We Put 12 Cameras in the Tiny Kitchen of a High-End Chinese Restaurant | Bon Appétit

All right, after we drop this, let's go on that duck mapo for $2.02 and a cabbage duck for $2.06. Hi, I'm Emmeline Zhao, managing partner of Silver Apricot Restaurant in New York City. You're looking at an actual Friday night dinner rush in our kitchen, when pretty much all of our 45 seats, indoor and outdoor, are filled. We serve new American Chinese small plates, which is a style inspired by typical Chinese meals, and they can be about a dozen shared dishes. Tonight we'll serve around 250 small dishes, which is bewildering because this is the entire kitchen. It's tiny, like 90 square feet. This is how we keep up with the rush. Okay, so our kitchen staff is basically three people at two stations, and we have a dishwasher in the back. This is Xavier and James, our sous chefs. James, this looks so good. The two of them make almost all of our hot food at this one station during service. They mostly cook on just four induction cooktops. Induction heats using magnetic current instead of fire. You're fired through egg. They get hot almost instantly, and with only four burners, we really don't have time to wait for pans to heat up. Induction isn't as common as gas in restaurants, but when we built Silver Apricot, we converted the entire kitchen from gas to induction. Gas burners also give off a ton of heat, which obviously would make a small kitchen like ours super uncomfortable to work in. And it's important to us that our team is supported by really good working conditions. The other source of heat we have on the stovetop is this Japanese grill. It's loaded with burning hot coals called binchotan that don't produce too much odor or smoke and can maintain their heat all night. Xavier actually keeps his paddle fan holstered in his apron to fan the coals. This is something we could technically live without, but it gives a char and a smokiness to our fish and steak dishes that's totally worth the effort. The kitchen is a bit of a jigsaw puzzle. The challenge is figuring out how to utilize every inch of space as efficiently as possible. All of the ingredients are within arm's reach of the cooks on shelves, in drawers below the stove, reach in fridges right behind them. Literally any space that we have is used. Right behind them is our garde manger. That's a French term for the cook who prepares the cold dishes. Things like our devil tea eggs or this really amazing cold poached chicken we have on the menu. A lot of first course foods. Make that two puff and a cucumber. Two puffs all day and a cucumber. Andrew here has the added responsibility of running the only oven we have in the service kitchen, so anything that needs to be toasted or roasted passes through him. Drew, can I get this in the oven for a minute please? It's an insane amount of work for one person in a small kitchen and he has to work not only efficiently but intelligently to prevent getting backed up. Hey Drew, as an order of operations thing, next time you should always put puffs in first because let the oven do the work while you're doing your other work, right? And then there's me, as the expediter, working at the pass today. The expediter is like the orchestra conductor. With so many plates and a small staff, managing the flow of how dishes are fired is critical. So aside from trying to track all our orders and putting the final touches on plates, I also course out everyone's meal. Can we fire one of these mid-course here? Yeah, can we do it, can we do cabbage duck mid-course and then broccoli steak sausage, right? Even though our menu doesn't say this, in my mind it's like any other family-style meal, whether American or Chinese. You have an apps course, a mid-course that's maybe your veggies and warm salads, and then your proteins and starches. Aside from talking with our servers and cooks, I'll also leave the pass and walk through the dining rooms to see where the tables are with their meals. I do this because I want to make sure that every table has enough time to fully experience each dish. I just saw a table taking more time with their food and drinks, and I don't want to bombard them with more. So knowing where they are in their meal is important to decide whether I need to move their ticket further down the rail and hold fire on their next course. Hold on a hundred, they're not even taking our food. A hundred? Huh? A hundred? Yeah. All right, so let's look at how all of this plays out when an order comes into the kitchen. After our servers take an order, they'll punch it into these wireless tablets we have. When an order is placed, two copies of the ticket are printed, one for the kitchen and one for the pass. I'll course out the meal and also write the table number in Sharpie since it's printed super small. I do this because both the servers and I, sometimes from far away, need to be able to read it clearly. And then I'll tell the kitchen to fire the dishes I want to come out next. You can fire a steak mapo for $2.05. So this order has a grilled Mongolian strip steak, which is one of our most popular dishes. It's inspired by the Chinese takeout dish Mongolian beef, which is pretty heavy on the onions. So the first thing Xavier does is drop a cipollini onion into a pot of glaze that's made with apple cider, vegetable stock, and apple vinegar. After the onions are glazed, they get charred over the coals. It's so good. He'll also immediately place a cut of the strip steak onto the grill to start giving it heat and char. A quick side note here, with just three cooks and a teeny tiny kitchen, the only way we can keep up with service is with a truly incredible amount of prep, like all day prep. A lot of which happens in a little basement kitchen below the restaurant. Xavier and the prep cooks were in all day, portioning out steak and preparing all those sauces. And for this dish, during service, we're constantly pulling out steaks to temper them and getting them pre-seasoned and ready to go. Those steak portions are literally right below him. He has them in a refrigerated drawer beneath the stove. We use all the space we have. But you'll see this constantly, our cooks pulling out containers of ingredients that have been largely prepared or par-cooked prior to service. And that allows us to finish every dish in about five minutes or less. OK, back to the steak. It's charring on the grill, and he'll also get the Mongolian sauce going. Aside from the Chinese trinity, which is scallions, ginger, and garlic, it's a beef jus with a bump of soy and chilies, so it's very earthy and a little spicy. Once it's pulled and rested, he'll slice it, plate it, and garnish it. And I'm here on Expo finishing it with Maldon salt. The garlic cloves you see on top of the steak are confit and beef trimmings. So here it is, just like take-out Mongolian steak, but, you know, smarter and so much better. At this point, either myself or one of our servers, there are three of them on Fridays, will run it out into the dining room, and I'll cross it out on the ticket. 205 sold out. That just means that all of the orders for table 205 are done, and the chef can pull the ticket. We don't have 200 tables, and they're numbered by section. 200s are the main dining room. 100s are this lovely outdoor space we have in the back with 16 seats. And then the teens are on the front patio. True pandemic-era outdoor dining. All right, order fire. Two puff, egg, cucumber, two crudo, two chicken. Two puff, cucumber, egg, and a chicken. No. Two puff, cucumber, egg, two crudo, two chicken. Two chicken, heard. So that was eight dishes, all for Andrew at Garmanger. Obviously a ton to keep track of, but again, he's done so much prep throughout the day that most of what happens here happens pretty quickly. He's starting with the scallion puffs because they need to heat up. Almost everyone orders these, and we make hundreds every single day. Scallion puffs are a puff pastry that is brushed with zha jiang. It is a fermented sweet and salty bean sauce, and then rolled up with fresh scallions. We parbake them in the afternoon, so for service they just need a final toast. The expediter, me, portions out our house-made scallion butter for them, and it's actually scallions that we dehydrate and blitz into a powder that's then blended with butter. That's what gives it that super fresh green color. So they're warm, savory, and definitely decadent. We also had a couple orders of our mouth-watering chicken. Mouth-watering chicken, or kou shui ji, is actually a really traditional Chinese dish from the Sichuan province, where Simone, my chef partner, was born. Of course, we took a New York approach to it. It's served cold, but this can 100% sell you on cold chicken. The dish as a whole is super flavorful, with a little tingly heat from the Sichuan peppercorn. This part's important. He dresses the chicken with an herb chili crisp that we make in-house. It's spicy and very aromatic, and then drizzles our herb relish on top of the whole thing. It's all at once savory, spicy, and bright and refreshing in a really surprising way for a cold chicken salad. I'm super type A about the way our dishes look and taste. Drew, your zigzags are a little uneven, huh? Sorry about that. We have a gold standard for what every dish should look and taste like. Chicken looks really nice this time, Andrew. Thank you. And it's the expeditor's job to be a gatekeeper for those standards of precision. When I run a dish to the table, it should look exactly how it did when we designed it. Fun fact, this one wasn't actually for that table. Once I put a plate down on the table, I'm not going to pick it back up and then serve it to someone else. So that table gets a free chicken, and Andrew gets practice on his zigzags. Mapo squash rice cakes is a lot of people's favorite dish. If you haven't had rice cakes, I like to call them Chinese gnocchi. They're chewy and glutinous on the inside, but here in the pan, James gets them really crispy on the outside, so it's a fun textural contrast. The dish is inspired by Mapo tofu, which is like this bolognese beef or pork ragu with silken tofu. But we wanted to make a vegetarian dish inspired by this, so we made a mix of butternut squash with yatai, which is a Chinese pickled mustard green. He's also making our sausage rice now, which is a totally different dish, but he can multitask. This sauce is chili bean paste with Chinese trinity, Sichuan peppercorn, and silken tofu, which gives this really nice creamy texture, and then butter to thicken the sauce. He's tasting for quality control here. All of the chefs have to taste the food to make sure it's properly cooked and well-seasoned. We train everyone to taste, taste, taste. It's the only way to know if what they're making meets that gold standard I mentioned before. I'll finish it at the pass with fresh squeezed lime juice and chopped scallions. The food that we serve, the beverages that we've curated, and the environment that we created means a lot to me and my partner, Simone. I'm Chinese-American. I grew up eating Chinese food made by my mom using whatever ingredients she could find in North Carolina, and that was the goal here. We're modernizing and characterizing that approach. I think for the size of the kitchen, it is astounding what food we're able to serve.