Primitive Fine Dining: 12 Hours at The Restaurant Changing NYC

This is a restaurant that takes you back in time, but it's also a restaurant that brings you into the future. They call it Primitive Fine Dining. It's both primitive and elevated, both weird and yet somewhat familiar. It's completely out of the box, is changing New York City's restaurant scene, and from foraging to the farmer's market to the dinner itself, for the next 12 hours, we're going behind the scenes to see how they create this insane menu. The name of the restaurant is called Ilis, and it's a combination of two words in Danish, in and is, fire and ice. So our kitchen is split in two. One is the ice part, and the other one is the fire pit. We don't have any gas. We're only using live fire. We're going back to how the caveman, in a way, was cooking back 100, 100 years ago. You kind of just like find what's there. How is it? Very, very dark. This is Ilis in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. It opened about a year ago and was started by Mas Ruffland and his team. They're taking the concept of fine dining in the US and turning it on its head, embracing what they call primitive fine dining, taking whatever they can find from nature and cooking it as simply as possible. So today we're super lucky to be getting an inside look into how they do this. And of course, at the very end, we'll be having an absolutely phenomenal meal. But the first thing we did was get up bright and early in the morning to forage for plants in New York City, which, honestly, I didn't even know was possible. This is glasswort or samphire, but most people call it sea beans. Those have good salinity. They're nice and tender right now. We're playing around with the idea of using the natural salinity as the way to preserve instead of like having to add salinity or add vinegar or anything. How can we utilize what's already there? It's like a salad that is already seasoned. Ilis brings us back to the past, to our hunter-gatherer days, when we really had to make the most of what nature gave us. The team was able to find cool ingredients everywhere we went, even on the side of the road to use later on in the day. This here is a plant called American sea rocket. American sea rocket's a really, really interesting plant. The flavor of it's very distinct. It's almost wasabi-like. So this is the rose hip. We utilize these things differently. So when they're open like this, the petals tend to be a little bit more tender. So if we want to do like a pickled rose petal or something like that, and if I would want to do more of an infusion, I would pick the unopened ones. When you infuse it, they express their color a little bit better. And so it's just two different kind of ways to utilize this same thing. Later on, we'll see how the ingredients we found here, like these fresh blossoms and the sea beans, will make their way into the final menu. But first, we need to make a quick stop at the farmer's market. A team with this ambitious of a menu needs a constant, diverse supply of ingredients, and they're really tied to the New York City community by coming to these markets. Fernando, Ilis's head chef, took me with him to the farmer's market so I could see the world through the eyes of a chef who sees endless potential and inspiration in everything. I always start with Norwich because I like the flavor. The whole concept of Ilis is spontaneous cooking. Whether it's foraging nearby or visiting local markets, they're completely flexible and always on the lookout for new ingredients. This is a new spinach lettuce. They made the plant able to open up, getting more photosynthesis in the old leaves because they are open. And they match the level of nutrients that spinach has. That's also why it's so important to keep your eyes, your mind, and your heart open all the time. You never know. And what that means is that the team doesn't know exactly what ingredients they're going to work with every day and what dishes they're going to make, as opposed to most fine dining restaurants that have a very regimented schedule of deliveries. It's a very unique style of cooking that only the best and most creative chefs in the world are able to pull off. It looks like so crazy. Vendors will often present ingredients they weren't even looking for, and the chefs will find ways to do crazy things with them. So, Saku Saku is a Japanese variety. So, I grow the tender sweet, which looks like this. And I'm really liking the crunchiness and flavor of this one. This is for you. Thank you. You can play around with it. Yeah. So, at Illus, you're not only getting the freshest produce, you're often getting new varieties of fruits and vegetables that literally just came into the world. Thank you, my man. So, we've spent the morning getting all these interesting ingredients with the team. And we know they focus on spontaneous cooking, but how do you turn these into composed dishes every single day when you don't always know what you're going to be working with? It turns out they spend a lot of time back in the research and development kitchen figuring out what to do. It's almost like live theater. And the maestros in charge are Mas, of course, and their research and development chef, Kane. So, R&D for us is, of course, it's a big thing for the restaurant because it's one of our DNAs. Of course, a restaurant is constantly moving to the next chapter all the time. I'd normally say this restaurant is always under construction. We're constantly building and getting bigger and bigger and bigger and better and better and better. One of their secret weapons is fermentation. Some bad harvests mean you don't always get the ingredients you were hoping for. But here, they don't just see an ingredient for what it is in the moment, but all the things that it could be. So, you have a lot of things here at Illis that we use basically out of either necessity to not throw something away or necessity to use an excess or to turn something that maybe not necessarily tastes good in its raw form, and we need to transform it somehow. It could either be salt, enzymes, bacteria. There's so many different ways you can do it. The whole idea behind the tomato miso, this was taken from visiting a farm and seeing all the tomatoes on the ground and having that idea of all of these things going to waste. This is a leaf that would normally get thrown away, but is also an invasive species. We can utilize fermentation to transform this so maybe this ends up wrapping something and then grilling it, or the stems from the Nasurtium, which by themselves, they taste good, but now they have the aroma of olives, the green olives and brine. This is something different. These are from last year. It translates and it tastes good. It doesn't taste bad, so it makes it taste better. I don't want to do the same dishes over and over and over again, but I believe that you have to follow the season as Mother Nature have created in vegetables or fish or meat, because nothing is the same in nature. Everything is tasting different by day by day. Okay, so now we're getting closer to dinner, but the question is, how were they able to execute on this really ambitious menu every night? Up until this point, we've explored mostly how Illes' food is unique, but one thing that makes Illes super interesting is that their approach to service is also really unconventional. I thought, okay, why not just forget about having waiters and just only cooks? So the cooks are serving the food. So meaning two weeks in the dining room, two weeks in the kitchen, swap all the time. It brought the team together in this somehow, so it becomes one house. There's no really doors. Everything is open. Anywhere you're standing in the restaurant, you can see everywhere in the restaurant. And to really see how they truly think through all the details of service, all the way down to the way the space is designed, I took a tour of the space with Will, one of Illes' co-founders. There are cool contrasts everywhere you look, from the massive yet welcoming open kitchen to the exposed brick warehouse walls and modern art alongside more naturalist features. This is one of the pieces from Farsco, New York next door. It's on loan from Ai Weiwei. It's an incredible Lego canvas. So as you get closer to it, each pixel is actually a single Lego. This piece is from Georg Voselitz from 1991. He did this entire series where he's painted himself in this really abstract self-portrait. It doesn't allow your eye to focus. You kind of register that it's a head and there's hands, but it doesn't register fully. So it really agitates the viewer, which I think is a great way to describe what some of Maz's food does as well. It really is hard to wrap your head around the food here. And there's so much going on behind the scenes or front and center in the open kitchen to bring these insanely creative dishes to life. I joined the team as they prepped for dinner and it was very down to the wire. There was a lot going on and dishes being tweaked to perfection, but there was still a sense of cohesion to everything from the unique dinnerware, some of which is alive, to the way the team adapted to last minute changes. Fernando. Yeah. What is this? Is that something you're selling? No, this one, we don't need, yeah? Okay. We didn't get to see it. I didn't get a show. No, right. It should be garbage for a show. It looks fine. It's fine. We can do it like this. It's fine. What is challenging is always these small things that's always going wrong. It's just a system. It's coming along. So yeah, they lost a claw. So it's growing a new one out. So it lost it and this is the new one that's growing out. So basically we are getting these cold. The ones that no one wants because they're deformed. The product of all their ideation and improvisational cooking every day is this super unique tasting menu that literally bottles up the fun surprise elements of the farmer's market and brings it to the guest. A chef brings a cart to you to present all the 16 raw main ingredients that'll star in the dishes later before they get cooked. And I got to see all these elements come together piece by piece. Market menu, you have three options of main courses. Normally we have the chicken. We have the trout. We also have the fluke, mussels, steak, and the pig's bladder, blackcurrant leaves. Any questions for the menu? All questions. You know everything, yeah? You wanna say one house? One house! After an eye-opening day with the team, it was 6 p.m., finally time for dinner, the moment we were waiting for. We kicked off the meal with a simple selection of vegetables that are in season and they even managed to make this look unfamiliar and exciting. Is everything edible? Everything is edible. Absolutely. This was followed by oysters from Long Island, except instead of your typical lemon, we had to juice a tangy cherry tomato over them for a hint of acidity and a little bit of sweetness. And then we had a whelk that came with a very special utensil. The tool that we used to get the whelk is a shovel made from the whelk's foot. It's crazy. Really herbaceous, nice and creamy. Just a little bit of texture from that whelk. It's beautiful. The dishes that followed really embodied the fire and ice concept at the heart of the restaurant. They prepared the same ingredients, both hot and cold, completely changing the flavors in the process. We have sea bream, given from Montauk, within 24 hours. Coming two servings. First, sashimi. We squeeze a little bit of lemon on it. If you want, you should chop sticks. It's just so light, so fresh. If you're gonna be doing a really long tasting menu here, that's the way you wanna start it out. The sea bream was presented to us as a crudo and Maz literally came out and took it back to be cooked over the grill on the other side. At this point in the meal, it was already one of the coolest interactive dining experiences I've ever had. I'm so used to seeing perfectly formal and choreographed movements in fine dining restaurants, so also having different chefs in aprons come directly to your table was really refreshing. Our next dishes were a chilled Maine lobster and later a grilled Maine lobster that couldn't have been more different. I usually don't get lobster served cold very often. The sauce, beautiful. Nice umami, deep flavor, but those petals in between give it this amazing florality. That might've been my favorite one taste-wise. That's great. Here, they really like doing things in two parts. They just grilled it, barbecued it. I mean, you can't beat that. Pot of reed, a little bit of lemon on it. I could have a hundred of those. That's phenomenal. We then had raw fresh tuna and a cured tuna with truffle. We bury it in salt for five days. After that, we take the salt away and we dry it out. We put seaweed around it, let it dry. The idea is you're tasting this completely raw tuna. And then up against this, it's almost like ham. You wouldn't think that you could successfully have two extremes in one dish. Raw fish that has bright floral notes paired with things like smoky aged tuna and pungent earthy truffles. But you can, and that balancing of contrasts is Illus' true specialty. Whether it's the sea bream, the lobster, or this tuna dish, it really is special. The next dish was caviar with green almond and fresh cheese that's made from the sap of fig leaves. If this dish sounds impossible, it's because it almost is. It's actually one of the most challenging dishes on the menu to execute. The whole idea behind the caviar dish that's on the menu right now is setting cheese with rennet made from figs. So we have to find figs, find a way to milk the sap, be able to set the cheese. And so like, that's been something really interesting that we've been working on recently. It has worked, it has not worked. And so it's just up and down right now. And it's very challenging. Weird combinations, interesting presentation as always, of course. I'm excited to try this one. It's got a natural brininess, a little bit of that saltiness. That cheese almost reminds me of silken tofu. I love the hot, full textures. The caviar, because it was charcoaled on one side, it's warm on one side, cold on the other, which is a really interesting feeling. Next up were these fava beans with unis smoked inside of them. This is one of the most innovative dishes I've ever had, and really shows you how Illus is thinking out of the box, not only in terms of complexity of flavors, but also in terms of presentation. It looks like a bamboo. Inside, I have these little chambers. People in Asia cook inside of bamboos. You have a vegetable that looks like a bamboo, why not cook it inside of that thing? Another crazy combo of flavors that I never would have guessed. I don't think anybody in the history of mankind has ever made that dish. The chicharron is so crunchy, but the uni is so smooth, so it's almost like there's a spread on top of that chicharron. The fava flavor comes through really nicely. I mean, that's a great balance of flavors. This plate is so freaking cool. I hope you're seeing this through the screen, because it's unreal how good this plate is. Illus probably isn't for everyone. Most people leave excited about food, learning about the possibilities of where it can go, and of course, having a delicious meal. But as with anything unique, there are some who didn't enjoy it as much. And I understand, because the flavors and textures are uncommon, and many of the dishes aren't fully, fully refined. But I believe that's the beauty of this restaurant, and why it's the most exciting new restaurant in the country. And this dish is a case in point. The next dish was just listed as mussels on the menu. But what I love about this place is that nothing prepares you for how absolutely insane and unexpected the cooking methods and plating can get. These mussels were steamed in a pig's bladder that Mass cut open at the table. And by the way, this bread with a mussel mayo on top was so good. One of the best bites of the night. The texture on that is so smooth, so soft. Kind of just melts in your mouth. It's got a little bit of that pig's bladder blackburn flavor. What I'm really excited about is the broth. If you're sick, that's what you drink to cure yourself. Not too seafood-y, but some really nice, almost earthy flavors. It's beautiful. Next up were king trumpet mushrooms cooked in kelp, which made them extra savory while preserving the nuttiness and sweetness that they're known for. And the brininess from the kelp was a perfect precursor to the sea bream from earlier, which reappeared towards the end of the meal. This time it was grilled over hojasanta leaves and served with nasturtiums to create little fish tacos. It's a really simple preparation that honestly just works. The sunflower miso adds a nice bit of creaminess. The fish, perfectly tender, fall apart, very flaky. And the nasturtium leaf just adds a little bit of that herbaceousness to the dish. After this was a fun surprise because the next dish incorporated an ingredient we found earlier today, sea beans. This is baby squid from Long Island filled with tomato and served with those sea beans we found foraging in the morning. It's really cool that we got to see them all the way through its lifespan from being on the beach this morning to being on my plate tonight. It's paired with squid and it looks amazing. The tomato tare, so flavorful. The sea beans actually give a little bit of that like a solidity. We worked hard for this dish, so I'm glad we got to try it. To round out our savory courses for the night, we had this gnarly looking golden Amish chicken with pickled ramps and a sauce made from chicken and green rhubarb. They've basically taken the chicken, put it back onto the leg after they've turned it into essentially like this meatball. It looks freaking great, but it's so juicy. The spices are amazing. It's not a spicy sort of heat, but it's spice driven. That is phenomenal. Holy crap. We finished the night with desserts, which like every other dish on the menu, refused to be put in a box. And not gonna lie, these desserts were incredible. This wheatgrass and sorrel granita came on a stunning patch of wheatgrass. It was so refreshing and vegetal with a little lemony kick from the sorrel. Finally, we had a super delicate and spongy oak mousse that they puffed up using a vacuum and that balanced nicely with a rich and nutty caramel sauce. And with that, the dinner was over. So after 12 hours with the team here at Illis, from foraging in the morning to the farmer's market to prepping for dinner in the kitchen and an 18 course, four hour long meal, seeing some of the most interesting foods, you can really see just how special Illis is. They're embracing that primitive fine dining concept and truly changing what a restaurant can look like in New York City. It's a place that's unique, creative, and of course, delicious, and is somewhere that everyone should check out. 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