- If I were a chicken,
this is how I would want to end my life.
- A nice briny, beautiful - Nice briny,
- citrus bath. - delicious citrus bath.
Served with dignity in this beautiful dining room.
(upbeat music)
- Today we have the pleasure of being at Crown Shy,
Chef James Kent's restaurant.
Amazing, talented chef.
Been at the NoMad, chef at Eleven Madison Park.
Today I'm gonna learn his technique
on this delicious chicken.
Really exciting.
(upbeat music)
We're here!
Chef James! - What's up, Chef?
- What's up?
- Hello.
- How are you?
- Welcome my dear.
- Thank you.
Where are we today?
So we are at Crown Shy. - Crown Shy!
- We are in the Financial District in New York City.
- Okay.
You grew up in this neighborhood, correct?
- I grew up in this neighborhood, yeah.
- History in the making.
- Yes, sir.
What is the plate of food we're making?
- So we are gonna do the Crown Shy chicken
- Awesome.
- With our Crown Shy hot sauce.
(upbeat music)
Okay, so we are cooking chicken.
We have some whole birds over here.
- Cool.
- It's a really simple protein
that everyone has a reference point for.
- Yes.
- There's a restaurant on the Upper West Side
called Flor de Mayo
- Okay.
- Which is a Chino-Cuban restaurant.
- Chino-Cuban.
- Chino, so basically Chinese people who lived in Cuba.
They came to New York,
and they have this like chicken that's brined and roasted,
And we kind of like took inspiration from that.
- Awesome.
- We've tried like five
or six different brines and marinades
and we landed on the one that's on the menu.
And it's acidic and fruity and citrusy and spicy.
Has a lot of flavor to it.
- So I brought my sketch book and I think you said
you have one as well.
- The most badass black book.
- Geez, it's like double the size of mine.
- I'm a graffiti artist also.
- Oh, my gosh.
- So this is my black book when I have a,
whenever we work on food we document it really well.
And you see like these early stages of things
and it's really just a really rough idea.
I really wanna really like be thoughtful about the food
that we do and think it through
and like have my team poke holes in it.
Oftentimes it takes a long time to get it to the point
where we're okay with it going on the menu.
We can't rush creativity.
- Cannot rush creativity.
So we are cooking chicken.
- We break the bird in half.
We debone the leg,
but still keeping the whole half-bird intact.
But we glaze it with citrus jus
and then build this like beautiful salad on top.
So we have little baby romaine.
We have sliced jalapeno, we have cilantro,
and then we have watermelon radish,
and then we drop a little quenelle of Crown Shy hot sauce.
- [Nyesha] Nice.
- And then a little bit of citrus jus.
- I'm a sauce girl, all day.
Excellent.
- It's a good way to start this book off.
- 100%.
(rhythmic upbeat music)
- Got some gloves for you, Chef.
- Thank you.
Small hands, big heart.
- Exactly.
- That's what they say.
- No one says that.
- So we wanna essentially cut the bird in half.
- Hiya.
- And we wanna keep the cage on the breast.
The bone on the thigh and the leg gets deboned.
But we wanna keep the foot on.
The head comes off.
The bones, we basically take the flat off and just leave
the little.
- The little wing buddy.
- The little gun.
- [Nyesha] What size are these birds?
- These are probably two and a half pound,
three pound birds.
So you either wanna, you wanna take a knife and cut
to the cage.
- Okay.
- Or with scissors.
- [Nyesha] Okay, from the top.
- Yeah, yeah, from the top.
Okay. - Ahh.
Cutting down the backbone. (grunts)
- That'd be at this point, so keep this cage on,
cause you wanna keep this breast really moist
while you're cooking.
But we like the idea of this being boneless.
Like I'm not a big fan of like chewing on leg bones.
- Yeah, makes sense.
- So the goal is to...
(drumming music)
- Done.
- Chef, you beat me.
I got the dull scissors. (laughs)
Is this regulation size or what?
Mine's not as nice as yours.
- No, it's beautiful.
Good job, chef.
This will be acceptable.
This goes on the menu.
We're selling this one.
- Excellent.
What does the citrus do for the chicken?
Is it similar to like fish, where it cooks it.
- It cooks it a bit so it's a ratio of salt to liquid.
And the four percent brine is a good standard brine
for marinating.
Lemon, orange, lime, grapefruit, ginger.
This is the ferment for the hot sauce.
And then we throw in a few pieces of star anise.
- [Nyesha] Star anise.
- Black pepper, salt, some habaneros.
- Just whole, - Yeah.
- No worries.
- No, and then the more you blend it,
the hotter it's gonna be.
So the idea is we just kinda wanna break up.
- Sort of not breaking down the chiles too much.
- All that much, yeah, yeah, yeah.
(blender running) Essentially that.
- You can hear the kind of pepper breaking down
a little bit.
- Yeah, and you see it.
The idea is like there's still bits
and chunks and stuff in it.
Marinate for 24 hours.
- [Nyesha] Okay.
- We saw that any further it starts to cook the bird.
- Interesting.
- Like the citrus starts to like think of like
a cevice, you know like it starts to really
cook it through.
- Yes. Cool, Chef, so chicken's done.
We just pour the marinade out.
- Just throw it over your shoulder.
24 hours later.
- [Nyesha] Yes.
Welcome back, chicken.
- [James] Little guy.
- Little buddy.
- What's up there, little dude?
So you can see, kind of show you the back end of it.
- Yeah.
- Like it basically like, it starts cooking.
- [Nyesha] Absolutely.
- [James] It starts cooking the meat.
- The texture's completely changed.
- And it's definitely, it's important
that we keep the bone on
because it protects the flesh from the cook in the citrus.
- [Nyesha] Gotcha.
- But then also during the cooking process
it protects it from overcooking.
- Okay.
- We take the bird out.
We dry it, we dry it for another like 12 hours.
- Okay.
- At the very least.
So moisture is the enemy of like crispiness.
- Yes.
- So the idea is that we dry it as long as we can
and we lay it out on a tray.
- Beautiful, how do we cook this chicken?
- So this gets grilled.
(rhythmic upbeat music)
So first a little bit of fat.
- [Nyesha] Any particular fat you use?
- We use grapeseed oil to cook and olive oil to cook.
- Cool.
- And then basically you wanna cook it on the skin side down
for maybe like six, seven, eight, nine minutes.
- Okay.
- You cross hatch the bird.
Get a really good render on the skin.
And then throw it in the oven.
Oven is very hot, so at that point it like crisps
and roasts the rest of the bird.
- What temperature do you cook the chicken at
the rest of the way?
- Hot.
- [James] So this is at 450.
- 450, how many chickens do you think you sell a night?
- We serve like 60 is probably the record, 65.
One of our cooks, he documented every bird he cooked.
This is the 1000th bird that I've cooked
since I came on this station.
- 1000.
- And it was like two, three weeks.
- Ah, the aroma is amazing.
You can smell the sort of citrus caramelizing on the grill.
- And so here, so you wanna so kinda get that cross hatch.
This is when you let the foot come down
to start cooking
- Do a lot of your guests eat the foot?
- Some people send it back.
We are here to make people happy
and if someone says that they don't want a foot,
we take it off.
- Wow.
- My cooks would have like tongs, but I only work
with little tiny tweezers.
So like this fine dining.
- This fine dining staff in here.
- Yeah, exactly.
- Does this go in the oven?
- Yeah, this goes in the oven.
- Okay.
- Yeah.
- Hot oven.
Bye, birdie.
- Yeah, peace out.
(rhythmic upbeat music)
It's pretty simple.
It's peppers, onions, garlic, and then habanero,
some chiles.
- Awesome.
- So it's really just about kinda cutting in half
and then cleaning out.
This ferment is three percent salt to a liter of water.
- [Nyesha] Okay.
- You just throw these in.
Cover it, cap it, fill it with water.
In about 10 days it turns into this.
It's essential you start with roasting the raw pepper.
These are some of the chopped fermented pieces.
- [Nyesha] Ah, that aroma is amazing.
- We add citrus to it also and cook it down.
We're gonna blend this.
- [Nyesha] Excellent. and make it correct.
- Perfect blendy.
Ah-ha we meet again.
Awesome.
- I would add a little bit of olive oil.
(blender running)
So this is the final product.
This is with all the heat.
Fire it.
- Bro, this s*** is next level.
It's amazing. - Cool.
- Very well balanced.
(rhythmic music)
- When we were designing food we wanted to make sure
that it was meant to be shared.
The idea is that each bite will be very similar
to the next.
- [Nyesha] Wow.
- So what do you think, looks like our drawing or no?
- I, 100% delicious, yes. - Looks pretty good.
- Yes, absolutely.
- So this is a citrus jus.
- [Nyesha] What's in the citrus jus.
- So it's made with a citrus gastrique
which is the zest of lemon, lime, orange, grapefruit
and ideal it's not completely coated.
And then so we have baby romaine,
watermelon radish,
some fresh chiles, and then cilantro.
Start with the romaine.
So we build with the leaves and then we add on top of that.
So the idea is to kind of shingle it
and then now we kinda add these.
So the idea is I wanna show this.
I put five of all of these things on.
- [Nyesha] This definitely looks like our sketch.
- [James] Not bad, right?
- [Nyesha] Yes.
- [James] I want people to like kinda work to get
to the bottom of it.
- [Nyesha] Yes.
- [James] And kinda figure out.
- [Nyesha] It's like discovery.
- [James] Yeah, exactly.
- [Nyesha] Yeah, absolutely.
Look at the precision.
- [James] And then, yeah, this is the dish.
- Wow. (claps hands)
Look at that.
- Let's go, Chef.
- [Nyesha] I can't wait to fight over this dish with you.
Let's get in there.
- No, there's enough to share.
- Fair.
- There's enough for us all.
- Okay, so what's the kind of perfect bite?
- I don't know, you know, it's like realistically
you wanna get a little bit of both.
So you can have like the leg meat down here.
- Okay, a little dark meat, a little white.
- Yeah, a little dark meat.
And then some of the breast meat up top.
- Okey-dokey.
- [James] And then idea is like a balance
of this stuff.
- Okay.
Yum, on the back of the palate, you have you know
the citrus from the hot sauce, you have the citrus
from the marinade in the chicken and then you have
this really, bold, bright, up front lemon vinaigrette
that has a nice, pleasant acidity to it
and then the killer radish texture that's kind of
freshness, a little peppery.
It's really, really lovely.
- Yeah, thank you.
- Of course.
- And it's, like I said, we love it.
I'm happy to show this to you.
I'm proud of it.
- [Nyesha] Yeah.
- People love it.
- I bet, amazing, winner.
- Winner, winner, winner, chicken dinner.
(laughs)
(jazzy music)