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Sip & Guzzle is an American-Japanese hybrid cocktail bar. We got number one burger in North America, voted by world's best steakhouses. My title is executive chef. I did 10 years at 3 Michelin Alinea as executive chef, and I'm taking all of my creativity and applying it to the bar. It's a cocktail bar. A lot of the food wouldn't work in all environments. Here, having a 13-inch mochi fry that's chewy and it's a french fry with a couple cocktails and a beer makes absolute sense, and it's fun. Hey, what's up? Welcome to Sip & Guzzle. I'm Mike Begayle, executive chef. Come on in. This is actually Guzzle Bar. Downstairs, it's Sip Bar. Upstairs focuses on classics and classic cocktail making, prohibition style, and then downstairs is a little bit more technique-driven, and the kitchen supports both programs. So come into the kitchen and let's get started. We're checking in on some morning production. Chef here is getting ready to grind our A5 Wagyu for our signature tavern burger. This tavern burger is a byproduct of another iconic sandwich that we do, the Royale with cheese. We take all the trimmings from that and we grind it into patties. That was how this dish was birthed. We use A5 Miyazaki specifically because the Royale with cheese sandwich is an iconic sandwich in Japan called the katsu beef sandwich, and our version is a little bit Americanized. We put minced onions similar to how big fast food brands do it. We make our own Japanese ketchup, our own version of cheese sauce on it. Specifically, this is tenderloin. This isn't just A5 Wagyu. It's the most tender cut on top of it already being tender, and the reason for which is when you bite into this really thick sandwich, it needs to disintegrate and eat almost like a marshmallow. But for the burger, we do 12-day very specifically because that's our yield of our byproduct, so it is sustainable. This is like a nose to tail, if you will, of our in-house production. There's a lot of fat here. It's not traditional for a tavern burger, so we need to strengthen it. So we add a little bit of gelatin, and then we add Japanese Jodori egg yolks to give it a little bit of a binder as well. It's a Japanese chicken that's actually a fertilized egg. It's chicken eggs they use in yakitori. We start this in the morning, let them really, really firm up because we're going to pan baste those and a lot of French butter and caramelize them, and we need to make sure that it's fresh ground daily, that's bound properly, and that it has time to rest. So the meat softens even a little bit more, but it's still compact. And then we assemble the burger by adding what I call parmesan singles to mimic like a crab single, where you take parmesan and cream and lay it into a sheet and cut it into perfect squares so we can drape that over and steam it over the final product. And then we do our own fermented shishito relish, napa cabbage slaw, fermented pickles, just a light brushing of tare on it, and the bread's bakery sesame bonds. This looks great, chef. I'm gonna head upstairs and check in with chef Isaac. I like to start my day with chef de cuisine Isaac here. Isaac runs not only the day-to-day operations, he helps me streamline the systems, make sure every dish is consistent. Let's check out this caviar, see how it's gonna work. This is golden osetra caviar. We get it farmed from Greece. It's just a rare quality egg. It's a little bit richer, a little bit more buttery than you would typically get from a caviar. Any luxury ingredient, there needs to be a form of education from the product to the guest. The best way to serve it is in abundance. That way the guests feel not only are they getting the quantity of which they want, but they're able to make their own assessment into why they like it. Feeling getting it with ice cream a lot, so thinking maybe we just do a special with a fat dab of caviar on the Hokkaido milk saucer. Mm-hmm, really good. This badge is super nutty. All right, we're gonna check some of the deliveries that are coming in now. Some of our deliveries come up to the bar. This is our Breads Bakery delivery. A very prestigious list that rated us number one burger in the country is partially due to this amazing partnership with Breads Bakery. Every day, deliver in the morning between 12 and 15 buns. Just baked like an hour ago. We don't make it in-house because we don't have the time commitment, the proofing, the ovens. One thing coming from Michelin kitchens is there's like a stigma of not making everything in-house, and if you're not making your own bread or your own cured meats or whatever. Then you're a hack. Yeah, then you're an idiot, and you should go home, and I've never come back. Bread looks awesome, and we have a few other deliveries that we need to check on. Come on in. Thank you. Straight to the kitchen. All right. This is our bluefin tuna. Really high quality, as you can tell. Clean, beautiful product that we use a lot of. Typically what we'll do is we'll separate this loin and use the loin specifically for putting into our volcano roll. We like to give it a little taste, determine if we want to age it on the skin a little bit downstairs to impart a little bit more umami and flavor, or sometimes it's kind of ready to go now. What do you think? I think it's great. I think sit on it for a couple days and let it kind of concentrate just on the skin, and then we'll break it down and get it ready. It could go right now. I'd be happy with it right now, but yeah, let's give it a few days and we're okay. Let's pack it up and keep on moving. So a big part of my day is checking in on production. All of the production happens behind the scenes before we start service. Right now, I'm checking in on our volcano roll, which this is an homage to the Japanese hand roll. This is a unique recipe of macerating nori with sugar and soy and invert sugar and then drying. This is a perfect example of a dish that's just hyper, hyper minimalist, but it took about four months of constant R&D. This is actually two sheets of nori that we've pressed together. The next thing is to fry it quickly, and what we're doing is we're letting the sugars that are in the soy caramelize. You take this bar and you have to work very, very quickly because as the sugar cools, it hardens. So what we're doing is rolling this and pressing it so that I'm getting it very, very, very tight and structural, and then the sugar temperature is dropping drastically, and as it cools, which forms a tube, and we set it right here and we make 150 of those, and then we move on to the next project. So we're almost done here. Let's go check on some more of the production. So we saw some production upstairs. A lot of the rest of the production happens down here in our receiving kitchen. You saw upstairs me rolling the tubes and finalizing them, and then they get dehydrated. Down here is where the production starts. We lacquer and brush and macerate all the nori, and then it gets air dried before the final steps. So this happens every day, first thing in the morning, as well as drying our chicken skins that we will puff later. This is our bikini production. This is the bikini sandwich designed for my love of the Spanish bikini sandwich. We call it the world's thinnest sandwich. The idea of this dish is that we fill it with luxurious ingredients that embody ham and cheese sandwich. We use Comte cheese from France, and we kind of make like a Comte cheese ganache, and then we layer that with fresh shavings of Cinco Hotas jamon Iberico, which for me is the greatest jamon in the world. This is the base of the sandwich, and as you can tell, it's super, super airy. It's like a wafer. We need two of these per order. We can sell over a hundred of these a night, so kind of like everything else. It's a huge production that has to continually work with extreme efficiency. These machines here, they have to continually go for hours and hours to fill this. It's not a traditional stroopwafel machine. It's basically a flat iron press with nonstick surfaces that I've used for a variety of techniques, but it's the only one I know that proves this technique. The batter is really special because it's a combination of the right amount of starch and how those starches are introduced with flour and how it's rested and sits over time to give it the resiliency it needs to be paper thin and light without being overly heavy. Over here, we have our chicken production. Chef Will here has been with us since day one, and he's a monster. Will can single-handedly prep almost all of it by himself, and we're super lucky to have him. This is a signature electric chicken. It's called electric because it has a heavy amount of Sichuan oil and a little bit of sansho, which is Japanese, that has a numbing effect on the palate. It's kind of like our version of Nashville hot chicken. We debone it for maximum surface area, for crunch, for consistency. It also helps speed up the cooking process. Then we brine the legs overnight. It makes a juicier piece of chicken. For me, you cannot fry chicken if you don't brine it. We air dry it. It takes a little bit of that moisture out of the skin so that when we fry it, it gets even extra crispy. Off the air dry, into buttermilk. Out of the buttermilk and into our dredge. Out of the dredge, into the fryer. Every single chicken gets fried for exactly seven minutes, no more, no less. Out of the fryer, into our amazing Sichuan oil. It goes in and out of that oil, which just allows that textural crunch layer to be saturated with all that chili. But then we let it drip and dry so that the chicken's not overly saturated. And then we finish it with a heavy dusting of a lot more chili powder and Sichuan powder. You let the guests use a pair of scissors. We instruct them to put a glove on so they can handle the heat. If we cut up the chicken, it immediately starts to lose heat and also moisture. All of the dishes are Izakaya style, so it's all things to share. And this is how we can make something that is a single leg of chicken shareable for, you know, the whole table. So that's it for our chicken. Keep this thing moving. We have a little bit more production to do. We got about an hour before doors open. Get ready for service. Do any final tastings, any final garnish work, and make sure the stations are set the way they need to be for service. Here's our nori rolls. The cutting boards are coming out. Salamander's going on. Ovens are going on. Cotton candy machine's getting warmed up. This is another bit of garnish for one of the dishes. This is our chicken skins, which we make chicken stock and puree the chicken stock with koshi akari rice from Japan. It kind of puffs like a chicharron. These are the skins that we have drawing on the speed rack downstairs. We go through a lot of these. We do a chicken chips and salsa. So this actually acts as like a potato chip. The guests get to crack the chips that are seasoned with the powder and dip it into avocado, pineapple, and salsa verde. So part of service is getting these last minute. They say super crunchy. We're going to put up the chicken chips and salsa. This is kind of a Ferran Adria trick. Way, way, way, way back in the day used to put salt air on his margaritas, which is super ahead of its time. Sometimes people will look at airs and foams and they'll criticize it as being sciency and molecular. It's no different than any other technique. Making a foam, making a puff chip, making an anglaise for ice cream base, these are all science techniques. You can either dip it or you can sip it. It's almost designed to be like a gazpacho. Guests have a lot of fun with it. We need to check the foie gras, which is our signature Mont Blanc recipe, which is toasted shokupan, sour cherry jam, and make sure we're tight there. Did you re-blend that? This is new. That's new? Yeah. It still needs to be blended silkier. This is a pate a foie, the classic French pate a foie using cherry juice. It's kind of like a jam, which still gives it bite and really holds up texturally to the foie gras. We've lost a few chefs to this dish. He's our third chef to attempt this today. Foie gras is obviously really, really dense, right? It's pure fat. And when fat gets cold, it gets really, really firm. We stabilize ours with a little bit of gelatin, so it's flexible, but we don't do a whole lot else to it. So inherently, he's working with a very, very dense, firm duck fat, and he probably should start going to the gym soon. He's going to fix the cherry, so I think we're pretty much there, unless I'm surprised. There's also like a peanut butter and jelly thing going on, not in actual flavor, but in texture and design. The sour cherry and the super fatty foie gras, and of course, the bread. Your mind takes you to a place. You're like, something's very familiar about this, and it's done in a little bit more of an elegant fashion. For service, I'll typically expedite, or Chef Isaac will expedite. We have 110 people on the books, but we could easily have 150 walk-ins tonight that we're not ready for, and with that comes surprises. That's the nature of the beast. We are all set up in here with tastings. Now we just need to finalize getting the expo station set up and fine-tuning everything so we can get ready to go for service. It's four o'clock. We're about to get busy, so I'm going to have to kindly ask you to leave. Thank you.