- So I only half-cooked this lobster because it's going to
go into the fryer and then it's going to
get-stir fried in the wok.
Just like all the best Chinese dishes,
this comes together really quickly.
Prosperity Jerk Lobster is our take on crispy wok
stir-fried lobster that you can get in Chinatown
at 2:00 AM when you had a table full of chefs.
So this is how we get the lobster ready for service.
This is our three-step dredge method.
So it starts off with a dry, the next we go into wet.
So for every lobster, this is exactly how we do it.
One at a time.
All right, now the lobster goes in the fryer.
While that's getting crispy, we're going to
get started on the sauce as well.
This is where it gets intense.
Cooking with a wok was such a different learning experience.
- This is jerk butter.
- A lot of the restaurants that I worked
in were predominantly French ones.
- Onions.
- So I didn't get a chance to use a wok as much,
- Peppers, Maggi sauce.
- It's not easy at all.
- Lobster goes in...
- Like every, all the mise en place has to be done way ahead
And you can't be like f******,
like you have to be like super dialed in...
- Ready to plate.
- I came from the world of fine dining, French cuisine,
working in three-Michelin-starred restaurants.
And I've learned a ton of techniques
- Back on for a quick sec.
It's a Ritz cracker crumbs and a bit more butter.
- But I think it's hilarious that they would be snobby
towards our use of things like Ritz crackers.
It's delicious.
And if somebody is too stoosh to enjoy the things
that we're doing, then they can go to another restaurant.
- Prosperity Jerk Lobster.
- Chinese people go way back in Jamaica.
There's generations and generations of us there.
When we first opened, people had no idea
that this culture, much less as cuisine, existed.
(upbeat music)
- Go!
- It's 8:30, time to start getting on some jerk chicken.
- This is Chef Nick my right hand when it
comes to jerk and chicken.
- Yep.
- Chicken man.
(laughs)
- Yeah, you go through a lot of chicken in here man.
- A lot of chicken.
(laughs)
- Check out this jerk paste.
This is scallions, scotch bonnet, soy sauce.
This is what put us on the map.
- When you wanna get dressed up for jerk chicken,
you want to get all in right inside the cavities.
- Deep inside.
- Deep inside, yeah.
(laughs)
One time a bartender asked me how much chicken I go through
- I have my hands in chicken too many times.
(laughs)
- And this is just the first part.
The fun part is when they started smoking.
- And voila.
- Jelena, let's truss.
- Trussing is important because when you put it
on, on the rotisserie, you want it to keep that shape.
Keep that last one.
- Yes, let's go.
- Oh shit!
(laughing)
- He got it, he got it, he got it.
- Look, she has extra life right now
Right now it marinates for 24 hours.
And then we put it on our smoker.
- Our jerk chicken takes a couple of days to make.
We start off by dry-brining and then we cold smoke
to get to that smokey flavor.
- [Both] One, two, three.
(laughs)
- Yes.
- We smoke at the back of the restaurant.
This is like a narrow little alleyway.
Definitely not the most ideal place,
but you know it gets done.
And to do that, we need a little bit of kindling.
- Go on.
(inaudible speaking)
(laughs)
- I used to be fast at one point.
(laughs)
Ooh, I'm chopping wood in...
Jordan One Breds.
(laughs)
- Placement is important.
You want to get some of the larger ones on the base.
- So we're cold smoking this in the in,
in this smoker because we want to finish the cooking
on the rotisserie to keep it as juicy as possible.
- Yeah.
- So normally you have chicken coming off the grill
Sometimes is especially like the breast part
is very, very trashy and dry.
This helps give you the best of all,
of every world to be honest.
Nice and space, smoke going all through
and then you close this baby up.
And that's how you get the best chicken in town.
Because we're smoking chicken, we tried to smoke pork belly
same time for our Yakisoba dish.
- I have a new idea that I want to test out at Mignonette.
- So please save me one of these pork bellies.
I'm going to check this one.
- All right.
- And as you've seen earlier, I'm very good at this point.
(laughs)
(inaudible mumbling)
- I'm thinking about a new dish.
So I'm going to smoke this pork belly
almost like a, like a Texas-style brisket.
So I'm mixing up some Chinese hot mustard.
This is my first time doing this.
I'm not too sure if this is going to be working
out, but this is just testing.
- And again, just like with the chicken
do you want to put space in between it.
You do not want to put the fat part down,
you want to put on the meat because the fat renders down,
you don't want to lose all that fat
because that fat is good man.
When it comes on to like the winter time
like what year is this?
Ice is all over the place.
There's some time it's snowing.
Sometimes the rain sometimes the hail.
It's cruel man, it's cruel.
Canada, it's nice. Canada is really nice.
And it's a really good thing all-year round.
Yeah.
- All right, oxtail?
- Let's do it.
- Watch your back, watch your back.
- Next big task that we have for the day is oxtail.
Sometimes they come in chopped up,
but sometimes they come in whole like this.
Now we gotta deal with them.
So I'm just cutting at the joints
to separate the oxtail and get into manageable pieces.
We couldn't be a Jamaican-Chinese
restaurant without serving oxtail.
- Calm down, man.
- How do you think I get my stress out?
- Oh my god!
(laughs)
See, I don't yell in the kitchen.
I take action in the kitchen.
- All right.
- For me when I eat oxtail, I like big chunks like this.
- You want to have a big piece of oxtail on your fork?
(laughs)
- A good oxtail, a Caribbean person
would take out of your hands man.
You mess up oxtail, and they're like,
"What are you doing?".
Most like shocks you go in it.
It's a big cleaver where you go...
(growling)
just like what he's doing.
- The way we do our oxtail is we start by caramelizing.
And we do that in the deep fryer.
Not so typical in a traditional oxtail,
but it really differentiates ours.
If I show my aunts and uncles that I'm browning oxtail
in a deep fryer they would,
who knows what they would do to me.
- When I first saw him deep frying oxtail,
I was like, "What are you doing? This is not oxtail.
This is not oxtail!".
But then, the flavors came out perfectly.
- This is exactly what we're looking for.
That deep caramelization.
- So when I started the sauce for the oxtail,
so we put off our onion...
So you want to get them nice and translucent.
And this is now the real flavor oxtail.
This is, this is where the real love comes into the dish.
Because if this is not done well,
everything else that we did, it makes no sense early on.
- So caramelizing ketchup is almost like napalm.
It just sticks everywhere.
But Jelena has developed this technique to get around it.
- Any part of exposed flesh will get burnt.
(laughs)
It'll get you.
- Next up goes oyster sauce.
It's that familiar flavor you'll get
in Chinese cuisine and some soy sauce.
Last thing we're adding is some browning.
Browning is that caramel that you'll find
in Coca-Cola, it's the thing that gives
oxtail its signature slight bitterness.
- Browning you find in every Jamaican kitchen.
I think this dish merges
both cuisines the best right?
- Absolutely.
- You have the Chinese influence,
but still with the Jamaican flavors.
This is what that is.
The yin and yang, right?
(laughs)
- So now we're about to bring it up to a simmer
and then it gets poured over to the oxtail
and into the oven for three hours.
Jamaican-Chinese food was taught to me by my grandmother.
We go back three generations to Jamaica
and she was cooking Jamaican food with Chinese ingredients,
and she's cooking Chinese food with Jamaican ingredients.
It's been three hours in the oven.
That's what oxtail is to us.
Soft, tender, brown.
You can't have oxtail without rice and peas,
and we're actually plating it up with
with spinner dumplings as well.
It's a very simple flour-water dumpling.
Fusion, for the sake of it,
is definitely not something that I'm into.
But with a mixed background, the way that I have,
it's just a natural progression for me to experiment
and play with both sides of the cultures and the cuisine.
- Yeah.
You can see they're still raw.
Texture has changed slightly.
You can smell it.
This is what you're looking for.
- When I first decided to do jerk chicken,
I knew I wanted to do it on a rotisserie rather
than on a grill, but at the same time
I wanted to make sure I kept the respect for the dish
and the smoke lends a huge amount of flavor.
- Jerk Chicken, Jerk Pork, all smoke.
Let's go, okay guys.
It's after four, let's start getting ready for service.
Okay?
The jerk chicken, we tried to do it as close
as possible time, because it makes no sense to do all
of that work on and you have chicken sitting out.
You want it to be fresh and nice and juicy.
I get all up in the chicken.
That's the way we like it, that's what we like it here.
Rub on some more.
It gives you all that nice crunch
and it gives you that nice heat that you get.
That's what Jerk Chicken is about.
Sometimes we don't even get by the bones.
How about our Jerk Chicken is on?
So now it's pork belly.
So we want to go for eight ounces.
Very generous with salt.
And then again, you can do some more jerk base.
And this is not like any jerk pork you have
ever had in Jamaica to be honest.
- One of the things that I'm doing right now
that's keeping me busy is our new restaurant, Mignonette.
It's menu testing time, it's the exciting time.
And I have this idea for a new dish.
It's really loosely based off of a shumai,
Chinese shrimp and pork dumpling.
And I smoked a little bit of pork belly as well.
So we're upstairs at Mignonette, and we've accomplished
the big jobs for mise en place at Patois.
And here we get to play around and do some new dishes.
So then I took this pork and smoked it
Texas brisket style, and just put a little bit
of salt, some pepper on there...
has that crust still because of that barbecue paper.
In theory, this is going to taste good.
- I trust you chef.
- Yes.
(laughs)
Dripping.
So juicy.
The cut of the pork could be a little bit better
but what we did to it was really good.
All right.
So I'm going to make a mayonnaise, but the base
of it is actually going to be Shiromiso and crab.
And it's going to give us a like a
really intense umami flavor.
(whirring sound)
It's good.
My deal with this was Ritz cracker, super simple.
So we got some of this mayo right
on a piece of that pork on there, and it's got some ikura.
It just works together in my head.
This is an actual test, first time.
- Cheers?
- Cheers.
It doesn't taste the way that I, I actually imagined it
but in, in, in some ways...
- Tastes delicious.
- It tastes delicious.
- It's a bit heavy.
- It is.
- In all honesty.
- Yeah. Well, it was inspired by a shumai but it doesn't
f****** taste like a shumai to me at all.
- Cause there's no shrimp on it, right?
(laughs)
- Exactly, we had that crab and stuff
but I mean, it's a very loose interpretation.
Yeah, we'd have to think it over.
All right man, that was fun.
I got to head back down, take care of service.
- Thank you so much.
- See ya.
- All right guys, picking up one Yakisoba.
What makes this dish so unique is that we actually
put oxtail gravy as the base of the sauce.
We start with a lot of cabbage, broccoli.
Yakisoba is traditionally like a wok stir-fried
ramen noodle and we wanted to do a different take on it.
Here's our yakisoba sauce.
(sizzling)
- So, this is our pork belly for our yakisoba.
- Finish it off with a bit of jerk glaze.
- That's our jerk pork yakisoba.
- Now we're plating our juicy jerk chicken.
And you see, because of the rotisserie, you see
all the juices are running out.
Chicken breast is nice and moist and beautiful.
And finish it with some cilantro.
(yelling)
Connor, what are ya working right now?
It gets chaotic sometimes.
I mean, we don't have a lot of space
and then you have a lot of persons on the line.
So this is our dirty fried rice.
So we have our ground pork, we have our Chinese sausages,
we have our homemade dirty spice.
(bell rings)
The chicken, two chickens.
- So you can get our jerk chicken in two ways.
Right off the rotisserie or you can get it in
a jerk chicken chow mein.
Shiitake mushroom.
Jerk chicken and chow mein are a natural match
Jerk paste.
There's the spice of the jerk chicken and
there's the saucy, crispy noodles in the chow mein.
(incoherent speaking)
Part of me is a storyteller.
I really wanted to show some of my heritage.
This is bok choy.
Next up is jerk chicken meat.
Jamaican Chinese, it's a, it's a very unique one.
And we finish with bean sprouts.
Noodles go on the plate and we pull it
straight from the wok.
I don't think a lot of people have seen that.
So of course it's really important for me to show a bit
of my heritage in the food that we're feeding people with.
- Table 32.
Oxtail with slaw!
(bell ringing)
So we have one fry, one jerk on our dirty rice.
All right, I'm going guys.
I'm going.
Here you go.
Three oh two.
You want the next patty?
- I'll take that patty.
- Okay, go, there you go.
Give me hot sauce please!
There you go, double jerk.
Three oh four.
- Just had a bit of a rush.
It was a, pretty intense everyone coming in altogether
but you know, it's, it's the thing that we enjoy the most.
- All right.
So now we're coming into almost the close of service.
Um we got the last couple of tables left to come in.
So we're just gonna put up some more chicken
just for those guys and then we wrap it up tonight, okay?
Here I go again.
(upbeat music)