(dramatic music) - Hawksmoor, in its bones, is a steakhouse and the kind of culture
that we've created here is we've merged the UK
and the US seamlessly. The adrenaline of the
excitement of the guests and the team kind of pushes
me through every day. (upbeat music) Morning, guys, doing good? My day starts with people and product. So first is checking on the team and then doing the same
for all of our products and making sure that
everything's to our standard. (upbeat music) So this is some meat that we've selected from the delivery that just came in. These are the cuts that
we're gonna fabricate today. A small percentage of the
beef that we'll go through here today at Hawksmoor. First thing we're always
thinking about here is beef. So our beef supply is usually the first to come through the door in the morning. We check it in. We inspect it. On a weekly basis, we go
through a literal ton of beef, where we try to utilize the whole carcass as much as possible. So we sell almost the whole cow. Incredible amount of beef
comes to these doors every day. (knife clanging) So this is Chef Paddy. Sous chef here in charge
of grill development, steak development, everything
beef and a master butcher. - So this is a whole rump, off the bone, so fresh out of our dry aging facility. So the rump is the bum, basically. It's a hardworking muscle and top sirloin is what it's known as. It's my personal favorite cut. - [Matt] The rump steak is
really important to our mission as part of our sustainability mission. And also with our UK roots, being such a popular cut
there for the Sunday roast, it was really important to
us to introduce the US to it and show them how
delicious that cut can be. - Is we'll actually use this
cut for our tartare dish. - Paddy is here from the UK, a long-time member of the Hawksmoor team and he's the driving force
behind all things beef and grill at Hawksmoor. Having someone with Paddy's skill, how to train the staff, both
front and back of the house was really a big integral part
in opening the restaurant. And he's really allowed us to
be as successful as we've been in just being open for three months. He's got his head around ounces now. - Yeah, still getting to
grips with Fahrenheit. We track the dry aging of it. So that we know that it's
at that perfect sweet spot of what we want in a Hawksmoor steak, it's between 28 and 35. I've just separated off
what's known as the barrel, the barrel cup from the D rump. So now we're just gonna break
down the D rump into steaks. So this is a rump or top sirloin, as known in the US on the menu. 12 ounces it's a fantastic steak. (upbeat music) - This is kind of a cut that
many cultures use, right? So, Brazilians, picanha. In France they call it the culotte, the rump cap in English, and here we just call it delicious. So this is the cut we
primarily will use for tartare. A huge reason why we chose rump is that that chew to it and that
strong beefy flavor, the texture of the umami
from the age incredible. We're gonna put together a steak tartare so we can make sure that the steak is at the quality we
need for service tonight. We basically tasted every cut on the cow and the rump outperformed everything else. (upbeat music) We hide the yolk. So it's like a little bit
of a surprise to the guests when they cut it open. Fantastic dish, on the menu tonight. (upbeat music) So at Hawksmoor we use a
Turkish style of grill, which is actually a replica of the grill in our very first restaurant and every restaurant
since and is, you know, part of the DNA of who we are. So this is a beautiful lump with charcoal. We get from Ecuador. Huge chunks of wood,
burns really, really hot, really long time. Amazing flavor. - You basically wanna
create some air pockets. So there's enough oxygen to circulate to help start the fire. The quality of the charcoal, this is good. I mean, it literally
takes 30 seconds to light. So there's no need for any
chemicals or anything like that. It's just pure, like fire and oxygen. Just playing with the elements and you really wanna nice dry charcoal. And that's why it creates that crack. It's the layers of
woodwork and carbonades. There's like air trapped in them. It's a sign of good charcoal when it starts to split like that. (fire cracking) - [Matt] Working with charcoal
in New York is unique, mostly due to the cost of
building out a charcoal kitchen. - What you do is you get the grill lit, so that it's super hot. And then you create your hotspots to what your personal cooking style is. So we'll always have
one side ready to cook and one side that's burning. And then there's like a game of tetris you're always moving from side to side to play with what's best
for the steaks at the time. (upbeat music) - Here in America, we know we're in newer country and we're starting to realize and care a bit more about
like what our animals eat. In the UK they have a bit
of a headstart on that. They have ton of old world farming. - Grass-fed is like, kind of almost seen as a
bit of a nouveau thing, whereas in the UK, it's, you know, it's what the majority of our cows are fed and raised on grass. (upbeat music) - Rather than just taking
exclusively porterhouses out of the short loin,
we take the whole thing. Porterhouse will have the
largest amount of filet, probably our most popular sharing steak. As you start to go a little bit
further down the short loin, you get to the t-bone and then
as you get even further down, you lose the filet totally. Kind of get our bone-in strip out of this, which I would say is my
favorite steak on the menu. It's beautiful bone on the side. Excellent flavor. Nice and thick. What's your favorite Paddy? - Of the three?
- Yeah. - Strip tenderloin. Yeah. - We agree on that one. - Yeah. To be honest, my least
favorite is porterhouse. (Paddy chuckles) I don't know if you wanna
to use that or not but... (both laughing) Here's your bloody tadpole, chef. This is the whole tenderloin or filet as we'll know it in the UK. Very lean piece of meat. - What we do with the
tenderloin here Hawksmoor is quite unique. Places would take just
the center, cut barrel, get filets, everything else goes. For us we do full tenderloin utilization. - So we're gonna break down the tenderloin So we have the head which
will be our shutter ground. And then of course the tail we'll butter fly and use as our skirlie. And that's where you can see a bit of our British culture coming in. The skirlie is a Scottish
dish traditionally, hence the name comes from the sound of the oats and the fat hitting the pan. It makes that 'SKS' kind of sound. And that's what we'll get. Set it off for the cast iron. And we'll make a call on how many filets we can get out of that before it starts to cut into the chateau, in this case it's two. And then what you're left
with is a nice even chateau that's got three pieces to it. That's what makes a chateau, a chateau where you have the
end of the sense of barrel and then the two side muscles. And that'll go in our blackboard later. (upbeat music) - Our pastry program, I look
at it as our secret weapon. Carla is a pro, an amazing team, an amazing variety of desserts. You know, people come
in just for a dessert. It's really becoming a huge
part of our identity here. This is my, by far, my
favorite morning snack, maybe the maple tart neck and neck. But...
- Marple tart. - Yeah, this is my favorite thing to quality control in the morning. Normally I'll be over here and she just kind of
leaves it on the corner, gives me the look, that's
when I know I can have it. (upbeat music) - So we're making the chocolate
shells for the grand Rocher, 70% chocolate. - Carla is gonna be
making the grand Rocher, which is one of our signature desserts. It's inspired by her childhood
favorite holiday dessert, the Ferrero Rocher candy
and this is her play on it that we do in the restaurant. (soft music) - It's very important that we try to do as thin as possible. It's gonna be pretty hard to cut into them if they're not thin. (soft music) This is definitely for me, one of the perfect chocolates to have in this time of the year, for sure, it always in my house, always. It's my guilty pleasure. - So it's 12:00 PM. We just finished butchery. The grills are lit and now
we're gonna start to get ready for our daily steak test. So Paddy we'll take one piece
from every cut that comes in. We taste it, we talk
about it, we make notes and if anything doesn't make the cut, it doesn't make the menu. (upbeat music) - Quite a generous seasoning
of Maldon sea salt, 'cause A, because we lose a little bit on the bars as they fall through but also the big heavy
filets make for a great crust and enable us to get that
Maillard reaction going, caramelization. Flavor, it's texture and
it's appearance as well. But we don't want bar marks. We want a nice even golden brown crust through out our steaks. Because the different steaks
have different fat levels, which will make for where and how long you need to cook them. So the heavier the fat,
the quicker the char cause there's a bigger conductor of heat running through the meat. Whereas something like a filet, which has much, less
fat, will take longer. We can see how good our
extracting system is by how quickly it's going up, so it looks like a lot of smoke. They help spread my
natural charcoal color. - The main difference
between cooking with gas or cooking with charcoal is
as the juices of the meat, the fat is dripping onto the coal. It's creating that bit of smoke, which is kind of coming up and
almost like glazing the meat with a whole nother layer of flavor and I almost call it
our secret sauce here. - You have to pay
attention the whole time, otherwise something can over-char or burn and that is just no good, We won't send it. - [Producer] How many
steaks have you cooked, do you reckon? - [Paddy] Since ever?
- [Producer] Ever. - Millions, millions. I wouldn't be able to count as many. - [Matt] The importance
of taste testing each and every steak is every cow is different. Especially once we put
something at the 35 days of age, a lot of things can happen, there's a lot of variables. So we take one piece
off of every subprimal that comes in and test it. And it's a real indicator of what the rest of the
beef is gonna taste like and we can flag any issues. (upbeat music) - So let's start with this, this is our...it's not on the menu yet. It's the grass-fed,
grass-finished bone-in rib chop. Crack on and try a bit. - This is the rib that we
brought in this morning. So this is a new cut from a new supplier. First time we've actually tasted it. 35 days in the box, really good and I think as more gets ready, we'll start to see it on the menu. - [Paddy] This is the boneless strip. - Great texture, amazing
flavor from the age. that's a winner. - Yeah. - [Matt] It's absolutely essential that we have the whole
senior team in the kitchen during the beef tasting. So it's not just my opinion
but it's the house opinion. And also to help develop
their pallets as chefs. Well, now he needs to
cut 10 times more meat, than we did on camera. So if we do 250 cover
service in the restaurant, 220 covers come off of that grill. - It's a two-person job. - Yep. - So now the meat's been prepped. We're gonna send it back
down into the fridge, get everything weighed up
and get ready for service. (soft music) - So now we're in our prep kitchen and this is kind of the
heartbeat of the restaurant, where everything that
happens behind the scenes before it gets sent upstairs for service. This is Nick, one of the
Sous-Chefs on the grill. So chef Nick here is
weighing out all the stakes for the service. so these are all the large
cuts that we sell by the ounce. So they all get individually weighed, packed up in peach paper and labeled with the
ounces as customers order then we know which ones to
identify from the drawer and I make sure that
everyone gets the stake that they have picked. (soft music) So we're just gonna weigh out the chateaus for tonight service. Six will probably take us
into the first two hours. We'll most likely sell around
16 or 20 in the evening, a chateau like this coming into 31 ounces, because of no bone, it's about
10 ounces of meat per person, plenty for three. And then we have something
here closer to 22 ounces. This is a great steak for two or one very hungry person. Two reasons we weigh the steaks, one for kind of our
experience for the guests, with the marking off of the chalkboard and giving them that control of how much beef they want to consume. And for us, we can, you know, manage our cost down to the ounce. This is a count of all of
the large format steaks that we're gonna sell by the ounce, that'll go on the blackboards. We have the different
ounces that are available and then how many in each category we have available for each service. (soft music) The sides that we do at Hawksmoor are as important as the beef. We wanna have kind of a
rounded dining experience here, where you don't just come
in, eat steak and leave. So here we have the
Yorkshire pudding butter. This is another kind of
ceremonial act we do every night. The butter needs to be
prepared 24 hours in advance. (soft music) How do they look chef? - Look okay actually, yeah. - So you could see that beautiful rise, that nice indent and then you have that nice
beautiful totally inside. Yeah so we bake roughly 300 Yorkies before the service every day. They go with the potted beef. So this is our potted beef, What we do with all of our trim, we confit them in beef fat and then that gets kind
of whipped together, almost like a rillette. Served in a little jar
with Yorkies, bone marrow, onion gravy on the side. And just like another way that we try to be really sustainable and using everything that
we have in the restaurant. So this is a half an
evenings of bone marrow. We go through about 1500
pounds of bone marrow a week. Bone marrow is in everything. It's in our burger, it's in our
oysters, it's in our sauces. It's one of our favorite ingredients. The goal of that center cut is just really optimizing how much marrow
meat is inside each bone. Here you could just see it in there, by taking the center cut of the bone, you get that beautiful
deep cup of bone marrow. You could just slide it out like that. So this is day two of
the triple cooked chips. Last night, the prep team
steamed and shafted these, from the shafting you get all
these beautiful imperfections in the potato and that's what's
gonna get very, very crispy and create the signature
triple cooked chip. (upbeat music) So this is Mohamedou, Mo has been with us since day one, when we opened Hawksmoor and his primary mission every
day, is triple cooked chips. So many different variables
of how it can go sideways but a real master of what he does. Are you tired of chips?
- No. - Nah, never tired of chips. Our triple cooked chips, take three days from start to finish. It's a labor of love but when you see the guest enjoying it, it's always worth it. Here we do the triple cooked chips but we also do a beef dripping fry. And we have a clientele
that remembers that flavor and he's like, "I just
can't put my finger on it." And that's exactly what it is, it's the original flavor
of a McDonald's fry. (soft music) All right guys, three o'clock staff time. (soft music) Afternoon, guys.
- [Group] Heeey! - All right Mikey, let's hear it. - We have 200 reservations
for this evening. - When the line staff arrives, we have a briefing talk about last night. What went well, what didn't? Menu changes anything like that and just kind of bring everyone together, before we start the day. (all clapping) - All right, so great service guys. - [Man] Yes chef. - So everyone's outside,
eating their family meal. I'm just boxing off what I'm working on. We cut all of the raw meat and fish as close to the surface as possible, starting to get to that
intense part of the day, race to the finish line. This production is beginning. We have a little over 70
employees at Hawksmoor. This is the largest team
I've managed as a chef. We have a lot of legends
in each department and we're just really trying to build something special here. It's 4:45 on the dot. We're doing our sauce check every day. This is the last test, before
we go into the service, one, two, three, four,
five, just shy of 20 here. Creamed spinach is a big one. - Yeah.
- It's a staple here, tasting it through meat sauces, the view on the chicken. Both are really good. That one my favorite sauce. If you don't feel the anchovy, then you don't know you're eating, too much anchovy in it overpowers
what you're eating with. Small window of perfection. And then the chips. Crunchy, nice acid from the malt vinegar, great bunch of chips. A little bit more salt on the tartare. But everything else is great. Here you can see all our
single cuts for the service and then in the bottom, is
everything sold by the ounce. Doors are open and the guests
are gonna start to come in, anytime.
(soft music) At 5:30 the curtain goes up, lights go down in the dining room and then it becomes all about the guest. As the day transitions into service, it becomes more of a conductor role. So we have a bar, we have private dining, which is huge and taking off. And then we have the restaurant. You know, we're kind
of air traffic control on the past making sure that we are able to serve all
three at the same time. (soft music) Beautiful porterhouse service plates. (soft music) So this is our cast iron steak, taken from the tail end of the filet, bone marrow squarely on top, beautiful chiffonade of
parsley, pinhead oats, a little bit of sea
salt ready for service. Tonight we have around 220 on the books, plus two private dining events booked and then a full bar. It's one of the beauties
of being in an open kitchen and standing in the dining room. Is that you get to feel
that energy of the clientele as well as the full team, it's incredible. (soft music) So this is our bone-in rib chop, nice T-bone and a big
boy 40 ounce chateau. (soft music) It's a beautiful rib chop, atlas carrots cooked
with cider and mustard. This is two sides of
bone marrow, small table. Night's almost through,
quarter houses are gone, ribs are almost gone. Couple of big ones to sell. (jazz music) By the end of the service, you know, it can be quite exhausting but we're always quite
enthusiastic and excited by the end 'cause it's just a huge accomplishment what we do here every day. I finished once the last check leaves, it's around 10, 11 o'clock at night, check out with the senior team and then off to my next job with my son. (soft music) - Chef, eleven open menus.
- [Man] VIP. - And we're all in for the evening. - All in, oui. Boys all in. - [Men] Yes chef.
- [Man] Yes sir. (soft music)
