- [Erwin] First thing that we're gonna do, we're gonna break down our cod because it's a long process. As we dry-age the cod
for a minimum seven days to remove the moisture, Johnny's gonna start to butcher it. - [Marcos] I mean one of the ingredients that we have, the most iconic of the restaurant, is gonna be our cod. We get the whole Atlantic cod. I think ours is special because
of the dry-aging process. We are dry-aging the fish to
eliminate some of the moisture. - [John] So there's our
first one right there. (upbeat music) It's a lot easier to break
down the dry-aged fish because all the proteins have solidified. It's a long process to cure fish. Two hours and then you wanna rinse it, and then you don't wanna serve it or grill it right after you've rinsed it, so you need it to dry out again. And that way when you
put it over the fire, skin gets nice and crispy. - We receive--
- 140 pounds? 170 pounds or almost 200
pounds every single week. - [John] Okay, so that's it. We've broken down our fish,
now we're gonna go ahead and lay it on our cure. So I've made a bed of the
curing salt right here, and I'll just kind of
shape it onto the fish, and then we'll grab some
more cure for the top. And we'll cure this for minimum two hours. - [Erwin] For it is a
beautiful, beautiful process. Let's put it in the cooler. - My father is a butcher,
that way I started working with my father in a butcher shop. The way my father showed respect
for the meat in his shop, I show the same respect for
all the fish that we get. - [Erwin] This is a cod
that we cured this morning - [Marcos] Right before service, when everything is ready to rock and roll, we just put in the charcoal, get the skin really, really crispy, and just finish it on the side of the meat for like two seconds. The whole idea for Porto is to make people feel like
you are not in Chicago. That way you are eating fish right by the ocean of Portugal or Spain. (upbeat music) - [Erwin] Let's go. (upbeat music) - [Marcos] One of the greatest things, everybody's super excited
to come in in the morning, is to open the boxes. It's like Christmas for us, right? But some of the days we have our contacts in Portugal or Spain. We are like, "Okay, just
send us whatever you find in the market that is super cool. I'll bring it to work." Some days we don't know if
we're gonna get mackerel or not, or scorpion fish or not. The first thing we do is open the boxes see what we can do with the fish. Always super fun because every day, almost every week, you can
create fun, new dishes, but you don't know exactly
what you're getting. Kind of fun. A little (bleep) up honestly
sometimes, but it's cool. But seeing how fresh, when you see a fish that is like this, it's just still in rigor mortis. To be able to have this in
Chicago, this is amazing. It's sardines. It's about maybe a hundred
grams, not even, 80 grams. There's a lot of work behind it. We gotta get the whole
team on what we call "a sardine party." In Spain or Portugal, they
basically just serve them whole. But we want to make it
easy for the customers to be able to enjoy this
amazing quality of fish. The sardine is also one of the dishes that we have on the tasting menu, and this is another fish that is important and
emblematic for Porto, because it's a fish that represents all the Atlantic cuisine in
Spain, Portugal, and France. - [Erwin] Sardine party, sardine party. - [Marcos] We got a shit ton of them. We get most of the team all together, trying to make it as fast as possible. - What're you doing? You scale and we butterfly. Sabotage. - Don't be mad at me, chef. - I'm never mad at you, but I can see that you always
take the easiest stuff. - [Marcos] This is actually
really hard, you know? - [Erwin] Yeah, of course, yeah. - [Marcos] You know this is probably one of the dirtiest parts
of the cleaning process, because you have all the guts, and all the blood in there. That way--
- Poor baby, he's bloody. - Trying to make it clean. Some of the head, what we do is we make a sardine barbecue sauce. The first one, that is
just one requirement, is gonna be actually making the scale. This is actually super delicate fish, that the scales are a little hard. It has to be super delicate. That way you don't get into the meat. As you can see, everybody's
taking their time. Chef Erwin, Chef Johnny, what they're doing is also
probably the hardest part of the process, is actually
butterfly the fish. The bigger the fish, it's
easier to butterfly it, but the smaller it gets,
it's a little more fragile, the spine is a little
more delicate as well. What they're doing is taking the middle of the spine out, but keeping
the butterfly like a book. After we butterfly all the sardines, what we do is basically cure them for about 20 minutes, enough to get the meat a little firmer, and the skin a little more dry as well. That way when we torch it, the skin is gonna be really crispy, and there's not gonna
be any breaking down, or anything like that. A beautiful labor of love
happening here at Porto. - Thank you, chef. - Oh, thank you, merci beaucoup. - De rien. Muchas gracias. - I've never cooked food
like this in my career, I've been doing this for a long time. It just feels right. - [Marcos] And this is going back to ancestral techniques, right? Taking fish that has been curing in salt. It's something that's been happening for thousands of years, right? Why don't we bring those techniques back? Chef is gonna take it to the
walk-in, we'll wait 20 minutes. In Spain, sardines used
to be a cheap fish. I think if you treat every single fish the best way possible, and you try to make it as good as you can, it can be any other, even like a lobster. This is gonna be the sardines. After we cure them, we stuff them with sofrito in the middle, and we are gonna toast them, that way we can make their
skin a little more crispy. - [Erwin] We came up with
the recipe one night, after service we wer drinking
a glass of wine, of course, but we used to order hot dogs. - [Marcos] We're gonna
drizzle the sardines, like if it would be a hot dog. And then on top, I'm gonna put a mustard. - [Erwin] And I start to say, "Chef, what do you think if
we start to make a sardine like a hot dog?" He's like, "Shut up." (bleep) - [Marcos] What if? What if? - [Erwin] And he was like, "No." And he finished his glass of wine, he say, "Why?" And when Chef Marcos start
to put the finger like this, he say, "Chefo, what we don't do..." I'm like, "Okay, here we go. We're gonna find a recipe." - [Marcos] Add some drops of the oil. This is probably one of the
ingredients that makes me more, I would say emotional to have in Porto. Goose barnacles is something
that takes a lot of lives, to be able to catch them. About every year, there is
about three to seven people that die actually diving
to get the barnacles. These are stuck into the rocks. That is really dangerous
to be able to grab them, and be able to, before the
wave is splashing to the rocks, the diver needs to run back
again, and then come back. To be able to have this one
over here, this is insane. How crazy, the first person
that ever actually was like, "Oh let me try this. This is good." It's so ugly that I cannot
believe the first person that actually did it. Okay, you got some balls in there. - This is Chef Shannah,
our executive pastry chef. She's the best. We call her the queen. Happy queen, happy Porto, eh chef? (Shannah laughing) We just prepare the percebes, as you can see, they're
all attached together. We just want to remove one by one, and we're gonna blanch them pretty quickly in a mineral water with
a little bit of seaweed. - [Marcos] Tonight we're gonna serve it in the traditional way
that they do in Spain. Blanch them into the water, cook them, and just serve it warm for
people to be able to taste it. For me, I like to see, it's almost like a kiss of the sea. - [Erwin] Chefo, percebes. Percebes time. - The percebes are kind of
a little sexy thing to see. Because when you break it, in Spain, they give you like a bowl of this, and then you basically
grab it from the nail, it's just incredible. Here we are trying to make
it easy for people to enjoy. It's a little hard to
actually be eating them, because you have to peel them, you gotta take the nail out. We are trying to make all
the job for the customers. They just take the spoon
and go right for it, and also compose the bite, that way they're not missing
any of the flavor combinations that we want them to have. I think it's just
actually one of the dishes that every time you eat it, you got like a splash of the sea flavor in your mouth, right? Voilà.
- [Erwin] Voilà. (upbeat music) One of the last boxes of the day. But this is something also pretty unique, it's the monkfish. It's one of the ugliest fishes that you can find in the sea. His head is huge. We have one over there. It's almost like a dragon almost, it's like a huge mouth. We get it every week, but there is some that's
been in the dry-ager, that is actually from last Friday. Those are gonna come to
the tasting menu tonight, but then this one will
be ready for next week. We clean them, we take the skin off, we clean a little bit of the
blood on it, and we hang it. No cure, no anything. The natural gelatin of the
fish is gonna protect it. Chef, I think after that, we
should work on the mackerel. - [Erwin] Oui, Chef - [Marcos] And getting it
ready for the dry-ager, that way they can be ready for next week. Just a beautiful color on them today. He loves fish and seafood. I'm coming from Valencia,
the Mediterranean coast. It's hard to find people that understand each
other the way that we do. Sometimes we're in the shit,
and we don't even need to talk. We know exactly what to
do to help each other. - [Erwin] He just did
the first one for the TV, now he's watching me, saying,
"Okay, you're doing great." - I said, you do it better than me. - No, no I can't, I don't
do nothing better than you. - You do it better. - You just teach me pretty well. - You have a better smile. I wanted to be the sexy guy in the show. - You are the sexy one, you
have the beautiful six-pack abs. - I've been working with a
French guy for four years now. - I start to work, he was one year old. - Yeah, he has 28 years of experience, and I'm 29 years old now. But when I was one year
old, he was already cooking. Pretty badass. Pretty badass. - It's cool. (upbeat guitar music) Thank you, chef. - The mackerel is actually amazing, how acceptable it is
to put in the dry-ager. We put it in the dry-ager for seven days, no longer than that,
because it's not too big. And actually these ones are
gonna be ready for tonight, after a week of dry-aging it. As you can see, the skin is ready to go, and then butterfly and
cook it over the charcoal. - [Marcos] Nice, chef, it's fantastic. - Magnifique.
- Magnifique. (upbeat guitar music) It's one o'clock, we have
like one hour to prep, and in one hour we're gonna start to set up the station for the opening. - [Marcos] Okay, this is the
other part of the restaurant. What we have here is
basically the chef counter, more like an omakase style, that way people are facing the chefs, and the chefs are explaining
to them all the dishes that they're eating, how to
eat it, the story behind it. But what we have here is the brioche. This is actually the brioche that is gonna be for our uni toasts. The uni toast is actually one
of the more emblematic dishes that we have in the restaurant. But the whole idea is utilizing the uni that is coming in the can. As you can see it's been
cooked in the natural juices with a little bit of sea water, that way you can keep all the flavor, and all the moisture inside of the can. This uni is probably around
almost one year inside of there. First time that me and
Chef Erwin tried it, we were blown away. It's like how something
that's been in a can for over a year, it stays so fresh, and so incredibly powerful. We make a toast that represents
that idea, that philosophy. A little toasted brioche on the bottom, a cauliflower puree with a little bit of our São Jorge cheese from Portugal, and we finish with the uni right on top. It's a two bite, but with a full flavor that is coming up together. Giving the respect for a product that maybe people doesn't have anymore, that is the preservation system in a can. (upbeat music) It's 3:45, almost ready for show time. Chef Erwin is checking all the stations, making sure we have all
the last little details for the station. We know it's go-time when
Chef Erwin puts on his hat. We also have John put a bone on the hat, super fashion on it. - No. Mas lacto-fermented, papas are good. This is one of the last
things that we're gonna do, a portion of our monkfish
in the last minute to make sure that we
keep the moisture out, and we're gonna put in our station, just portion boning to get
like steak idea of the T-bone, but just with the monkfish. It's a nice amount of work, but also it's a pleasure for us to be able to use a
beautiful fish like this. You can get some monkfish from Maine, or from a domestic one,
but there are like nothing. To compare this one's flavor
profile, it's so different, and we feel so lucky and happy, that even if you take time, we spend time. But when we work, we feel on vacation, is what we we say. We are lucky, we are making
something that we love. We have a job, of course,
we need to pay our bills, but we are making something that we love. We can work like 80 hour
weeks, we don't care, because we love what we are doing. I will never replace my
life for another job. I started to work when I was 11. I am 41. I just want to cook, cook, cook and cook. And learn. It's about like 6:30, we just received a table of six, six tasting menu. We just send what we
call the first course, seaweed and conservas. And now they're gonna wait, soon it's gonna be their
turn to send the matrimonio and after this is tuna. We're gonna go with our dry-aged tuna. We love this dish, because as we know, Chicago is really famous
for steak and potatoes, because it's a steakhouse city. - [Marcos] It's funny
because a lot of people think that tuna is something that like is only in the Japanese cuisine for the sushi, but actually one of the
best tunas in the world are coming from the
Mediterranean coast of Spain. - [Erwin] We just want
to get the smokiness. This kind of fish should be almost raw, a little bit of finishing salt
that we bring from Portugal, and because all the steak
should deserve a sauce right in the middle. - Fire four amuse. - [Erwin] And we are ready to go. Vamonos. It's time to shine, it's time
to go, it's time to enjoy. - [Marcos] I want them to feel like they are a little bit in Chicago, or most of the part of
you are not in Chicago. Because the whole decoration,
the sign, the smell, this is nothing like in Chicago. And you have Chef Erwin or
myself or anybody on the team that is explaining to you,
super excited about Galicia, and Portugal, and the
rest of Spain, and France. - [Shannah] Oh, it's turbot time. - [Marcos] You have this
amazing experience like, "Oh shit, I'm really
in Chicago right now?" When the fish is coming
to you, you're like, "Okay, I'm not in Chicago anymore." - [Shannah] Walking in, two tasting menu. - [Marcos] I really
think, and I wanna believe that what we are doing in
the restaurant as a team, from the kitchen, from the
floor, from the wine program, everything together is a
beautiful combination of love that everybody's putting together, right? And I think that work
philosophy of working hard to be able to achieve what you want is, I try to pass it along to the team. I think it pays off, right? Like being able to have all these amazing, incredible achievements
that we have for Porto, all the awards, and the recognition is not only for me, because
everybody's behind the scenes that people maybe don't see them, they make Porto a real special place. (uplifting violin music)
