the birds need two weeks, this has two months.
We have this constant rotation of different proteins
that we work through depending on different dietaries
and cover counts.
- So now I'm gonna clean them up and clean up
all this fat and connective tissue, so that we're just left
with really clean, perfect portion.
Once it's cooked, we can just slice and go.
This is incredible, worked in a lot of restaurants
and I've never worked with a product like this.
It sounds unassuming, it's like pork shoulder,
people wouldn't expect to get that
at a two Michelin star restaurant.
But as chef was saying, the way we treat it
and everything, makes it really special.
Few hours before service, I will season it
and then I'll start slowly smoking it over cypress.
- [Matthew] Fire six pig.
- [Tuna] Yes.
(meat sizzling)
- Tuna will cook the pig, pass it to me,
I carve all the meat at night, but I taste a little piece
and that will determine how thick or thin we cut it.
Whether it needs a little bit of finishing salt
because fat content, but we really kind of focus
on the hyper seasoning.
This is incredible.
Good cooking.
- [Tuna] Thank you.
- Honestly, it's amazing.
I think that a lot of menus currently, right now,
are pretty similar and there's an expectation
of luxury ingredients when you are at a two,
three star level.
So I am proud to say that we don't serve caviar,
we don't serve imported beef,
we don't serve truffles and things of that nature.
We're trying to show what a two-star restaurant can be,
serving humble ingredients.
(gentle instrumental music)
It's 9:30, we're in Point Arena,
which is about 25 minutes south of Elk and Harbor House.
Everything you see here is actually owned by us.
One of our cooks, who lives in town, they'll stop here
and pick up the ingredients for the day.
Two days ago, I saw on the end there, a massive kohlrabi
which we'll harvest.
So we have a course in the menu right now,
it's barbecued kohlrabi and it's just the entire kohlrabi.
- It's a white kohlrabi.
I prefer this variety because it's more uniform
in terms of growing
and it's fairly consistent in terms of flavor,
which is something that you want
if it's going to be central to a dish.
(upbeat pop music)
- It's 11:00 AM.
So, kohlrabi from this morning.
Sam will fabricate these, peel them down,
- So you'll take off all this really thick outer skin,
and you end up with this kind of like faceted diamond,
and then I'll kind of peel it down
so you'll end up with like a puck.
Then I'll pass off that trim to chef.
He'll do a puree with that.
Salt it like fairly heavily, 'cause we do want it
to go all the way through the vegetable.
And then we'll kind of put it in a warm place
above the grill, just kind of sweat out
a little bit of that moisture,
get the seasoning all the way in.
- Since we only do one seating, 5:30,
we understand that this will probably walk
around 6:45, 6:50, depending on the pace.
We have a couple hours to get the texture where we want.
This probably concentrates down probably 40, 50%.
- I'll set up the grill to start 'em cooking.
Kinda have to keep turning it and brushing it
with butter and refreshing the coals and stuff
so you can kind of rush it.
It'll look right, it won't taste right.
And it like needs to cook really, really slow.
It really gets like barbacue-y.
You could cook a brisket fast
but it won't taste the same as like a smoked brisket
and this is a similar kind of thing.
- This is like three years of working with kohlrabi.
It's something that we've been working on,
like this cooking technique,
and every year it comes back around, we change something,
we change something.
So this year's version is actually my favorite, obviously,
'cause we're going in a forward direction.
And we're starting to change levels depending
on moisture content.
So they'll go from here as he continues to remove moisture
over the next four hours,
it's gonna really concentrate
and we'll get this barbecue bark on the outside.
We have show-rabis up here.
We're starting to realize that most
of our guests don't know what a kohlrabi is.
We do a show-rabi, we put a whole kohlrabi that's raw
on the tray and we bring it to the table.
Being in this area, there's a lot of farmer's markets
and small farms, but quality's not always the first thing.
And while I appreciate that and I understand
that style of farming, it's not really super good
for the restaurant.
After two years of trying to do that,
we decided to start a farm.
It's just a major quality,
to be able to harvest that morning
and then put it on the plate.
Our abalone course has slowly become a bit
of a signature for us.
One of the most important and first steps
for the abalone is to go down to the cove,
grab some of that sea water.
So, five gallon buckets of ocean come up
and then every day those abalone are stored in there.
Seaweed is fresh pulled that day as well.
See the staircase behind us?
We just came down, just beneath the inn.
This cove is actually private to the inn,
we have the only access.
We're at a negative tide right now,
so we're usually under water.
This is nori, and we use nori all over the menu.
We harvest about nine different types of seaweeds
from this cove, it's kind of like our second garden.
Late March till September down here,
harvesting everything and preserving everything
we need for the rest of the year.
So this time of year, it's early mornings
and a lot of extra labor to get us through.
Can you take this bucket, grab some ocean
for salt and abalone, then I'll meet you upstairs.
- This is the ocean water that we grabbed earlier,
and we use it to keep our abalone alive,
changing up the water every day.
- Abalone is coming from Monterey.
This is the furthest away we source.
We really do keep it local.
Farmed underneath the pier in Monterey Bay,
super sustainable, and they've just been a great partner.
- Pull them out, kind of let them relax a little bit
because if they're stressed out they won't be as tender.
- If these were to come in today, the dish is different.
They're too stressed out from travel.
A lot of precision in the actual cut and the pounding,
and it's gonna result in a super soft texture.
(upbeat dance music) (knife smacking)
- So, after processing all these abalone,
I'm gonna wrap them in kelp and roast them off
- [Matthew] Contents of the abalone course:
abalone which will get roasted in kelp,
offal for the gut sauce, and then the adductor.
- We get two portions out of each abalone
but the packet that they're roasted
in ends up being part of the presentation.
We serve it on that packet,
so we need twice as many pieces of kombu as abalone.
And if you cut 'em in half and cook them, it's not the same.
You need to cook them whole.
So we found, down at the cove, similar sized rocks
to the abalone, so we can cook the kombu packets
and it'll get a little crusty and form that shape
without sacrificing the quality of the abalone.
It's actually part of my prep work is, like, cook rocks.
(Tuna laughs)
I have definitely accidentally cooked an abalone
thinking it was a rock,
'cause the rocks cook at a different time than the abalone.
Rocks take like 12 minutes to cook.
I'm not kidding,
'cause you have to make sure the kombu's cooked.
But the abalone take like 10 minutes.
All right, let's cook some rocks.
(Sam laughs)
This is rock cookery 101.
It's gonna be the tagline of the f****** video.
(clock beeping)
Check it after 10 minutes.
30 minutes is too long.
You can overcook rocks.
So the whole point of this is just so that
it'll kinda set the kombu
so that it's not just sitting flat.
So to replicate the same way that it would look
if in abalone were roasted.
Those are done.
- It's hard to say signature dish
but it's definitely been evolving and the style
and preparation of a abalone where it's harvested alive
and roasted in the kelp lends itself to a super,
super soft texture, that is only obtainable
through this process.
(gentle piano music)
We're gonna look for lichen,
which is part of the tempura dish.
Spending some time in the woods, in the forest,
the beginning of COVID, initially I had fried it,
the texture was just god awful.
And then we started to think about it like a noodle dish.
This is some of the lichen that we harvested.
I don't think anyone else is making this, it's unique to us.
It's not something you can buy.
You can't buy this.
So we blanch it three times to get away some
of the stringency, some of the aroma,
then we finish it in dashi and it kind of soaks up
that taste and has a texture of like glass noodles.
It goes with the mushroom because it is earthy
and it adds another balance to that course.
Honestly, it's one of the guests highlights throughout
the meal, and I don't think many guests have ever had that
in their life.
(gentle orchestral music)
- So we got in some squabs,
they're from Devil's Gulch Ranch.
So we need to age 'em for about two weeks,
and I'm gonna lightly salt the cavity.
It's not to season or anything,
but just to prevent them from unwanted bacteria.
And then the next step pin the wings back
just to keep everything uniform.
- So as it hangs up, depending on, sometimes
we'll go this way or this way.
We have a couple fans in the walk-in,
constantly circulating air,
the resulting bird will have a lot tighter skin.
So later on, when we go to cook it, grill it, smoke it,
we're able to get this super crispy
and then the flesh itself is really concentrated.
So it's like totally amplified in taste and texture.
So we do rotate through a couple different meats,
so squab, the pig, lamb and then beef from our ranch.
So just depending on what's available, this is one of
the meats that I believe in, and I think fits our menu.
Local, it's raised in a super sustainable way
and the quality of it is super good.
- It's kinda like a rotation going here.
So we have the fresher birds over here.
These ones up here are ready to serve.
They're about two and a half weeks now.
So again, you can see how much dryer they are.
Now that it's been properly aged,
I'm gonna take the heads off.
The wings, we use to make a sauce,
the legs we will cure and confit,
and the heads, I tried making a garum out of it,
so we might be able to use that as another seasoning agent.
And now it's ready for service.
- Our cooking technique is we slowly smoke it
over cypress and then we finish it with oil that's 550,
and that really puffs the skin and gets it super crispy.
So it's got this texture and aroma of aged meat,
but something really, really crispy on the outside.
(suspenseful music)
- Yeah, so one of my last tasks for a day here
is gonna be breaking down rockfish.
This is called a black gill rockfish.
Yeah, we have a few fishermen in Fort Bragg,
that they're really small scale, line caught,
and when they have fish, we have fish,
when they don't, we don't.
So I have to be ready to basically work with
any kind of fish.
Before working here, I never really worked
with almost any of this product.
I had no idea, anything about rockfish, skate cod,
cabezon, yeah, bocaccio, sea cucumber.
Definitely pretty much just had to learn on the job.
This is the trim that we created
from making the abalone packets,
so we're not wasting anything here.
All right.
So it's rock fish has been cured for 30 minutes now
on the kombu.
Yeah, so after rinsing it off and drying it
on really absorbent tuna paper...
(Tuna laughs)
It's not my own proprietary brand.
(Tuna laughs)
So then just letting that dry off just since I rinsed it off
and then we'll slice it closer to service.
- Being here and really trying to zero in on our products,
we started to understand that there's 30 species
of rockfish in this area.
Again, it's just diving into the products that you have
and truly understanding them.
Two o'clock now, kind of majority through
of the actual prep day.
Kind of a bit of a push right now.
We start from scratch every day,
18 portions of everything, not much preparation.
There's zero getting ahead for the week.
It's a bit of a push every day.
Every day we'll tape two cards here,
and through out service, I'll just shout down notes
on little things that I think we can improve on
or things that we're doing great.
And we continue to expand on, so.
All right. Good evening.
- [All] Good evening.
- 18 tonight, nine by two,
no IRDs, a couple small menu changes.
We're gonna run back over a couple notes.
Obviously, last night we had
a couple high maintenance tables.
I wanna thank Adrianne for the time she spent at table one,
working that guest experience
because that was probably one of the more difficult ones
we've had.
Like we discussed last night,
it's a learning experience, right?
So I look forward to having a good night.
Everyone that works here, works their ass off.
I've never had an easy day here
and I'm sure they'll say the same.
An easy day, is the day that you're not moving forward
and we sit down every night, next day at line up and we go
through every single thing that we could work on.
Talk about the positives as well, but it's also like,
"Okay, here's our little bottleneck and
this is what we can improve on."
Meeting's wrapped, it's 5:10, last finishing touch ups
before we open doors at 5:30.
- We wanna be waiting around for people,
instead of like scrambling to finish those first tables.
We wanna be like ready to go.
- So right now I'm portioning the red sea urchin
from Fort Bragg.
We're going with a chilled chawanmushi, a chilled custard.
So it's with the custard, today, it's warm out
so it's gonna be chilled.
We'll use the really nice tongues on top
and then everything else will be chopped up
and mixed in with the custard.
(uptempo instrumental music)
- So everything, all of our cooking, we try
and cut things at the last second, all of our infusions
just to kind of preserve the aroma.
So with something like this, if we made this earlier
all the aroma is gone.
So it has to be less second.
So like the fish aroma,
just like his mushroom broth, everything is being done
the second we need it.
Yeah, our service is a lot of á la minute cooking.
Whether it's infusions, finishing on the grill,
smoking, frying, steaming,
we don't prep during the day to reheat.
We prep in the day to be able to get
to that last moment where something's at its peak.
We basically go into service
with a bunch of raw vegetables and obviously proteins.
There is no sous vide bath.
Our Combi oven is our plate warmer.
We use the barbecue, we use a steamer and a fry pot.
We can only do one service
because we need quiet hours to start at 10.
If you look around me, we have our first round set.
So with 18 guests tonight, we'll cook in three groups.
Really, we're only doing things per course, three times.
So Dan is working on pickles,
Sam is working on the raw course,
and Marlana is working on chilled vegetables.
And throughout the night,
we don't really have to talk to each other
because everyone knows what the next steps are.
Sat on two.
- [All] Yes.
- So we've sat our first table.
Kitchen Turkey on the gravy,
it's right around the corner.
It's table one so keep the volume down.
- [All] Yes.
- Sat on two more.
- [Co-Worker 2] Yes.
- Yeah, we work with the door open.
So anytime we're talking we're just,
from now on, volume down.
So usually when it's this beautiful out, this time of year,
guests don't really want to come inside
and start their experience.
So, 5:45 right now, we do have three tables set,
which is good for us in the kitchen
because we can get the night going.
If there's a whale in the cove, service is ruined
because the whole restaurant gets up and they go outside
and everything that we're slowly cooking has to halt
and we try not to have any whales in the cove.
Yeah, go all the way on swim.
You come back, will be six kohlrabi and the six app.
- [All] Yes.
The majority of our cooking is very importantly based
on timing, so you see like one thing hits the tray,
the sauce arrives, the show-rabi arrives and it walks.
So everything has to be instant.
So when it's hot, it's crispy, whatever the texture
or taste that we're going for is present
and it hits the table within 10 seconds.
You come from a restaurant that's always busy,
that's world famous
and you move up here
and everyone's telling you, it's never gonna work.
They're like, "What are you doing?
You have a great thing going on.
You should stay."
And I'm like, "No, I'm moving to Elk."
Everyone is like, "It's never gonna work."
And I'm like, "No, it's going to work."
We opened in May, 2018, five nights a week.
We would have two nights where there's just zero covers.
You might do one table.
A big night would be six or eight.
And that went on for probably like three or four months.
Luckily there's a hotel here,
so the room rate helped us get through that a little bit.
Slowly over time we would pick up
and then you're doing four, and six, and eight,
and then, then you're doing 12.
We got through that first winter
and then gained a little traction,
food and wine helped a little bit.
We got our first Michelin star
and then that kind of put us on a path.
You can go on all six kohlrabi.
- [Tuna] Yeah.
- [Matthew] Good cooking.
Tuna, don't let it go to your head.
- Never.
I know I'm trash at heart.
(Matthew laughs)
Gotta stay humble.
- I think we had a really good service.
The only comment I have is the vase
in the center of the room.
The water could've been changed out today.
There was a lot of nights where I cooked the food
and served the food, and then cleaned the kitchen,
and then woke up the next morning
and cooked those people breakfast.
And we did that for six months.
We don't forget about those days.
I don't forget about those days.
And it's why we still push on every day.