The Former NOMA Chefs’ Wild New Restaurant | On The Line | Bon Appétit

Every second that I am breathing inside of this restaurant, I need to come up with new dishes. I'm the chef for research and development. In order to be able to change the menu as frequently as we do, we need to have one person whose job it is to find these things to create preservation, fermentation. My typical day starts at buying produce from the farmer's market and creating a dish by 5 p.m. Chef Mads Resselin is the owner and he was one of the original chefs who founded Noma in Copenhagen. So the dishes we create are expected to be perfect and the service level has to be perfect. Yo, what's up guys? My name's Kane. I'm the chef of research and development at Ilis here at Union Square Farmer's Market. It's the bloodline of the restaurant. It's how we get everything to be inspired. All the flavor starts here. Last night we decided we want to change a bunch of stuff so we need to come up with some stuff before service day around 5 p.m. So let's hit it. We got to go get all these vegetables. Time's ticking. Halal pastures, they're an incredible source for us. They grow in the black soil so a lot of their root vegetables, things that have higher sulfur contents, very spicy, rooty things are very great from them. What up Willie? Morning. How's it going? Willie is a very talented cook at the restaurant. He kind of takes care of the daily grind of things we already have established. I would say that 80% of what we're getting is going to be for dishes that already exist and then the other 20% are things that are working that are new. We have an idea so I need to pick something that can fall into that idea that I've already kind of started in my head or Mads specifically has started in his head. He was the chef who started Nomo. To me he's the most creative chef in the world. He can see the sun choke a million times but he sees it today and it's like the first time he's looked at it and he starts to conceptualize and just break things down in his head visually. Everything is always going to change just based on today. So this is something that is going to change. Now I'm already thinking about it. Let's grab some carrots chef. We're changing the snacks for the short menu and this is what I'm going to be working on today. These vegetables are going to be a representation of things that are now. It's about 14 or 15 different preparations. Some of them are inspired by today some of them started a year ago. We do a lot of fermentation. It's a big part of my job as a research and development chef to be able to preserve these things. We're done shopping here. Hello pastors. Thank you for stopping by. Yeah no worries. Thank you. And we're going to move on to Norwich Farms. They're doing this on a scientific level. Their ability to actually produce new seeds and new flavor. It's where we can meet right. It's what we see eye to eye. What is this? This is it's called maraschi. So beautiful. It's a cauliflower. It's a Japanese variety so it tends to be very sweet. These are so beautiful. Everything about these we need. We will grab some peppers. We're going to grab some aji dulces which are sweet but having a very tropical flavor. Norwich for me grows the best peppers. I've always naturally been curious about what goes on in the farming side of things. This is where it always starts and it will end with me as far as cooking goes. It's the single most important thing for me as an R&D chef for Ilis. So today we have about 150 pounds of stuff. It's very much a light haul for us. We probably spent about four to five hundred dollars in produce outside of the pumpkin seeds. We're going back to the restaurant guys. We gotta start putting all this stuff up. We got dishes to make by 5 p.m. We gotta go. I'm gonna bring you guys into the kitchen. We're going to kind of disperse these vegetables to some of my friends who will be joining us in the kitchen soon. When you come into Ilis you guys are dining inside the kitchen. You're not dining inside of a restaurant. Our cooks are servers. Our servers are cooks and just offer a different style of dining and bringing the cooks to the table. So I'm taking all this stuff out. We get a good idea of what needs to get done for today. I'm going to get changed and then we're going to come down here and start cooking over the fire, getting some stuff prepared for tonight. You guys ready to run? You got your running shoes on? I'm not holding back now. I gotta cook. I haven't been cooking. Ready? Let's go. We're going to take these carrots. We're going to dehydrate over the fire. We use about three different types of wood here. Just a mixture of different fruit woods that grow along the Hudson. So walnut, oak, different types of cherries and apples, all forged trees that are actually dying so we're not killing any trees. It creates an interesting element for cooking because the woods all burn differently. We're going to dip them in the sauce that we made. The sauce is going to be made from a vinegar from parsnips. It's kind of white counterpart, right? These are overwintered parsnips from last year we juiced and then we made alcohol of them. From that alcohol we turn into a vinegar. So we're just going to dip them, hang them, dip them, hang them, take them over the fire. It's going to highlight the sweetness by using some honey in there. So beautiful to be able to have this as an element for us to prepare food. Something's like, this is normally something we throw away. We just hang it and then just dry it above the fire, make a powder, make a vinegar, make an oil, anything. It just helps expand our flavor vocabulary, continuing to compound flavors into it. It is always our priority to constantly evolve and paying attention to things throughout its micro seasons, right? Restaurants thrive on consistency but for us the constant change is better for Mads and I to create. He told me one day that I like to salt things, blend them and ferment them and that's what I'm good at. So that's what we're going to do now. We're going to go ahead and get these sunchokes processed. Sunchokes, super sweet, will tend really, really well to the fermentation process of using koji. Koji is an active fungus that you use to break down starches and proteins into flavor, umami. Sunchokes are full of starch, full of sugar, so it's going to lend to a very beautiful miso in the end. So it's a vessel for us to maintain certain seasons that might not be as long as we want them to be. This is a huge part of my role as the chef of research and development because our larder is what defines the flavor here at the restaurant. These guys are going to get smoked until they're tender and then we're going to put them through a meat grinder, mix them with our koji, put them at a certain temperature and just forget that they're there because I'm really impatient. Right now I'm just stoking the fire. We want like a nice smoking temperature. I grew up in Texas, the land of barbecue, and I think barbecue can extend beyond meat but smoking is such a beautiful tool. We like to indirectly cook things over the heat, not just grill them. The idea is for us to kind of dehydrate them, pull some of the sugars out, and then we can incorporate more water later. And we want to keep this nice and low and slow, so I'm going to close this guy. We want to smoke at about 140 Celsius, 150 Celsius, until the sunchokes are nice. I'm going to start some grits. It's going to be an added level of starch and protein for our miso. We have a spice wall here. It's a representation of past, present, and future works. A beautiful way to display it, get inspired, and just see what we have in house. The flavor library, exactly, exactly. These are pencil grits coming from Anson Mills. All of our grains that we actually make the koji with, we inoculate on Anson Mills grains. So while we're getting these sunchokes ready, I'm going to get these fermentations from downstairs. These are all our vinegars that we're taking off today. It's all been fermenting for a very long time. Alcohol is what vinegar is made from, so we started with a yeast. It takes about a month in order for us to produce like sufficient enough alcohol, and we'll add sugar. We'll taste things about the six to eight wheat mark. The natural yeast will dissolve all the alcohol and produce acid, and that's what vinegar is. This one is a vinegar made from berries and roses. This is a vinegar that we made from wild cherries that I foraged from Maine, and then this last one is from feral apple. So I'm just tasting for acidity right now, making sure that all the alcohol is metabolized. It should be acidic and not alcoholic, right? These all need more sugar, and it just needs to go for a little bit longer. So this is a sugar from Japan. The unrefined sugar just has a higher level of like umami and earthiness to it. The sugar will help feed the yeast, and it will produce a higher level of acidity. This one is for sure done. This is the fig vinegar. We took figs, we pectinized them, and then added Okinawa brown sugar to it. So we're going to strain this one off, and then let's see if we can use it for something for service tonight. What's coming out right now? It's called a scoby. That scoby is actually where the yeast lives whenever it's inside of the vinegar. I took a red wine vinegar scoby that I've had for about 10 years, and I use that as the mother for this one. All of these like starters and cultures you have, the more you use them, the more you're actually going to have these deeper flavors. So it's really fun to be able to keep something alive for 10, 15 years. It's like a sourdough starter, but with vinegars and kojis. This is actually a garum that we made from wild boar. Garum is the oldest way of making fish sauce. In Rome, they would take all the fish from the boats, and then they would salt them, whole guts, everything in there, and those enzymes from the guts would help break down the fish and produce this very umami-like sauce. It's great. Tastes like parmesan, plums, and smoked meat. So this is the man, the legend, Mads Resslins. Chef, I don't know what to say about you. You're one of the best people I've ever met in my entire life. I think the same. I love this guy so much. We get in the kitchen and so this is the actual roasted like garum garum. It needs to get strained. And this is the actual miso product. I love it. Big vinegar. It's every single day. All right, this is going to come off. We're going to go strain this in the back. I'm going to give it to my boy Nate. So this is made from bison, so we're going to do a bison tartare with the garum sauce that we produced. We just decided right now. So that's how fast the menu can change. We're going to take the liquid, and that becomes an actual true like fish sauce style liquid. Press the paste through a wine press to get as much liquid extracted out as possible. And then all of the paste is also edible, so we're not going to throw anything away. All right, so we're going to start grinding some of our components for the miso making process. Take these guys out. So we have the sunchokes. They've been smoking. We have grits nicely cooked, and it's going to bind everything together. Get this broken down so it actually mixes for the miso. Vegetable-based misos like this, they take a little bit more time. There's less enzymatic properties to it. So we're going to let this age for about 8 to 12 months, probably right around when the sunchoke flowers become a thing. Planning out a dish for next year, basically. We popped some corn earlier. This is going to go into our miso. It's just going to give it like another layer of complexity. All the popcorn is adding its flavor to it. I don't know, this is something I decided this morning. I snuck off and bought some popcorn. It's kind of funny to think about like something dried being fresh, but dried corn right now is really at its peak, and we'll see what the flavor does. That's the fun thing about R&Ding is like it doesn't always have to be so exact. We're going to hit it with some koji. This is salt. We're going to pack this in a little bit at a time, packing it super, super tight. Try to prevent any air pockets in there, and that's going to prevent it from spoiling. We're going to put a layer of salt on this, throw some plastic on it, put a weight on it, and it's going to go into our fermentation area. So it's 2 p.m. We're going to get some of our lighter pickled vegetables ready. It would be a shame for us to like get these really beautiful like spicy radishes and not try to highlight some of its just really fresh qualities. We're going to use an apple vinegar that I took off yesterday, probably with like ginger and sake leaves, something like light and floral. I love this idea of like sheeting vegetables, so you're eating like a fruit leather almost. This is really weird. Oh, I see. This is kind of interesting. Look at that. R&Ding always came about because of my love for the creative side of this, but I know that this was the job that I was born to do. I've always wanted to be a chef, always wanted, never anything else. First time I worked a 14-hour shift in a kitchen, I was 13 years old. I would skip class and I would go cook. I'm going to show Mads this and see what he thinks about it. This is one of the settings for the roller. You see that? Yeah, I love it. Noma itself was such an impactful restaurant on me. I gave up everything to just follow Mads for the past couple years and moved my life to Mexico, moved my life to here, traveled with him and just did whatever I could to just understand this man's brain. It's kind of stupid. Is it stupid? I like the idea of like cooking it out like that, almost. Just put it in water. The cold water will probably change the texture and see if we change our mind about it. The way that I learned from Mads is like you have to keep an open mind. If you try to overthink things, you lose that flow of what the possibility could be. It's about 2.15 right now. We need to get moving on what we need for service tonight. This is sea urchin that just got flown in from Maine. These are similar to the ones that you're going to see in Hokkaido. So very small. They're buffoon. Very beautiful. I love sea urchin. Like I have a tattoo of it on my hand. Like it's one of my favorite things in the world. We always imagine this restaurant being almost like an extension of the market. So this is going to be part of our snacks. So we have these carts go around. We present some options for them to add on to their meal at the beginning as a way for us to kind of bring the market to them. I'm going to go ahead and take this off, pass it to the boys in the back. They're going to get it all brined in seawater so it's ready for service. Mario cart. Chef, if you finish these up, get them all like this. And then Nate knows how to get them all brined, but we just need to take the tongues out. We're going to go into a meeting and talk about tonight. Okay, very fast. Seven course menu. There's some changes to the menu. It's uni. We're not doing base scallops tonight. It was too noisy yesterday. That's why I walked around to you guys and make the noise. Do you need a hammer? Do you need a drum set? Put it down. You can make a lot of noise, but we are in a completely open kitchen. It's okay people feeling their part of the kitchen. That's the part of the show. Really be careful. We do have an event on Sunday. It'll be a busy, busy, busy two days. Let's have one house. One house. Oh my god, on camera too. Come on guys. The garum that we pulled off this morning is going to be going into a new set for our menu tonight. In the sauce, I also mixed some of the fig vinegar. So this is the two sauces that we actually said were completely done. This is bison that we get from a ranch. These bisons that just kind of roamed on their land for a long time. This tartar is a reflection of the actual meat that we turned into the garum itself. The sauce will actually be a paste of these crickets and dried currant leaves. Burn some onions in there. We fermented some garlic. This is going to be kind of the base of the flavor. Mads conceptualized this idea of kind of plating over the top of this lid, thinking about a beautiful way for us to kind of present something in a very unique way. And then we mix it into a sauce that we made from some egg yolks. So kind of classic like tartar flavors going on here, right? So this is just going to kind of give us a base for these radishes that we got from a moon farm to kind of stick. Super spicy are going to go really, really well with the tartar. The idea is that these radishes become a way for you to actually pick up the meat and then dip it into the sauce. These capers are from last year. We forged a bunch of blueberries from New Jersey in the Pine Barrens. And this is just going to add to some acidity. It's kind of like one of our favorite ways to preserve berries, salt them in their unripe stage. This is the bison heart here in smoke, like katsuobushi, like bonito. We're just going to shave that over the top of it. It's going to give it like a smoky kind of salty dried meat flavor. This goes like this. And then now chef says yes or no. And we taste it and we see we're happy with the flavor, the idea of the actual dish. Nine out of ten times I would say no. So the idea with this dish is you eat it with your hands. And I don't know if anyone here has been hunting before, but there's a tradition that if you have your first kill, you should take a bite of a raw heart, carving out the heart and eat it with your hands. So I like this kind of raw meat with raw hands. You just dip it like this. I got the fried shallots. You need that, yeah? Yeah. Crispy shallots. Yeah. It's very powerful. Too powerful? Too much sauce here. Yeah, put less sauce. This is too much, too big. Okay. Put a little bit less on this. Okay. There it is. It's smoking. Tastes delicious. It's just too much. You're getting 12 courses. This is a lot. So we'll play one more up, try it again. We always just keep trying and trying and trying and trying until it's perfect. We do use very beautiful products here. So when we price things out, there is a certain level of food cost that is probably more than your average restaurant. Biggest impact of us being able to combat that is utilizing the scraps and like, you know, nothing goes to waste. We don't throw anything away. So, you know, the food cost for us balances itself out. So this is perfect now. It's approved and it's good to go. These are the carrots that we saw hanging by the fire earlier today. Really happy with them. They're still raw, which is the most important part. Taking the raw flavor, but they're still crunchy. So these carrots are going to be served with the snacks. Accompany some of our vegetables that we have fresh from the market this morning. So we took the peppers from Norwich and then we pickled them. This is the leaves from the cabbage that we bought this morning from Norwich. And then last year's turned into a white kimchi. The idea is that we're just making a very beautiful garden with all of these vegetables that we got from the market this morning. This is a mixture of minimalism and deep technique. We're going to serve it with a sauce that we make from last year's citrus. It's like creamy vinaigrette and salted beech plum and shiso paste. This is from the pumpkin seeds that we saw earlier today. And it's going to be going inside this pumpkin sea urchin dish we want to try out. They took all of the inside out of this pumpkin. So we completely cleared it out. It's going to be paired with mandarin. So I'm just going to cut some fresh mandarin. I think pumpkin and uni is a really classic flavor and combination in my mind. So we have some salted egg yolks which we've just cured. And some soy and mirin. Some marigold flowers. Pairs really well with mandarin. This is some dulse. The dulse is a very beautiful delicate seaweed. This is pumpkin broth. And this is the oil. I'm going to see if Mads is okay with this. The same pumpkin seeds just toasted and deglazed with a little bit of fish sauce to give them a salty. Yeah. Okay. Happy with it. All right. We got the menu sorted out right before we serve it. It's kind of classic our style, right? All of the dreams that we had in our head were accomplished. I think even more so there's things in the back of my mind that I'm already working on for next week. I can't wait for our guests to come in and try it themselves. Thank you so much for following me. And now you know what it's like to be the chef of research and development for Mads Refsland at Illest. Peace.