- Morning, Chevy. - Good morning chef. (upbeat music) - So these are wild Japanese
tai from Toyosu Market which is gonna be on our sashimi fish for the next several days. (upbeat music) So if you look at the tail,
like the tail is absolutely perfect on all sides, it hasn't been beaten up or worn down. And that's because this
fish is from the open sea. But farm-raised tai, these
things will be worn down to like bloody little nubs because they're raised in a
pen and they're constantly swimming in this net and their tail and their fins get worn down from the friction of
rubbing against the net. We'll scale all these fish
and gut them all today. And then these fish
will go on the dry-ager. These fish are $40 a pound. So each one of these fish
is a couple hundred bucks. Yeah. This is almost
$3,000 worth of tai snapper for the next couple days. It's crazy. So this same fish was farm raised, or even if it was wild caught, but coming from New Zealand
would be nine or 10 bucks. So basically four times
the price to come from wild from Japan. Chevy Ramirez, whose been
our fishmonger for what? Four years now, five years? - Four years. Yeah, four years. - We're gonna scale them
with a Japanese technique called sukibiki, which is actually you
scale 'em with a knife. This technique is better
especially if you gonna serve the fish for sashimi, 'cause it does less
damage to the actual fish. And then we're gonna gut them, clean them out really, really well. And then we'll go upstairs in dry-ager. There's process to it
just in the same way there is when you go to a sushi bar. Like you go to a sushi bar
and it looks like nothing. They got a bunch of raw fish. But there's so much that happened
before you ever got there. - Yeah. So we're upstairs
where our dry-ager is and we're gonna take the fish
that's already been drying over the weekend and then switch it out with these tai snapper
that we receive today. And then two, three days from now we're gonna use these fish. So we just keep on rotating. So yeah, this is one of the tai snapper that we're gonna use today. Right here. You can see how much the
difference just the two days on this skin is made there. (upbeat violin music) - So now Chevy's gonna filet some of the tai that we just brought from upstairs for tonight's sashimi. You can't really make nice
sashimi with any kind of fish if you don't filet it well. When you take the filet off the bone, if you in any way break up this
beautiful filet right here, or this one, then when you
go to cut sashimi later, it will be very obvious that the fish was sort of treated in a
less than gentle manner when it was fileted. Next step he'll remove those bones. Then you cut the fish
into different loins, the belly loin and the back loin. And then the fish will be salted
for about 10 to 12 minutes. And then at that point
it's ready for sashimi. Every step is essential
in its mise en place. So the first substantial bite, the first bite you really need like utensils for is
that oyster with caviar. These are fat bastards from the hood canal up
in Washington state. It's actually a shigoku oyster, which a lot of people are probably familiar with that, has spent extra time on the bed about an extra year on the
bed so that they come larger. So to wash these guys just
throw a bunch of ice in there and I'm gonna run a little
cold water over them, it'll knock off some of the barnacles and any sand that they might
have from the beds with. - [Tristan] Yeah. So we
rubber band 'em to keep all the liquor inside the shell
that'll end up being used for the sauce later. - [Chef] Tristan's been
here for almost 17 years. The entire time we've been open. We started cooking together
when he was a very young man and I was a much younger man, but yeah, it's been a long strange trip but I'm glad that he's been
with us every step of the way. - [Tristan] We let them steam
for two and a half minutes. And then we let him rest for one minute. - [Chef] They're not like fully cooked. They're just like, oh shit
it's getting warm in here. 'Cause you can still like
hold it in your hand. But it does enough to like
set the flesh so that it has a nice mouth feel and we
try to keep 'em upright also when we put 'em in the ice so that we're keeping
the liquor in the shell. Opening up that caviar
a couple times a week and just looking at it and
marveling at it and tasting it. It's different every time. It's a magical thing. Those kind of traditions
like food traditions, to me they're important. - Kind of deceiving how much
work goes into a single dish. You know, we have to steam
it and then we shuck 'em all. Then we cut each oyster, put
it back in it's original shell. They weigh out all the caviar
that goes into each oyster. And then a sauce is made from the liquid. - We make a sauce with champagne and cultured butter. We finish that sauce with the extra juice that
comes out of those oysters. Eight grams of caviar per
serving and some fines herbs and it goes right on top of the
oyster and it's served warm. That oyster changes from time to time. We need to have the oyster
to have a nice deep cup and to be really full in the shell, 'cause otherwise it's
kind of insubstantial. Yeah. So these are our scallops from my friend Nancy Wynn up in Maine. Nancy's scallops are so fresh that when you do that, they move. Yeah. Her stuff is just the best. Like they're just no better scallop that I've ever had really. During the season, which
is like December to April, this is almost always on the menu. It's just one of those
things with wild fish, with wild seafood you can
never really count on it and you gotta be flexible. And so we always give just a quick rinse, just to make sure that
any loose sand or whatever is rinsed away. So this side, the scallop
slopes away from you. If you were to put it
on the plate like this, but if you put it on the plate like that, the scallop slopes up sort of in a much more eye pleasing way. And so when we arrange
our scallops on the tray, we always arrange 'em in the same way which is to say that the flat side, 'cause all scallops will
have one flat side like that, is on the left. Every time you add a new scallop you find which side is
flat and then put it up and put it right up against
the last scallop like that. Making sure that scallops
are stored this way may sound goofy, but it
has many practical purposes 'cause it's silly to also
like spend all that money and buy the very best product that you can and not really care for it. (upbeat violin music) So from here we can prepare the truffles and then we can start
barding the scallops. We're in the Truffle
Brothers truck right now. Twice a week they come,
they bring us truffles. I'm looking for aroma,
I'm looking for shape. Obviously you look for color. So they always have a
little knife on the truck. And I like to take a little piece off so I can look inside the truffle and make sure that it's as
mature as I want it to be. So if the truffle's black
all the way through like that and you have great aroma,
you know the truffle's mature and it's gonna be what your looking for when it when it comes to black truffles. So yeah, I'm taking 'em all. Thank you. Yeah. Getting in and outta
this truck, it gets harder. I swear, he keeps buying
trucks that are higher. 'Cause every year it gets
harder to get in and out of this stupid thing but they don't like to leave it out here on
the street in Los Angeles, which is probably a good idea. Thank you guys. Take care. (gentle music) So Stephanie's gonna take us through the next step of our scallop dish. - So now I'm just gonna make some planks and I always find the best way
is to find the flattest side. - From the very first time I
stepped up foot in a kitchen. I knew that one day I'd wind
up in a restaurant like this. Like I've been mentored
with these ingredients as part of the repertoire. Yes they are ingredients
that you would always find in a fine dining restaurant. But at the same time, they're
much deeper than that. All these ingredients, I feel like history and past they're part of a larger culture. I don't know. I couldn't imagine not working with them. - I find that if I kinda
put a little pressure on the top it helps to... Put the truffle in without snapping it. And I'm gonna start with a
little bit of a crisscross shape. As you may be able to
see from the other side. And it is a little time consuming as I'm sure you can imagine. But when it's all said and done, you essentially have a
little bit of truffle in every single bite, so... - [Producer] Do you think the
scallops would be honored? - Yeah (laughing). It's a worthy cause to
give your life for, right? To be stuffed with truff. - And I really like cutting the truffle like this 'cause so often like, with black truffle you can cook them, white truffle, you don't
cook, but with a black truffle you can actually, when
you're eating this scallop you actually have a nice big
piece of truffle in your mouth. You're actually getting the sensation of chewing it and all
that flavor is released into the scallop but the truffle
still has a lovely texture that is really a part of the
experience of eating the dish which I think is really nice. So first they'll get barred with truffle then they'll be sauteed just
until they're just barely done. We glaze them with brown
butter and a scallop broth just to make 'em really
beautiful and shiny. And then it's served with
a puree of honeynut squash and a scallop sort of butter that's made with the scallop broth from
the dehydrated scallops and cultured butter. And that's that. Uni egg has been around here at Providence for maybe 15 years. These are uni for the
next at least day or two harvested from uni in Santa Barbara. We go through, I don't know,
six or eight trays a day but the idea is we buy as much as we can. Sea urchin is a tricky thing. It's a very important part of our menu. It's very like wind and weather dependent. Up in Santa Barbara, the wind could be hauling at 30 knots and if it is then the
fishermen can't get out and if the fishermen can't get out, then there's no sea urchin to be had for the next couple days. So when really good uni is available, we buy a lot of it and we hold onto it. A lot of this uni is
gonna go into our uni egg. Step one, empty out the eggs. You know, we top them. Then we empty out the eggs and separate the yolk from the white. And then the yolk goes
back down into the egg. When service happens, we
season the egg lightly. So these are borage blossoms
that we use on the uni egg. We can just pick what we need, it's as fresh as can be. With this stuff obviously unlike the fish, it's gotta be like picked
as close to the time that you you're gonna need it as possible. We'll warm up the sea
urchin in a very light sauce with some fines herbs
and then they get spooned into the egg. Definitely it's sea urchin. You know, it's delicious. It's also very comforting. Sea urchin a nice rich like
champagne, butter sauce. What else do you need? Well, one thing I'll say about that dish, there's plenty of people like, "Oh, I don't like sea urchin,
but that dish converts." So it's about two o'clock right now. And Chevy's, this is like
kind of the last big fish that he has to do for the day. If I were to ask you, what's
your favorite fish to cut? What is which one is it? - This fish-- - Salmon?
- King salmon. - King salmon? Chevy's a master at this point. So you better live up to that Chevy. No (beep) up now. - No.
(chef laughing) - Flavor bears no resemblance
to a fish like this, that's lived its entire
life cycle wild at sea on its normal diet. There's no way to replicate
the flavor of a fish like that with a fish that's raised in a pen. All of the fish that we want for the menu, actually we got today for the menu. We can always find wild salmon. We can't always find... the scallops don't always come in and weather dictates so much of the fish. We kind of have to just play it by ear on a day to day basis
to figure out exactly what is gonna go where. And if you commit to using
wild fish as we have, you kinda have to be flexible in that way. There's all sorts of
factors that contribute to what might wind up on
the menu from day to day. So basically we cut 'em about yay-big. Like so, and then Gina, the chef de parties on the fish station will put the sun choke scales on the fish. We will always use wild caught fish. We just have certain principles that we don't compromise period. So I think the thing that
I've dedicated myself to in this restaurant is
working with American fish and presenting it in a
modern and seasonal way. (upbeat techno music) If the message that we can
get across with the menu and by feeling a menu
that's comprised solely of wild fish is the idea that you can. It is possible. It's 3.15 and yeah, they just
walked in with a king crab. Better late than never for sure. But normally we hope that, these big guys will walk through the door, two o'clock at the latest. The vendor that we get these from, they do lots and lots of deliveries on Tuesdays and Fridays specifically. So we go through like, one and
a half of these guys a day. What we do is we take a look through 'em like figure out which is the
one that looks most lively, which you can kind of tell by the way they hold their antenna. Like this guy's his antenna
like all over the place. So he's the one that
we're gonna put in tank. (lively techno music) - Here's the finished
product of the body meat from all the crab with the
peas and the chanterelles. And then they roll it up
in this thin flower crepe and that's gonna be gently just pan-seared in clarified butter. So there's gonna be a little
texture on the outside and they serve it just
with a piece of the leg of the king crab and a tongue of uni. - It's almost 5.15. That's the time that we start our pre-service
meeting every day. We got Nancy's scallops
today, which is good news. So that's on the menu. And then for Maine's
troll caught king salmon, Liberty farm duck and Wagyu. Other than that, I don't
anticipate any changes to the menu throughout the course of service. All right, everybody have a good service. Thank you. - So these are the wild
Japanese tai that I cut all the Sashimi every night. It's like a little bit of
a moment to like unwind. I usually put on some
music and come in here and I slice the fish and
there's all this activity buzzing around in the kitchen. And usually by the time I go out there, Tristan has already tasted
through all of the mise en place that the cooks have made
and we're ready to go. - We have to look behind us. You see the wild Michael lobbying his head in the window over there,
probably listening to reggae or the Grateful Dead - [Producer] It's Grateful Dead. - Grateful dead? Yeah. I had a 50/50 chance. So yeah, they basically like make me one of the completed amuse. And then on all these
spoons is like the different puree's individually so
that I can kind of tell bite the whole thing together I'm like, oh, it's salty. But then I can taste all
the individual components then I'll know what they can adjust. So yeah, this is the oyster mayo. It's little spicy. They try and season it to
where they think it should be. And then obviously I try all the sausage, the next level of checking
and then chef will come by and he might think it
needs a complete change. So it really does hit quite a few levels. Usually like since we
open in five minutes, we'll try and get the amuses
kind of rolling over here. And I make sure that they're all set up. Good? You should start
building tarts right now. You already poked all your crackers? - [Kitchen team] Yes, chef. (suspenseful music) - [Chef] Service comes down to timing, execution and presentation. (upbeat violin music) - So king crab to sea urchin
sauce made with aged ham, crushed peas, a puree peas,
piece of uni on the dish, there's a piece of king crab on the dish. The first several tables have been through the majority of their amuses. The very first table is
ready for a main course now. Ordering two menus, adding one uni egg, it's gonna be one Wagyu, one salmon. (indistinct) It's gonna be two salmon,
both no pork and Wagyu. (violin music) I've definitely learned
work with those seasons. And I think, we've
definitely gotten better at running the restaurant just physically running the restaurant. We've gotten better at
taking care of our guests. You know, everything. It's just always an evolution. 'Cause if it's not, like if you ever just sit there and go, "Oh shit, we really did it." That's like the day you
start to slowly die. I think as a chef, you have
to believe like your best work is in front of you. 'Cause if you don't, if you
leave anything other than that, I don't know why you get out of bed. I really don't. (violin music)
