- So I only half-cooked this
lobster because it's going to go into the fryer and then it's going to get-stir fried in the wok. Just like all the best Chinese dishes, this comes together really quickly. Prosperity Jerk Lobster
is our take on crispy wok stir-fried lobster that
you can get in Chinatown at 2:00 AM when you had
a table full of chefs. So this is how we get the
lobster ready for service. This is our three-step dredge method. So it starts off with a dry,
the next we go into wet. So for every lobster, this
is exactly how we do it. One at a time. All right, now the
lobster goes in the fryer. While that's getting
crispy, we're going to get started on the sauce as well. This is where it gets intense. Cooking with a wok was such a
different learning experience. - This is jerk butter. - A lot of the restaurants that I worked in were predominantly French ones. - Onions. - So I didn't get a chance
to use a wok as much, - Peppers, Maggi sauce. - It's not easy at all. - Lobster goes in... - Like every, all the mise en
place has to be done way ahead And you can't be like f******, like you have to be
like super dialed in... - Ready to plate. - I came from the world of
fine dining, French cuisine, working in three-Michelin-starred
restaurants. And I've learned a ton of techniques - Back on for a quick sec. It's a Ritz cracker crumbs
and a bit more butter. - But I think it's hilarious
that they would be snobby towards our use of things
like Ritz crackers. It's delicious. And if somebody is too
stoosh to enjoy the things that we're doing, then they
can go to another restaurant. - Prosperity Jerk Lobster. - Chinese people go way back in Jamaica. There's generations and
generations of us there. When we first opened, people had no idea that this culture, much
less as cuisine, existed. (upbeat music) - Go! - It's 8:30, time to start
getting on some jerk chicken. - This is Chef Nick my right hand when it comes to jerk and chicken. - Yep. - Chicken man. (laughs) - Yeah, you go through a
lot of chicken in here man. - A lot of chicken. (laughs) - Check out this jerk paste. This is scallions,
scotch bonnet, soy sauce. This is what put us on the map. - When you wanna get
dressed up for jerk chicken, you want to get all in
right inside the cavities. - Deep inside. - Deep inside, yeah. (laughs) One time a bartender asked me
how much chicken I go through - I have my hands in
chicken too many times. (laughs) - And this is just the first part. The fun part is when they started smoking. - And voila. - Jelena, let's truss. - Trussing is important
because when you put it on, on the rotisserie, you
want it to keep that shape. Keep that last one. - Yes, let's go. - Oh shit! (laughing) - He got it, he got it, he got it. - Look, she has extra life right now Right now it marinates for 24 hours. And then we put it on our smoker. - Our jerk chicken takes
a couple of days to make. We start off by dry-brining
and then we cold smoke to get to that smokey flavor. - [Both] One, two, three. (laughs) - Yes. - We smoke at the back of the restaurant. This is like a narrow little alleyway. Definitely not the most ideal place, but you know it gets done. And to do that, we need
a little bit of kindling. - Go on. (inaudible speaking) (laughs) - I used to be fast at one point. (laughs) Ooh, I'm chopping wood in... Jordan One Breds. (laughs) - Placement is important. You want to get some of the
larger ones on the base. - So we're cold smoking this in the in, in this smoker because we
want to finish the cooking on the rotisserie to keep
it as juicy as possible. - Yeah. - So normally you have
chicken coming off the grill Sometimes is especially
like the breast part is very, very trashy and dry. This helps give you the best of all, of every world to be honest. Nice and space, smoke going all through and then you close this baby up. And that's how you get
the best chicken in town. Because we're smoking chicken,
we tried to smoke pork belly same time for our Yakisoba dish. - I have a new idea that I
want to test out at Mignonette. - So please save me one
of these pork bellies. I'm going to check this one. - All right. - And as you've seen earlier,
I'm very good at this point. (laughs) (inaudible mumbling) - I'm thinking about a new dish. So I'm going to smoke this pork belly almost like a, like a Texas-style brisket. So I'm mixing up some Chinese hot mustard. This is my first time doing this. I'm not too sure if this
is going to be working out, but this is just testing. - And again, just like with the chicken do you want to put space in between it. You do not want to put the fat part down, you want to put on the meat
because the fat renders down, you don't want to lose all that fat because that fat is good man. When it comes on to like the winter time like what year is this? Ice is all over the place. There's some time it's snowing. Sometimes the rain sometimes the hail. It's cruel man, it's cruel. Canada, it's nice. Canada is really nice. And it's a really good
thing all-year round. Yeah. - All right, oxtail? - Let's do it. - Watch your back, watch your back. - Next big task that we
have for the day is oxtail. Sometimes they come in chopped up, but sometimes they come
in whole like this. Now we gotta deal with them. So I'm just cutting at the joints to separate the oxtail and
get into manageable pieces. We couldn't be a Jamaican-Chinese restaurant without serving oxtail. - Calm down, man. - How do you think I get my stress out? - Oh my god! (laughs) See, I don't yell in the kitchen. I take action in the kitchen. - All right. - For me when I eat oxtail,
I like big chunks like this. - You want to have a big
piece of oxtail on your fork? (laughs) - A good oxtail, a Caribbean person would take out of your hands man. You mess up oxtail, and they're like, "What are you doing?". Most like shocks you go in it. It's a big cleaver where you go... (growling) just like what he's doing. - The way we do our oxtail
is we start by caramelizing. And we do that in the deep fryer. Not so typical in a traditional oxtail, but it really differentiates ours. If I show my aunts and uncles
that I'm browning oxtail in a deep fryer they would, who knows what they would do to me. - When I first saw him deep frying oxtail, I was like, "What are you
doing? This is not oxtail. This is not oxtail!". But then, the flavors came out perfectly. - This is exactly what we're looking for. That deep caramelization. - So when I started the
sauce for the oxtail, so we put off our onion... So you want to get them
nice and translucent. And this is now the real flavor oxtail. This is, this is where the
real love comes into the dish. Because if this is not done well, everything else that we did,
it makes no sense early on. - So caramelizing ketchup
is almost like napalm. It just sticks everywhere. But Jelena has developed this
technique to get around it. - Any part of exposed
flesh will get burnt. (laughs) It'll get you. - Next up goes oyster sauce. It's that familiar flavor you'll get in Chinese cuisine and some soy sauce. Last thing we're adding is some browning. Browning is that caramel that you'll find in Coca-Cola, it's the thing that gives oxtail its signature slight bitterness. - Browning you find in
every Jamaican kitchen. I think this dish merges both cuisines the best right? - Absolutely. - You have the Chinese influence, but still with the Jamaican flavors. This is what that is. The yin and yang, right? (laughs) - So now we're about to
bring it up to a simmer and then it gets poured over to the oxtail and into the oven for three hours. Jamaican-Chinese food was
taught to me by my grandmother. We go back three generations to Jamaica and she was cooking Jamaican
food with Chinese ingredients, and she's cooking Chinese food
with Jamaican ingredients. It's been three hours in the oven. That's what oxtail is to us. Soft, tender, brown. You can't have oxtail
without rice and peas, and we're actually plating it up with with spinner dumplings as well. It's a very simple flour-water dumpling. Fusion, for the sake of it, is definitely not something that I'm into. But with a mixed background,
the way that I have, it's just a natural progression
for me to experiment and play with both sides of
the cultures and the cuisine. - Yeah. You can see they're still raw. Texture has changed slightly. You can smell it. This is what you're looking for. - When I first decided to do jerk chicken, I knew I wanted to do it
on a rotisserie rather than on a grill, but at the same time I wanted to make sure I kept
the respect for the dish and the smoke lends a
huge amount of flavor. - Jerk Chicken, Jerk Pork, all smoke. Let's go, okay guys. It's after four, let's start
getting ready for service. Okay? The jerk chicken, we
tried to do it as close as possible time, because
it makes no sense to do all of that work on and you
have chicken sitting out. You want it to be fresh
and nice and juicy. I get all up in the chicken. That's the way we like it,
that's what we like it here. Rub on some more. It gives you all that nice crunch and it gives you that
nice heat that you get. That's what Jerk Chicken is about. Sometimes we don't even get by the bones. How about our Jerk Chicken is on? So now it's pork belly. So we want to go for eight ounces. Very generous with salt. And then again, you can
do some more jerk base. And this is not like
any jerk pork you have ever had in Jamaica to be honest. - One of the things
that I'm doing right now that's keeping me busy is our
new restaurant, Mignonette. It's menu testing time,
it's the exciting time. And I have this idea for a new dish. It's really loosely based off of a shumai, Chinese shrimp and pork dumpling. And I smoked a little bit
of pork belly as well. So we're upstairs at Mignonette,
and we've accomplished the big jobs for mise en place at Patois. And here we get to play
around and do some new dishes. So then I took this pork and smoked it Texas brisket style, and
just put a little bit of salt, some pepper on there... has that crust still because
of that barbecue paper. In theory, this is going to taste good. - I trust you chef. - Yes. (laughs) Dripping. So juicy. The cut of the pork could
be a little bit better but what we did to it was really good. All right. So I'm going to make a
mayonnaise, but the base of it is actually going
to be Shiromiso and crab. And it's going to give us a like a really intense umami flavor. (whirring sound) It's good. My deal with this was Ritz
cracker, super simple. So we got some of this mayo right on a piece of that pork on
there, and it's got some ikura. It just works together in my head. This is an actual test, first time. - Cheers? - Cheers. It doesn't taste the way that
I, I actually imagined it but in, in, in some ways... - Tastes delicious. - It tastes delicious. - It's a bit heavy. - It is. - In all honesty. - Yeah. Well, it was inspired
by a shumai but it doesn't f****** taste like a shumai to me at all. - Cause there's no shrimp on it, right? (laughs) - Exactly, we had that crab and stuff but I mean, it's a very
loose interpretation. Yeah, we'd have to think it over. All right man, that was fun. I got to head back down,
take care of service. - Thank you so much. - See ya. - All right guys, picking up one Yakisoba. What makes this dish so
unique is that we actually put oxtail gravy as the base of the sauce. We start with a lot of cabbage, broccoli. Yakisoba is traditionally
like a wok stir-fried ramen noodle and we wanted
to do a different take on it. Here's our yakisoba sauce. (sizzling) - So, this is our pork
belly for our yakisoba. - Finish it off with a bit of jerk glaze. - That's our jerk pork yakisoba. - Now we're plating
our juicy jerk chicken. And you see, because of
the rotisserie, you see all the juices are running out. Chicken breast is nice
and moist and beautiful. And finish it with some cilantro. (yelling) Connor, what are ya working right now? It gets chaotic sometimes. I mean, we don't have a lot of space and then you have a lot
of persons on the line. So this is our dirty fried rice. So we have our ground pork,
we have our Chinese sausages, we have our homemade dirty spice. (bell rings) The chicken, two chickens. - So you can get our
jerk chicken in two ways. Right off the rotisserie
or you can get it in a jerk chicken chow mein. Shiitake mushroom. Jerk chicken and chow
mein are a natural match Jerk paste. There's the spice of the jerk chicken and there's the saucy, crispy
noodles in the chow mein. (incoherent speaking) Part of me is a storyteller. I really wanted to show
some of my heritage. This is bok choy. Next up is jerk chicken meat. Jamaican Chinese, it's a,
it's a very unique one. And we finish with bean sprouts. Noodles go on the plate and we pull it straight from the wok. I don't think a lot of
people have seen that. So of course it's really
important for me to show a bit of my heritage in the food
that we're feeding people with. - Table 32. Oxtail with slaw! (bell ringing) So we have one fry, one
jerk on our dirty rice. All right, I'm going guys. I'm going. Here you go. Three oh two. You want the next patty? - I'll take that patty. - Okay, go, there you go. Give me hot sauce please! There you go, double jerk. Three oh four. - Just had a bit of a rush. It was a, pretty intense
everyone coming in altogether but you know, it's, it's the
thing that we enjoy the most. - All right. So now we're coming into
almost the close of service. Um we got the last couple
of tables left to come in. So we're just gonna put
up some more chicken just for those guys and then
we wrap it up tonight, okay? Here I go again. (upbeat music)
Nice. Craig is good peoples.
Patois is one of my favourite restaurants in the city, and I feel like its way of melding cuisines has a particularly Toronto kind of vibe. Good to see them getting some international attention via Eater.
Jamaican' me hungry
I went to Patois and yes, it is a good restaurant.
A question - what kind of bottled sauce did the chef use to make the jerk lobster? He mentioned it in the audio but I couldn't make it out. Was it Maggi?
Damn that looks delicious.
That jerk chicken chow mian looked 🔥🤤