How a Legendary Chef Runs One of the World's Most Iconic Restaurants — Mise En Place

My technique is simple. I use a silverware, and then I use a spoon, like scallop. So they're all using the different professional knives, and you don't really need this. Yeah, I don't do this every day, but I really enjoy it. I put my hands dirty, so much in one, you know, to see, be in touch with the guys, because they're really the backbone of the kitchen, you know, the backbone of the restaurant. I believe Eddie is probably the fastest butcher in New York City. You know, black sea bass. I mean, I'm pretty good at filleting fish, but this is like beyond. I mean, look at this. There's no flesh left, and he's going to do some tuna as well. We have some sea urchin arrive. Executive Chef Mark Lapico, who's been with us for 17 years from Canada. Canadians are OK. They're good with fish, you know, so here we are. This tuna comes from Hawaii every single day. Look at that color. It's spectacular. It's a little bit leaner, and it works really well with one of our signature dishes, tuna noodles. They get cut in the style of udon noodle. I think this preparation, we can never take out of the menu. People come once a week, twice a week to eat that tuna noodles. You have to really have a good knife skill for this. I mean, they ask us a couple times, and people have no idea. When they start eating the noodles with the chopsticks, it's like, how do you do this? Eddie is the master. That's the mise en place. And then it goes upstairs. Thai chili, olive oil, salt. It's the most popular dish. It is treasure. This is a good one. This is an exciting one. I've been using Uni since I'm in New York, since 1986, from Maine, sometimes from Japan. But we feel like the ones from California are very sweet. Wow. The purple ones are the best ones. Wow, look at that. We're so lucky. Out of the water, from the other side of the country, and this morning they're here, in an hour they're going to be on our menu. Some people have no idea what it takes to put a little Uni on a toast. Flying them in, open them up, the labor. For us, product is key. That's the number one thing. We've sold tens of thousands of cookbooks. No one's ever replicated this restaurant. And I think it's because of the sourcing of the product. And then we have a fabulous team. So, winter's sometimes a little bit tricky. There's not a lot of great fresh product in the local vicinity, but the very good thing is it's truffle season. Right now, we're going to go through a shipment of black truffle. I mean, the aroma's spectacular. You can see, check it. Whoa! This is one of those relationships that we really tried to cultivate. These guys know, as soon as they clear customs, they come directly to us. That usually gives us a large lot to choose from. Is that true or no? Saving $5, $20, $100 a pound of all the places to nickel and dime. In my opinion, this isn't it. Same thing with caviar. So, this is arguably my favorite part of the day, or at least checking in product. Mostly because I love eating caviar. We open each of them, taste each of them. If you look at the caviar, you know, each of the beads is all individual. Wow. I mean, for me, this is an extraordinary lot. You know, I love the color. I love the beads. I love how clean the finish is. I think we're opening shortly, and again, they hit the mark. We're right there. Between the classic egg caviar and the egg toast, we go through quite a lot of caviar. That, and JG has a tendency to sort of give it away. So, this will cover us for the day. We've got Joe Rhee, executive sous chef, who's going to make one of our signature dishes. It's a toasted egg yolk layered between two pieces of house-made brioche. It starts with the eggs, and these get tempered, and then they get cooked for about an hour. You know, it's been described as like the world's greatest grilled cheese sandwich, which I think might be pretty fair, mostly because it gets a massive dollop of caviar on it. For a lot of our dishes, we're looking for precision. We get a lot of custom things made for us, including, you know, in this case, there's a ruler that has the precise measurements of the egg toast. All of our recipes are measured out to a tenth of a gram. We want to make sure that if somebody loves the egg toast in New York, that when they get it in Tokyo or in Brazil, that, you know, they're going to have the same experience. So, the look, the weight of it are extremely important to us. How many egg toasts do you think you've made? I would say close to a million. A million? I have every single bread. I cook every single egg at a restaurant. It's all me. So, if you see it, you know it is. It's me. Each one of them is exactly perfect, so it's going to fit in the tray perfectly, and that's why we use the ruler. I love this. Ideally, you want the butter to be as soft as possible, so that when you fling it, it just lands. You know, it's going to be like this perfect golden brick, and, you know, the sunlight upstairs in the kitchen is like magical during the day. At the right angle, when the egg toast is on the pancha, it almost looks like the sun is glowing. I know that sounds a little dramatic, but honestly, it's pretty rad. See, now when you look at it, and it's like that perfect brick, this is the reason for the ruler. You know, that is the precision. I love this place. This is like, you mastered that, huh? I'm trying to, Chef. When this is cooked, the brioche is golden. A little sea salt, herbs, a spoon of fresh caviar. I think the texture of the crunchy, the creamy, hot, cold, salty. It's a 10. So, we have about 40 restaurants around the world, but this is the flagship. Jean-Georges is the flagship. When I'm in New York, people see me every day here. At least 10 hours a day, so. Co-op just came. This restaurant is really the hub of the creativity. That's why we create all the recipes, and then we export them around the world. I would never put a dish on the menu if I don't taste it, or if I don't eat it from A to Z. So, we think about what... I think it's smoking it whole. Chef Greg Brennan is our culinary director, who develops all the recipes for us. I mean, right now we're working on a co-op dish. We don't have a sauce yet. We don't have a condiment yet. We don't have a vegetable yet. And that's where it starts. I like co-op with some spices. I think we should spice it now. Okay. Let it rest. 15 minutes with seasoning. All right. With cardamom, yeah? That's good. I like cardamom. I'm going to go ahead and make a spice mix. And what I normally do in a process like this is I'll make it for one. In this case, four. If we like it, then we just scale up the recipe. But I weigh everything as we go, so I don't ever have to try to get back to something. What do you think? So, check this out. Greg made a spice and salt blend. I mean, it already smells good. Basically, we've got four of them because I think we're still negotiating how this whole dish is going to play out. We thought about frying one, sort of like a Chinese technique. We're going to roast one of them whole. And then I think we may break one of them down and broil it underneath the salamander. Definitely think that we're on the right track. Cure 20, 30 minutes just to set it. And then smoke. Our menu here changed about six months ago. We had a lot of vegetarian. I mean, 20% of our clientele, they ask for plant-based dishes and et cetera. So we decided to really go in that direction. All the deliveries are starting to come in. We're working on a new dish, Caraflex cabbage. Here we have your Caraflex and your celery root. This has started sprouting a little bit because it's just come out of the ground still. That's awesome. The best of the vegetarian and vegan restaurants, they're not making like a fake version of a fish dish. You know, they're allowing the vegetable to sort of speak for itself. We break the cabbage down into quadrants, then we weigh it. It's important that the weight is the same for each of them so that the cooking time is accurate. Once the cabbage itself is entirely cooked, you can see it's almost translucent. It's super tender. Hayley is going to pipe the celery root puree inside of it. And then after that, we're going to sear it on a pancha. It's going to get glazed. And we finish it with shaved white truffle. It sounds a little wild, but I think, you know, somebody getting a wedge of cabbage in a restaurant like this, it's hard for them to sort of see the perceived value in it. You have the truffle? You know, the onus is on the restaurant to sort of make sure that people feel as though they've gotten value for their money, that they've, you know, seen some creativity. It's a little chef challenge here with Greg and Marc. One's going to be fried, one's going to be roasted, one's going to be broiled. So different flavor, different texture. We didn't really think it was a competition, but okay. This one will take the longest, 12 minutes to cook and three to rest. This is going to be beautiful, too. I mean, the other ones are cooked on the bone, so there's always more flavor from the bone. This is going to be a little cleaner, but faster for service. When you add a little bit of butter and you're getting ready to baste it, when it starts to get sudsy like that, it's like the perfect temperature. The milk solids haven't caramelized yet. You're still getting a little bit of that lactic flavor. I love this color, the sheen of it. So we'll try the fried, the roasted, the broiled. See which one brings the most intensity, right? Exactly. Yeah. Fried is super juicy, succulent. Yeah. This is the broiled. Smoked on the spice, perfect. I think both roasted on the bone are better. Flavor-wise, juicy. I'm loving the smoke. I think the roasted brings, because of the butter, it brings a little more. I mean, the broiled is more practical for us, I think, because all the tastings we have is one, one, one, one. But it's so much better on the bone. I mean, that's the best part. Yeah, I think so. I think we can do it. So what are we thinking with this? Turnip? Turnip, kohlrabi, and then whiskey. Whiskey jus. Whiskey with the roasted on the bone. Good. So it's like ten after three now, and I think we got line up in less than two hours. This was fun. I love it. I love that we've got a direction to move on, but we really got to get ready for service now. So this is Bajou. She is a chef de parti on the fish station, and one of her tasks is to make the buckwheat crepes that we're later going to wrap our langoustines in. So we start off with a little bit of an excess in the ladle, and then dip off the rest. And the biggest reason for that is you want the crepe to be very, very thin. Once they came in, they were clean. We removed the claw and the head. That's something that we're going to use to make a broth. Just nice and crispy on the outside, and that's kind of what you're looking for. It's almost like a cast. So 5 p.m., the whole crew is at family meal. I usually take this time. It's sort of like the last moment of the day before service starts where we can really break open every container, put a spoon into every sauce, and make sure that all the mise en place is tight. If something's not right, now's the time that we're going to remake it. The last thing in the world we want is a customer to point out what we've done incorrectly. Are the chives cut properly? Is the dill hydrated? Is the caviar cold enough? Oftentimes, this doubles as dinner. When that's done, we're open. We're in it. We're in service. So you've got an uni mushroom matai now. Hannah, you can fire the three toasts. Window three, Hannah, or more? At least three. I need three toasts, but not before three minutes because the mushroom's not ready yet. Guys, pick up double crab. 6 p.m., we're sort of, you know, things are ramping up right now. We're getting into the middle of dinner service, so it's starting to heat up a bit. We're busy to the point where there's going to be some action. You know, we like it. It's like the best. Behind you, guys. There's a tuna and double tatsoi leaving. I think after that, let's do, we need a crab, a trout, and we'll do a ravioli all together. Merci, papa. You picking up one risotto? Beautiful. Let's move everything. Second course, one tuna, one tartare. We're going to finish with double squab, both regular. One more so we can finish the table. That's good. Felix, do me a favor, though. Just get the fingerprint right over here. Yeah, right here on the side. Thank you. I mean, that's a bomb. Put the truffle on the uni. That's magic, for sure. All right, so now we're doing a trout, a ravioli, and king crab. I need the food. I need to touch food every day. Even if Mark has it perfectly done, I still need to be involved and put my hands in it and taste things. I want to pick it up at the same time. It's part of my DNA, you know?