How a Master Chef Runs Washington D.C.'s Most Expensive Restaurant — Mise En Place

So this is a shima-aji coming from a oita. We're gonna break this one down and lightly cure it and then we'll sear it with a little bit of bean shotan charcoal just really hard on the flesh. Keep it nice and raw but serving it warm so like you can kind of taste the fat of the fish. We built this restaurant to showcase how amazing the quality of the products are. This month has been like the best shima-aji of the year. This is definitely like one of my favorite fish. Like you can see the fat right there. Looks like the top of a ribeye. We have like the Japanese wood charcoal, the bean shotan, right in the fire. We get it hot as we can and then we sear that straight on the fat of the shima-aji and it kind of just like softens the texture of the fish. Regardless of everything else, accolades-wise, the idea originated with we want to cook the best seafood in the world. Predominantly like Japan holds that category. Jon's a 16-seat tasting menu only counter focused on all the luxury ingredients of Japan cooked over a wood fire. Bresca's a French bistro. It's like our take on bistronomy. So it's 10 a.m. we're upstairs with Jon. We're gonna get the fire lit so we can help out the Bresca team downstairs. Get a little bit of beats over the fire smoking throughout the day. So for us like the fire is kind of the focal point of the food up here. So pretty much every course that you'll see throughout the day we cook over the fire at some point. Whether it's during the prep day or like during service a la minute. Now that the fire started, we're gonna go downstairs. A lot of our seafood orders are starting to roll in. So we're gonna start sorting through the fish. Look at what we got for today. Make sure that the quality is right there. So first thing we're going through, I'm gonna start with the sea urchin. This is how they mark the sea urchin at auction. They'll go through. They have like an expert that rates each one. So this is the number seven at auction this day. So super, super tasty, super exciting stuff. Unboxing all this. Really we're just checking to make sure that nothing got beat up in the shipping. It's a guarantee 36 hours out of market like from from Toyosu to here. This is a channel rockfish or kinki. This is coming from Hokkaido. This is definitely one of our favorite fish here. You can talk to any chef that really works with Japanese seafood. They can definitely tell you that it's like a cut above. After I go through these, we're gonna go ahead and we're gonna pull out what we need for today. We're gonna process those. With 32 guests, if we're breaking down eight fish a night, it should take us no less than an hour to fabricate the whole fish. There's nothing easy about working with some of those small fish. Like we can get like 40, 50, 60 in a week sometimes. Take the eyeballs out to preserve the fish from getting overly fishy. You can usually slide your finger through, pop the eyeball out. Such a process. Like every day you're breaking down what you need for service, but then there's like the process before it even started to dry age. It was like cleaning it, scaling it, gutting it, knocking out the eyes, hanging it. Then like we'll take that down to the dry-ager in a little bit. It's not only like expensive as an ingredient, it's expensive like cost of time. So we're in the basement prep kitchen. Kind of where we store all of our meats and plus throughout the day. We're down here at the fish dry-ager. We also have a meat dry-ager that we're gonna fill with pork a little bit later on this evening. Our menu's 75% seafood. And all of that sees a little bit of age from as much as like four days to as much as two weeks depending on the fish, depending on the fat content. So really it's just kind of picking and choosing trial and error for the last two and a half years has kind of taught us a lot. So we're gonna go ahead, we're gonna shop. Starting off with our channel rockfish, the kinky. These guys have been hanging since the 25th. So we're looking at four days right now. It really allows us to like get a nice crispy skin. And with the fat content on these fish, it kind of almost fries it when we grill it over the fire a little bit later. We need all three of these fish this evening, but really we just want to make sure that we keep the quality of the fish. So we're on the ice and we want to shop them one at a time because we're on the third floor. It means a lot of running up and down the stairs. Keep you pretty fit, hopefully. So we'll be here for a little while like breaking these fish. It usually takes about an hour just because all of the pin bones. And then we'll go back through and try to find any scales we have. It's like these fish are so crazy that like, you know, you break down two and that's like the fat that comes off of it. It's insane. You can see this is all like fat that's like leeching out of the fish. One of these small kinky is easily 60, 75 bucks a piece. Like even when we buy them, like we communicate with the guys through WhatsApp. They'll literally be like, kinky is the highest price that it's ever been. Like they send you like crying emojis because they're just like sad that they can't give it to you at the price point that you want. It's like, not like, get us where we want to be. I'm like, that's fine. They're pretty much like the opposite of giving you what you want. They let us know where we're going to land each week. This is the most expensive fish at the market. Like you have to enjoy this when you can get it because nobody wants to buy this shit. It's so expensive. But like, then when people eat it, it like blows their mind. They're just like, what the f*** is that? You're like, I'm like, I told you, it's like the Wagyu of the ocean, man. It's crazy. Yeah. So Kyle's just unpacking our beef here. This is the order for the whole building for about the next two weeks. This is our Japanese Wagyu rib caps coming from the Gunma prefecture. And then you also have Japanese short rib. This is coming from the Miyazaki prefecture. So you kind of get to see two different prefectures of beef. So with the two restaurants, it gives us a lot more buying power. Obviously, when you commit the 300 pounds of beef bi-weekly, we can try to get a better price point. Everything's rolling in both restaurants. You know, the guys are just prepping. Evan's knocking out some caviar meats. Brandon's working on some of the canapes with the braised lamb neck. And then we just received some pork though from Ademala Farms. It's been dry-aged for about three weeks. So we're going to go down to Nebraska and start breaking those down so we can split them up for the restaurants. Good, how are you? Good. You see everybody on the stairs. That's how you know when everyone's here, you know? Going up and down the stairs. Every floor is activated every day, or like the five days a week that we're open from like 7 a.m. until 1 a.m. Part of the reason we're able to offer the experiences that we do are because they're in the same building, right? I think if they were separate, the restaurants would both logistically cost a lot more money to operate. Second-story restaurant like Jaunt benefits a lot from a first-story restaurant like Breska paying the bulk of the rent and things like that. And now we're down at Breska. What we'll do is we'll start to knock this down. Downstairs, we'll use probably 80% of it. Upstairs, we'll take the first six bones off. And then we'll throw that in the ager downstairs for like 45 to 90 days. They'll grill that over the wood fire and serve it upstairs as well. Yeah, so we like knock the tenderloin off from the backside here. Pork is something we love to work with here in both restaurants. We get in the whole back saddles of the pork though. Downstairs, you know, we're going to take the loins and the tenderloins, kind of roast those classically, confit them in pork fat. The meat is like crazy dark for pork, yeah. Adam's knocking down some fluke from the Mid-Atlantic. They're going to work that onto crudo. Chef Cam has that Aussie sirloin. They have like a lot more mise en place down here, that's for sure. I'm going to take this downstairs, rack it up in the dry ager, and then Cam's going to roll a couple bones off this loin. So when we're breaking it for up here, we're just kind of rolling it right off of the bone here, cleaning the loin up. We'll have it ready for service tonight. Like we always just like mature the meat for as long as possible. Sometimes we'll take the hams, we're working on those right now. We have over 200 days of age on them. So this one's, this is going to be our saguaro, Spanish mackerel caught in southern Japan. The only thing we have to do is we'll wipe out the chest cavity. We'll make a small cut around the back part of the tail that we can't use to tie it up with string. Tying it around the bone allows us to not stress the flesh too much. Each fish gives us about two days, so we'll break the side off of one of these and then we'll bring it back down to hang again. And hopefully by the time we finish this fish, the next fish will be ready. I'm just going to pull out the saguaro for today's service. We're going to go ahead and fabricate that. Yeah, the first grilled fish of the night that the guests are going to receive is the saguaro. There's like three dishes that never change. That's one of them. By aging it 14 days, we just get like a beautiful firmness. We'll char the skin really, really nicely, or like the fat, if you will. And then we just leave the top like cool medium. And then we serve that with like a load of caviar. Like, I'm sure there's probably going to be some ducks. Yeah, some rendered ducks in here that we're going to get rolling for tonight. There's duck everywhere in this building. Like, it's ridiculous. We're going to start rolling on some duck processing for the day. So we're going to grab for jaunt and brisket. We go through a shitload of duck. So we inventory about 220 ducks at a time, aging. This is a brisket duck being like around like five pounds, a whole cavity. The jaunt ducks are in the jaunt cooler though. Jaunt ducks age separately, larger duck. So we need like a little bit more airflow. I'm going to pick out the ducks for Daniel today and really get on his nerves because he likes to pick them out himself, you know? So this is Daniel. He works meat roast here in jaunt. Right now he's starting our duck processes. It's kind of one of our things that is a signature on our menu. We're trying to like get rid of this fat cap right here with the jacquard, which is an instrument that basically pokes all this oil into the fat. You want to be gentle in this process. You don't want to go too deep. Otherwise you mess up the meat itself. You need to be conscious. We used to take an individual cake tester and we used to poke holes over and over and over and over again. Like I can tell you right now, this is going to be a hard duck to render. Daniel's like a scientist, man. He like everything methodically, right? The same movement every day. Consistency reason and a little bit of superstition. To change the steerer took me six months. Like a tennis player, right? They always use the same rugged. He like talks to the fire during service. I like this job a lot and it makes me excited every day. That's for sure. So now it goes in the oven for seven minutes. So you can tell after seven minutes how much fat we render already. And that's just the beginning. So they're going to chill in the freezer and then we're going to like keep rendering. So 1 p.m. we start our bread rolling process or all the dough that got made this morning got mixed out, portioned, and then it's brought up and the team gathers around. Everything's cleared off and then we roll our bread for tonight's service. So we do pretty much one per two guests. So we'll look at the books, see about how many moviels we need to roll. We only roll the day of, so it's fresh. Proof that day, bake that day. And then during service, we brush it with what we call brush fat. Just an aromatic fat that sprinkle a little bit of Maldon salt on as well. It goes with everyone's main course. It's 2.30. We're through rolling bread. So we're starting to like finish up our projects. We're going to do another scrub down. Tyler's breaking down the brisket ducks. So same ducks that we use upstairs, similar process but we kind of use the upstairs to render in the rationale and then cool them down. And then what he'll do before service, come in, hand render and then like continue the process as guests start to roll through the doors. So this is the guy that's been hanging out for a while. I'm just going to pull out a couple of muscles and slowly cook over the wood fire. Depending on when you dine, the proteins that are like mature and ready at the time are like what you're going to end up experiencing. These things are gnarly to break down because there's like no moisture left. You know, you're like cutting a brick. We'll carve away a lot of this, a lot of this trim here before serving it. We'll split this down and then we'll seam out like this muscle right here. I'll peel the skin. Once we kind of break this down and wrap it in its own fat again, these are the muscles that will serve tonight as like the main course of the tasting room. First guest in 30. So right now we're getting set up for service, finishing the last little touches. Prep is done. The pass is set up and we're just getting tidied up and ready to feed some people. It's 4.15. We just got back from family meal. We're setting up for service right now. Last thing to prep for the meat station would be the final render on the ducks. Usually we do three to four ducks a day to feed 32 guests. We are doing the last render stage. So we went in the oven earlier today. Right now we're working it in the cast iron pan. Kind of take out a little bit of fat at a time. So that one's going to hang out. He's going to put them up there for service. They're going to hang out. First guest, five minutes. Daniel's doing his superstitious fire build, right? It's got to be a certain way or else the fish isn't going to cook correctly. I always put the new logo on the side as a support and as a protection. So I keep the calorie with me. Starting off with the four course. Awesome, let's do it. Walking into four course, going stack, following two fluke, two pierogi, two chicken, two dessert. Waiting. Upstairs it starts with canapes and then rolls into like plated crudos and always some sort of egg custard chawanmushi. And then, you know, it moves into like grilled fish and then we integrate some like vegetables and broths and things of that nature to break up the richness of the meal. Then we finish on like the protein progression. That's the final rendering that I told you about. If I press towards the skin, I notice that we still have some fat to render. So I'm going to like hang it over here towards the fire and you will see like some duck fat dripping and that's my final rendering. I always say like we're not the most avant-garde restaurant. It's not our intention. The idea is to be the most technique and product-driven restaurant that we can be. Find the best ingredients and like use the best techniques to our ability. Cook it 100% the best that we can. We're used to like a watered-down food system here in the United States. That's our focus, like Brandon, myself, like the team. It's to like showcase, help people understand like what something really can be or is. So we just wrapped up the first round of savoring. So Daniel's getting the fire going for the second round, putting some more calories on it, as he would say. Thank you so much. It's been great, like spending time with you guys. Now the rest of the team is going to reset. We're going to get cleaned down. The guests are going to transfer to the second part of the tasting menu into the pastry parlor. And then this is usually the time where we go downstairs and check on Breska and see where we're at. Are you going to cool off? What are you going to do? You going to take your shirt off in the freezer or what? Yeah, I have to. In a blast freezer. I'm going to get some water for sure. So down here tonight, we have a few large parties out there. We have 14. It's super busy right now, like peak hour, 7.30. It's a little bit noisier down here. You don't have the guests watching you, so they get into it a little bit, like lots of callbacks. You can have a really good time here. It's like a lot of adrenaline. So I was saying, we got to get a picture of your duck right here and then send it to Daniel upstairs so we can show him how much better your duck was than his tonight, OK? That's like the philosophy, if you will, of what we're trying to do. We're trying to just continue to educate on what quality really is, you know? Kampachi? Hey, Tyler, how long on that pork? I think it's part of our job is like, what is the evolution of food dining culture? If we can educate or help showcase ingredients, their purest form and the quality of what they really can be, it helps change the food system ultimately, right? Can someone go give Tyler hands getting scallops down here? We got to go. I mean, it's a long game, right? It's not going to happen overnight. Quality over everything, it's like something we say here all the time. We want quality over everything.