Chef Edward Lee's New Korean Restaurant Is Unlike Anything Else in America — Mise En Place

Korean food is very bold, it's very aggressive. Everything in Korean food is like a party in your mouth. It just explodes with flavor. We are a modern Korean restaurant trying to bring a different voice. The menu is basically a seven-course tasting menu. Every course will always have an ingredient or a technique that really harkens back to something traditional. This is the first bite, perilla leaf stuffed with roasted scallop, ssamjang, an Asian pear, sweetness from the oyster, spice from the holic row. You've got fresh, crunchy, acidity coming from the pear, and it really just sets a tone for the whole evening. In Korean, sia is kind of the root word for a seed. The restaurant here is a non-profit, and the research that we're doing hopefully is a seed that will blossom and influence the whole industry. This is our hamachi that we're using for our crudo dish. Our crudo is paired with some pretty big fermented flavors, so you want something that's got a lot of fat content in it. It's not like a light crudo dish. But it's really important for us to make sure that all the seafood that we're using is sustainable. We try and stay, obviously, as seasonal as we can. This is the main filet off the yellowtail. We take just the best part for our crudo plate. But this is really good fish. I guess you'd call it the belly loin. So this will go into our fish stock. If you only use scraps for fish broth, it's going to taste like scraps. So we do this process every single day. When we think about Korean food, we always think Korean barbecue. But the country, it's surrounded on three sides by water. It's a peninsula. So seafood is really important. And this will cure for a few hours. Yeah, this is our little muslin wrap. It's nice because it's breathable, but it'll retain moisture. It's toxic-free. It's affordable. You can get it at any fabric store, and it's a great alternative to plastic wrap. We are a nonprofit restaurant. There's zero plastics inside the restaurant. All of our equipment, everything we use here is powered by clean energy. And then last but not least, we are researching and developing ways that we can reduce waste. At the end of the year, I will know the exact cost of what it takes to go plastic-free here. So my question is, is plastic-free the new organic vegetable? We're going to start making mugwort noodle. Mugwort is a typical spring vegetable from Korea. So with the flour and then mugwort powder, I'm putting salt, olive oil, and then this is water. Mugwort, it's actually part of sort of the legend or myth of how Korea was formed. And so mugwort is something that is really important culturally to Korea, but also as a flavor component. Mugwort has good bitterness to it. So in Korea, we used to harvest it fresh, and then we eat it as a guk, which is soup with soybean. We don't use any camberos, so I'll put it in the airtight container. Rest it for 30 minutes to one hour, and then we'll shoot it out and then portion it. When you're not storing food and sauces and vegetables in plastic, it does taste fresher. You're not bleeding plastic into your food. All of our sauces are so clean because we make them fresh every day and they don't sit in plastic. So I'm just weighing out everything for our black garlic puree. It goes on the side of the duck plate. So this is the onion skandashi, black garlic, a little bit of vinegar, brown sugar, and we're gonna add some salt too. Kind of all the duck dishes working over here. To me, the side dish of the duck, which is actually the main dish, it is an artisanal rice that we get from a single farm in Korea. We pair that with a grain called yulmu or jobstir, and then we add all different kinds of namul, which are wild herbs that are harvested throughout Korea. So we rehydrate them and then we mix them together and we cook the rice in this stone bowl. It's really earthy, very herbaceous. It's so delicious. I mean, I can eat bowls of it. So we have a Rohan duck. This is a tri-breed, so Peking mesquite and mallard. It's one of my faves. I think the tenderness on it's really nice. It's not too chewy. Really melts in your mouth compared to some conventional ducks. So we'll use all the carcass and the wings for stock. The fat will get rendered and we'll use that for one of the sauces that goes on the plate. Equal parts brown sugar and salt. And we'll keep it on top of the breast for 12 hours. And that's just gonna dry it out the skin, pull out any unwanted moisture, and we'll come back and rinse it in the morning. We're gonna make our gochujang, a Korean mustard glaze for the duck. So we have our ssamjang already made. It's like a Korean mother sauce. You know, I'm not Korean. So when I first was conceptualizing this dish with Lynn, obviously I went back to like my staples of Dijon. And then Lynn introduced me to this. And it has that like horseradish, super sharp sort of wasabi vibes to it. It's really funky. So good. And then we also add a little bit of local honey. We'll take a brush and just lacquer the whole breast with this. With us having such a small kitchen, such a small crew, it's really essential that every single person cares. The short amount of time that we've worked together, we've become like family. There are dishes that we create, I'm like, I don't know where my voice ended and yours started. It feels like one voice. And that's a really rare thing to happen. So the dough is done. We're gonna sheet it out now. It requires a lot of dusting. So I'm gonna sheet it to workable thickness. I love this noodle. I ate a lot of mugwort growing up. So doing this here remind me of my childhood. I love how we're keeping all the flavors tradition as possible. In Korea, when you eat noodle, you should slurp it. But for our guests come dine here, I don't want them to like slurp. It might make them feel a little uncomfortable. So we wanted to find the texture that makes them happy to enjoy it. She's being humble. It was her idea. No, we all work together. Yeah. Very special seaweed that we get from Korea. This is called Kamtae. It becomes kind of the finishing touch on our crudo dish. It's hand harvested in the mud flat of the Southern province of Korea, pressed into these sheets. And it's just this really delicate product. I mean, if you eat it, you almost feel like you just harvested it off the ocean. But it still has a smoky flavor from the roasting process. This Kamtae will pick up moisture and you don't want it to get soggy. So this is really kind of the last step that we do. Before service starts. This has like a fluffy texture. So we want to keep that texture. It's not cheap to bring this in, but for us, it's worth it. First tables are walking in. Getting all of our last minute cook done. Team's ready to go. Thank you all. You ready? Let's do it. We're a small restaurant. We only have 22 seats in the dining room, 10 seats at the bar. First thing we do is we bring you into our kitchen island. These are our chefs, Max, Lynn. Hi, how are you? We give them a little soju, give them a little bite to eat. Whenever you're ready, Gabby, we'll show you to your table and enjoy your dinner. Thank you. So I'm going to drop the noodle. It will take three to four minutes to cook it. So I'll just give it a shake. The noodles have a nice chewy texture, a little bitter aftertaste from the mugwort. This is the soy sauce, ganjang mix. So we make sure everything is seasoned. So we wanted to pair it with something nutty, a little sweet. Texturally, it's like soft to counterbalance the chewiness of the noodles. So I came up with basically a sauce that's black sesame and a sweet, soft tofu put together, blended, and then we aerated. The easy version of making like a whipped cream. Right now, it's just like a liquid foam. But once I charge it, it's going to look like Perky Mountain. That's a new word I learned. So I teach people Korean, and then they teach me new English. She just learned for shizzle. After you charge it, it's going to cover the mugwort noodle. We make a really briny shreds of pickled cucumber. And then we paired the dish with sea urchin roe and the other being a domestic hackleback caviar. Give me some nice slicing. All right, beautiful. For the yellowtail, we serve it with a very interesting sauce made from chutgut. And chutgut is a fermented fish paste in Korea. The chutgut we use is made from beltfish. It's spicy. It's salty. It is really powerful stuff. The fattiness of the yellowtail, pickled radish, pickled fennel, some sea beans. All the kimchi that we make here, we strain the juice out of it, aerate it a little bit. Kind of the way you would do a cappuccino. And then we finish it off with that kamtae seaweed. So that is our yellowtail crudo. We portioned our soap up earlier. We keep the bowls, like, ripping hot in the oven. So we build that nurungji kind of at the bottom and around the sides of the pot. The onion skin dashi, just poured it in on top. So the ginkgo nut is a tree nut, very chewy in texture. I think this with the jobs here, it gives you those, like, really fun bites of where you're like, oh, what was that? We're going to put it back in the oven. It cooks for about 15 minutes. And then we'll be ready to go. So we rinse our duck. We have it ready. It's air dried. I like it around, like, 300 to 350 degrees. Any higher, I feel like, can kind of char the skin a little bit too much. So as much rendering as I can do possible to get that fat down. And yeah, we'll just let it ride low and slow. Nice and crispy skin. So this is the gyoza, the mustard sauce that we made earlier. We already got good caramelization on the skin, but I want to make sure that that flesh side gets infused as well. Just butter on the bottom here, and we'll pop her in the oven. Then we use this root vegetable called ma, which is a root vegetable that grows in the mountains. Braise it in kind of a Korean doenjang. That's accompanied with a black garlic sauce. We don't want to rely on French techniques to sort of be the easy way to make it elevated. Like, to me, that's a bit of a cop-out. We're really trying to find something new. Korean food is not always, like, spicy and in-your-face. To me, that rice dish, it's as gentle as a mountain breeze. And then you pair it with the fatty duck, and it's just a perfect pairing to end your savory meal. The satisfaction that I get from working in a kitchen without plastics, I want the customer to get that same kind of feeling when they're eating a meal prepared like that. It really does feel good spending a night not surrounded by plastic. And I do think the customers feel it when they see the handmade paper and the handmade coasters. They feel it when they sign their check at night and they don't get a plastic pen. When they're walking through the kitchen and they don't see plastic containers and plastic squeeze bottles. If by doing this research, we can convince 1,000 restaurants to go 15% plastic-free, that's a massive amount of plastics that we are not contributing to the landfills, to our oceans, to our environment, to our health. So that's the goal of this. Not only is it delicious food, but it makes you feel better. Things are permanent. Things are more durable. Things are made with quality and excellence.