- I call this our secret ingredient.
It's the charcoal, which makes everything that it touches
or cooks over taste better.
This is Marabu charcoal, which is an invasive species.
It was like taking over the forest in Cuba.
And then they figured
that they could just turn it into charcoal,
and then actually like sell it
and make some money off of it.
(bright music)
These are just little like chimney bricks
that we actually bought at Home Depot.
We got these amazing grills for like 20 grand each.
And then we decided that we wanted to cook
a little differently than they were designed for.
So we really want to keep the smoke and the heat insulated,
coming directly what we're cooking.
Everything we're cooking all day is gonna be so close
to that charcoal.
It's kind of almost like we're smoking it,
even though you're really not.
Mike, our owner, grew up over in Israel
and has trained over there and worked over there.
We just have to really respect the people
and the culture that we are representing.
And then just have to be like thoughtful and intentional
about the flavors and the spices that we use,
so that we're not just gonna put something random
on the menu and call it Israeli when it's really not.
When you look around New York City,
you see people like slinging hot dogs
on the side of the street.
When you're like walking around Tel Aviv,
if you just look for the smoke,
you know someone's cooking.
And you can just go and get like a beautiful little sandwich
or like a little skewer or like a kebab over rice
or something like that.
People have been cooking this way,
in this style for thousands of years.
So it's really cool to be able to do
that in a restaurant setting.
(upbeat music)
(bright music)
This is Sam.
He's our executive sous chef here,
and he's getting ready to go ahead and grind up
all the meat for our brisket kebab.
We've figured out that the nicest mix
is gonna be brisket with some chuck roll.
- [Sam] Let's start with that brisket.
- [Andrew] People will probably kill us if they know
that we're taking a brisket and doing this to it.
- [Sam] But it'll make such a beautiful product. You know?
- So there's not too much intermuscular fat
going on here, but when we get into the chuck roll,
they're gonna see it's like really nicely marbled
and just kind of all throughout it, which is cool.
And that's kind of the reason why we decided to do,
instead of purely brisket, to do both.
So you kind of get the best of both worlds.
We grind the meat here ourselves
because we really wanna focus on good fat content
so that we can spend as much time as possible over the grill
and cook it basically to well done,
but it'll still be like tender and juicy.
- And we're gonna grind right onto a tray over ice.
And that just ensures that everything stays as cold
as possible and that the fat doesn't melt down
as we're grinding our meat.
(machine whirs)
So we grind it with the coarse attachment,
and we're gonna run it through twice.
When I cut the long strands like that,
we can just drop it right in.
And I don't really need to do anything else.
I don't have to push little chunks down.
It kind of just pulls itself.
These beautiful, white strands,
that's all the fat being ground up.
And it's gonna stay nice and juicy
because of all the fat that's in there.
And that's kind of the importance of using the blend
of the chuck and the brisket
because the brisket had that beautiful cap on it,
that's the stuff that's kind of gonna render out
as you cook.
The chuck has all the intermuscular fat
that's gonna really stay in there.
So we are gonna get some beautiful drippings,
but we're also gonna have a lot of the the fat stay
in the kebab itself.
And that's what's gonna allow it to be nice and juicy.
All right, so this is our meat blend.
After the first grind, as you can see,
it's super, super coarse like this.
We want it to all be homogenous so it can kebab nice.
So we're gonna blend it through one more time.
(grinder whirring)
You can see how it's incorporating a lot better now.
It's all becoming more of one thing.
All right, so we're gonna add our brisket/chuck mixture
to the mixer.
So I'm gonna grab the rest of the ingredients here.
We have the baking soda, the onion, and the seltzer water
that's been sitting for a few minutes.
This baking soda is gonna give the kebab
what we call a little bit of a bounce.
So a lot of kebabs, when they're cooked over the grill,
and all the fat renders out,
will actually get a lot smaller.
This is gonna puff up on us a little bit.
(utensil clanking)
So we're gonna add our parsley, cilantro, some salt.
and this is our harif.
So this is our house-made chile paste.
Harif means spicy in Hebrew.
It's actually gonna be on the smokier side.
It's not extremely spicy.
One nice, even piece of meat.
This one batch for 10 pounds is gonna get us
about 20 to 22 skewers.
We use the entire brisket.
We don't trim a single thing off of it
because that fat is so important to us.
So we get almost a 100% yield on our entire whole meat
before it goes into a kebab.
All right, so I'm gonna fill this whole bowl up.
We're gonna put in the fridge for about half an hour,
and then we'll be ready for skewer time.
The high fat content here and the shape
and the way that we're gonna cook it so close to the coals
is almost gonna make it like Bulgarian style.
And that's just like one example of the different cuisines
that make Israeli cuisine what it is.
The name of the game with the brisket kebab,
specifically, is we want one long, cylindrical piece
going on because we want it to cook completely evenly.
Sometimes, the meat tends to get a little more narrow
here and here than the rest of the kebab.
We want it to be completely even
so it can cook exactly the same everywhere.
We want to pinch it at the end.
The whole bottom has to make contact
with the skewer, or else, you'll get little gaps as it cooks
and it'll start to peel off.
It's also important to work pretty quickly.
So you're not overworking it.
If you give it like too much heat or keep messing with it,
the meat again, is kind of gonna fall off the skewer.
So it has to be a pretty quick process,
and we need to keep the meat nice and cold as we're going.
The way that our grills are set up is we have bricks
that balance the kebab on it.
So we wanna start about right here to give it
enough space to rest, and for the meat to be completely
in the middle of the grill.
The fat will kind of start to drip down,
and then the smoke will come up.
And that really gives it its flavor and its smoky aroma.
Just blasting these on like a gas grill,
you're not gonna get the same effect
as if you're just suspending it over the heat
and gently cooking it.
(upbeat percussion music)
- Any meal anywhere in the Middle East,
specifically in Israel, always is gonna start out
with salatim, which is just gonna be like a variety
of different like spreads or pickles or like sauces.
It's the first thing you're gonna get
when you're dining here,
no matter what you order,
no matter what you're doing,
you're gonna have some hummus, pita, and salatim.
It's just like a good foundation.
Like from there, you can have such a great meal.
(bright music)
So we're just gonna go ahead and get these guys on here.
So this is for our eggplant babaganoush,
which is one of our 10 salads.
They're gonna spend a lot of time over the grill.
They're gonna like boil from the inside out.
So the skin will get nice and like crispy
and like almost burnt.
And then the inside will be like molten,
it'll get like super creamy,
a little bit sweet, and just like smoky as hell.
You can see the skin starting to blister
and char, which is awesome.
That's what we want.
It's just really important to remember
that we are like representing people's culture,
and we're doing things that people have been doing
for thousands of years.
Like everybody's grandma in the Middle East
is making their own baba.
And it's gonna be very similar to this,
but they'll all be tweaked and like slightly different.
But why do you wanna f*** with something
that's already great?
They're just gonna hang out here like this for a few hours,
just to get all that extra moisture out
and really concentrate the flavors.
And as you can see,
we already got a ton of moisture out of them.
What we're gonna do now is peel away like the gnarly parts
of the skin.
Like this stuff here, that's like really charred,
and like probably pretty unpleasant to eat.
And we don't go crazy with peeling it 'cause a little bit
of that skin is actually gonna be pretty delicious.
And it's actually also gonna add some texture to the baba.
We also are gonna hand-cut it just like a little bit rustic,
nice and chunky.
But yeah, it's gonna be the tehina, the eggplant.
We'll add a little chopped parsley to this,
then we're just gonna season it
with like olive oil, lemon juice, salt.
And whenever someone who has lived in or spent time
in Israel says that it like reminds them of home,
or like something that their grandmother made,
that is like the biggest compliment you can ever give
to any one of us.
So now, this will be the first stage of the short rib prep.
And we're actually gonna skewer braised meat,
which is a little crazy 'cause probably not many people
are doing that.
So we're gonna begin by curing it.
So we have a barbecue spice blend that is sweet
and hot smoked paprika.
Cumin, garlic powder, onion powder.
What we're gonna braise it in then
is pretty traditional barbecue,
which is just ketchup, brown, sugar, a little bit of water.
And then we add to that passion fruit puree,
as well as amba.
Amba's a really cool, fermented mango sauce.
And then they're gonna braise nice, low, slow,
around like 275 degrees for like three or four hours,
until they're not quite falling apart,
but like just nice and tender.
And then we'll go ahead and skewer 'em up.
So as you can see, the liquid gets like nice
and gelatinous from the meat cooking
and all the collagen and everything.
Mike, can you go ahead and take one of these buddies out?
What we'll do is we'll take these.
We'll cut them into one ounce pieces,
and then it'll just be five pieces on every skewer.
And then they'll get picked up over the charcoal,
on the skewer, which is also cool
because we're increasing surface area
so that we can have as much contact
with the smoke and the charcoal as possible.
And then we'll take this liquid
we'll reduce it down a little bit.
And as it's over the coals,
we're actually gonna be glazing it too.
It's so ancient and it's so primitive,
but like we can do it in a elevated setting here.
But like at the end of the day, we're cooking meat
on metal sticks over fire, which is pretty awesome.
So we get the branzino
from Samuels & Son out of Philadelphia.
We've served the same dish for two years.
It's like the only thing on the menu
that we have never changed.
So this is Mike Mayo, he's the CDC here on property.
So he's gonna work on the branzino.
- It comes head on, tail on, whole fish, two pounds.
It's for two, it comes pre-fabbed.
We have specs that we like them to sort of fabricate
the fish for us.
It looks really nice.
It's very uniform every single time we get the fish.
So we're certainly lucky to have them doing this
for us because this cuts out a lot of the labor.
It's a very intensive process to keep the fish
looking so intact as it does,
while still getting it to look
like nothing's been done to it.
We check every fish for quality, obviously.
Run your fingers down each side of the filet,
and just make sure that we are not serving
our guests anymore bones.
So at this point, we just simply season
with a little bit of salt,
just to make sure that every piece of that fish
is well-seasoned before it hits the grill.
And then we're gonna take some
of our tomato-ginger marinade.
And then, we're just gonna kind of massage this in.
In that marinade, there's tons of ginger, tons of tomato,
garlic, onion, coriander, caraway, and dill seed.
And then when it goes to the grill,
we'll put a mixing bowl on top of it,
sort of create some convection.
And then, we'll flip the fish one time.
We'll let the fish finish.
We don't play around with it too much.
And at that point, we'll take it off.
We'll put a little bit more of the tomato-ginger
across the top of the crispy fish.
And then we'll season it with citrus salt,
all the herbs that we have in house.
And we'll send it out with a bunch of lemons.
(bright music)
- Because of the fact that we're doing skewers
and the fact that we are breaking things down
to smaller pieces,
we can use things that are typically like byproduct
or maybe we get it for like a good deal.
It gets a little bit cheaper because filet, for instance,
everybody wants like center cut, like beautiful steaks.
So then our purveyors have, they call it "tips and tails,"
which they're either gonna like throw in a freezer
and forget about or throw away.
So it's just a really nice opportunity for us
to take something cool and something that people
think of like a fancy,
like maybe white tablecloth steakhouse,
or whatever, like getting a filet.
But we're gonna chop it up,
throw it on a stick with some really cool marinade,
and just grill it over the charcoal, you know?
So this is like a brand new thing
that we're hopefully gonna be putting on the menu.
- When we're approaching a new dish
and doing R&D, a lot of it has to do
with what's available to us.
So, I mean, we're opportunistic
with this really nice cut of meat
that came to us a little cheaper.
We gotta think about the season and we gotta think
about what makes it authentically Israeli.
- Like, it has to tell a story.
That's chermoula, which is like a traditional African sauce.
It's almost like kind of like chimichurri-esque.
So I think it'll be really cool with steak.
- The North African influence on Israeli food is huge.
- So this is just a puree of parsley, scallions,
a little bit of oil, some all spice and some black pepper.
And then a bunch of garlic.
We don't want any of that skewer exposed
'cause that'll get too hot,
and then you'll start cooking from the inside out.
Where we really want all of our cooking
to be coming from the outside
so we get that beautiful caramelization and char
on the meat.
- [Sam] Just gonna even out our coals a little bit
to give ourselves the nice cooking area.
- We decided to go like larger chunks here
so that we can get a nice like sear and caramelization
on the outside while still keeping it like medium rare
to like medium.
There we go.
What do you think?
- Thinking how delicious it is.
- We can definitely like send those out to people tonight,
get some feedback and make sure everybody else is
as into it as we are.
And then we will run through the sirloin we have,
and put this on the menu for the weekend.
(bright music)
So charcoal is awesome.
And it's what people all over the Middle East do.
A lot of people will tell you like live-fire cooking
is maybe the hardest type of cooking,
but the way that we have our menu designed
and engineered, and like the way that all of our stuff
is prepped out is like really thoughtful
and like done with a lot of intentions.
So it's basically just like managing those coals,
managing the fire.
And as long as it's good temperature,
your food is gonna be amazing.
Like I tell people all the time,
the charcoal's like our secret ingredient
'cause everything that it touches just gives us
that beautiful smokey, grilled flavor.
Hope nobody thinks that what we're doing is like too simple
because simplicity is very important to us.
People have been cooking this way, in this style
for thousands of years.
Everything that we're doing,
we are very thoughtful about it.
We're doing it with intention.