- [Eric] Great fried chicken obviously has to have a crunch on it, and that should yield to really tender, seasoned, juicy meat. That is a perfect fried chicken. Everything else from there is kind of the spinning wheels, if you will. The main difference in
American fried chicken is completely a flour crust. Definitely veers more towards the crunchy spectrum of things. Whereas an Asian fried chicken would usually be smaller
pieces cut up in dice and fried with pure starches, and it's very crispy and light. So it kind of exists in between that. It's crispy. It's crunchy. It's has a little bit of sweetness, but it also has that intense savoriness of American-style fried chicken. Then when you add all
the chili paste together, it adds a lot of flavors. So it seems to work out. (upbeat music) This is very important. This is probably the foundation upon which this fried
chicken temple was built. The rock, if you will. If I'm busting out the scale, it means I'm taking it very seriously. (Chef laughs) Normally, just kind of freehand it all. It's a mixture of these
Tianjin chiles here, which we dry and toast a little bit. Then we blend them into a fine powder. Got Sichuan peppercorns here
that we toast and grind. Very aromatic. The idea here is it's hot,
it's spicy, it's warm. If I'm doing it right, I don't have to taste it too many times. Anyway, after I taste
it two or three times, my taste buds are pretty shot. It's imperative I get it right within the first couple tries. It's tingly. Not that it's "melt your
face off" kind of hot. While the recipe is fairly true, it needs little touches here and there. (energetic music) Nice. (Chef coughs) Yeah. Then we're gonna mix it
with our warm duck fat. I think when you think of fried chicken, you have to think of the
oil as an ingredient. It's a cooking medium. There's a little bit of oil that percolates throughout the crust. That's what makes it
different from baked food. And that's what the chicken
is brushed or dipped in. (energetic music) We're currently in our
pop-up space in Rosalu Diner while our permanent
space is being built out. So this is our temporary home. Once the diner's all set and they're finished with their day, they'll typically clear out of the kitchen and finish the dining room up at 2:30, and then we'll get in there and we'll start flipping
it into what we need to do. So originally, this started in my family's
restaurant in Queens, which was an abundance of space, but unfortunately, that lease ended. We needed a temporary home
to keep the business running. So we came over here to Rosalu Diner. It's very challenging to have two menus that just don't have any overlap. I think there's a reason
restaurants don't share spaces. It's a hectic process. It's very challenging,
but we try our best. So we get these really beautiful
whole air-chilled chickens from Pennsylvania. Then we break 'em into 10 parts just like true country-style. Legs, we'll take out the oyster, obviously, super important here. Best bit on the thigh. Then, obviously, everyone
likes a drumstick. Nice little handle on it. It's what the emoji for fried chicken is. So yeah. Then we'll split the chicken right down the breast bone. We're real delicate about the way we process the breast skin. This is really delicate. It's very easy for it to
slide off and slip off. You know, I'm very much a stickler about it being a whole chicken and an air-chilled chicken. Vast majority of industrial chickens are cooled via ice bath. The skin gets really soggy and soppy. When they're air-chilled, they still maintain this
beautiful skin integrity. So I think, you know, when people are talking
about how crispy the skin is and how chewy it is, it's tender, everything kind of falls away in one bite. I think that's where the detail really is. We have the 10 pieces right there. We're gonna start marinating the chicken. Ideally, we do this ahead
in a 24-hour window. They do the buttermilk marinade with onion powder, garlic powder, Chinese five-spice, mustard, and then we're gonna add a little flour. It makes the paste kind of sticky. The flour hydrates overnight, and that way, it adds a really
nice substrate, if you will for the dredge to adhere to. I would say the only thing that's not traditional
about it is the five-spice. Having the exact ratio is really important for it to be a great product. I think this is also another part of probably a more unusual bit of how we fry chicken, and probably what makes it unique. It's a combination of
pure starches and flour. In a traditional country-style chicken, it would just be flour, which is great. We add pure starches like
potato starch, corn starch. Those are more prevalent in Asian cooking. They are super crispy. We add our seasoning mix to
it, which is salt, sugar, MSG. Then we also use a
product called EverCrisp. It's a cost worth that minor detail of someone going to the fridge
at like two in the morning to have a bite and it's still crispy. That's worth it to us. We try to keep a mix
of white and dark meat as best we can. So he spends every day starting off by counting
exactly what we want to use, what the ratio of white to dark meat is. Then he'll pre-fry probably 40, 50 orders just to give us a head start. Then we'll see how the night goes. It would be impossible to fry
all this chicken to order. We kind of do all this
par-frying to get ahead, especially with only TB fryers. There's just no other way. These thighs - he's
frying thighs right now - they'll fry for a solid nine minutes. They'll take some time
to get cooked through and nice and tender. So yeah, he'll fry, depending on how busy the day looks, anywhere between 35, 50 orders just to get us a head start and then we'll keep rolling
it throughout the night, if it's busy. But without par frying,
it would be impossible. I mean, when we did
the delivery operation, we par-fried 100, 150 orders a day, then cooked everything right before we started
going out the door, driving around Manhattan. So yeah, par-frying is
the key to success here. This is definitely a
logistical step that we need. This all started in September, 2020. It was completely through Instagram, through friends of friends. Then it kind of just became a thing. We caught fire with some presses and then all of a sudden
my Instagram inbox was flooded with 600,
800 requests for chicken. I didn't really know
how to build a website. So the only way to lock the order page was via password. So that's kind of how the password wait list chicken started. At its apex, it was 8,000, 9,000 people. Took us about 10 weeks to get to people, which was challenging. This is for our chicken sandwich. It's a de-boned, skin-on chicken thigh. Chicken thigh is great, in general. Very juicy. Has a lot of beautiful connective tissue that breaks down. Has a really nice bite for a sandwich. We liked keeping the skin on. We were trying to do a chicken sandwich that had not been done before. We felt that was an extra
detail that was kind of nice because dredge adheres
to it in such a way. It has that kind of crunchy texture. It's really something special. Everybody has a chicken sandwich. So we were trying to do
something a little different, something that no one
had really done before. So we kind of had a starting point of, "What if we glazed it in this
kind of dark soy caramel?" I know there's a million ways to make caramel the right way, supposedly, but I don't do any of those. I just heat up sugar until it turns the
color I want it to turn. While I joke about how kind of a casual and imprecise approach I take to cooking, there is a lot of thought
that is put into it. I'd like to think it's a
detail-oriented kind of approach, and meticulous. There is a lot of thought as to why things are put
together the way they are and why things are supposed
to taste the way they are. So there is balance and
thought put into it. We'll season it up with dark soy. Then we'll simmer it with these aromatics, garlic, ginger, cinnamon, star anise. Then we'll add a little
chicken powder, as well, to add the savoriness. (upbeat music) I've been cooking in fine dining in New York City for 10 years, like Cafe Boulud and Gramercy Tavern. Then finally at Eleven
Madison Park as a sous chef. You know, my goal had always been to open my own fine dining restaurant. To me, it was about launching Chinese cuisine into modernity. That one had always been my mission. There was a lot of ways
to introduce Asian flavors and Asian cooking into
what is generally a menu centered around Southern
tradition and country cooking. But this was something that still seemed authentic to the way we like to cook and where our background was coming from. Once I settled on really
liking the dark soy caramel, that kind of led me to the pineapple part. So we take these really nice pineapples and we blend it. You know, we wanted to tie
all the spices together with cinnamon and star anise. So like almost every level. Then that's just the basis for our 14 sandwiches. That's what it looks like when it's done. It's translucent, it's
brown, it's caramelized. This is a charred cabbage slaw. Cabbage and grilled flavors
and charred flavors, they take really well. It brings out a lot of
the meatiness of cabbage, and obviously there's a crunch and a vegetal note to
it that's really great. In our original restaurant, Pecking House, we would have wok-d, where we would just toss this in a huge fire-breathing wok for the whole day, and get it really nice and toasty. But, not an option here, unfortunately. So we're using this plancha, which the diner uses for pancakes, (Chef laughs) and we repurposed it to our use to make our charred cabbage slaw. So we'll char it on the plancha, let it get really nice color on one side. We'll just marinate in
Worcestershire sauce, some fish sauce, then Tabasco. Dining room's arriving. They'll flip the dining room over from the diner into Pecking
House for the evening. (energetic music) It's 5:00. We've got people coming in. Every now and again, we'll get a big old kick
in the butt at 5:00 PM, and here we go. Fine dining was a very
kind of ego-driven thing. You know, it was about showing everyone how great you were and these cool techniques
you were doing and such. Obviously, the pandemic
changed a lot of things for everybody. We went to this extremely casual, really approachable food in fried chicken. It gets you back to your roots
a lot as a cook, as well. Not just from a cultural standpoint. At that time, we got so many beautiful
heartfelt messages from people who were like, "This meal just meant so much to me in a time where people are locked inside and kind of freaked out." It became kind of a pivot back to understanding the emotional impact that a chef can have. How it can really mean a lot to people to do this kind of stuff. Every culture has its
fried chicken for a reason. It's something everybody enjoys and there's maybe just slight nuances and slight differences in how we enjoy it, with seasonings and dipping sauces and marinades and methods. I think everyone can
appreciate fried chicken in its own way. This was a very simple approach to just, "We're cooking food for people and making people happy." (dramatic music)
