How a Master Chef Built a Michelin-Starred Taiwanese Restaurant in a Strip Mall — Mise En Place

This is a caviar. The caviar dish is based off of instant breakfast soup that you have a lot in Japan or Taiwan. It's called corn bataj. We get a Kaluga hybrid caviar from China. Chinese caviar is for sure getting more popular. It's an interesting way to have caviar because in Chinese food, different textures are appreciated. Like, crispy isn't the first texture you resort to, so our caviar course is different levels of softness. That's basically a different texture of egg yolk, but we just use it as like a pedestal to kind of keep everything upright. So it comes with a smoked onion cream, a soft yolk. People always have an image of what fine dining should be. I think it's super interesting for us to challenge those notions and do stuff our way, seeing if it gets rewarded in the same manner that stereotypical fine dining does. Some milk that we cook with corn cob. I mean, I grew up in an East Asian household. Like, your parents are always just like, if you're gonna play, like, you might as well win. So in food, yeah, three Michelin stars is the goal. I don't think you'd expect to come to a strip mall and have, like, a nice tasting menu, but we make do with what we have. It's 10.30. We're waiting for our fish to get here. I wake up with night sweats. I'm like, our entire restaurant hinges on a seafood order. Yeah, we can't really do anything until seafood starts. Seafood's pretty late today. This was not, this isn't staged or anything. That's, that's our fridge for everything. 600 plates of food every night, that's our fridge. Yeah, so he's, like, finally here. Hello. You could set it up over here. We're just working with so much fish and it's, like, a time crunch, so seafood comes in, like, we're racing to break it down and store it properly. This is what we get in every day. Turbo, seabream, lobsters, crab, oysters, abalone. Yeah, we're good. We basically have the next, like, five hours, like, to fabricate everything and turn it into a tasting menu. Yeah, this is a spiny lobster. They're seasonal. These are from Santa Barbara. It looks like the thing from Alien. It's not as fat as, like, a main lobster. It's really lean. They're closer to, like, giant shrimp. They're really strong and they're covered in these spikes. So that's the tail. It's a lot more, like, vibrant than a main lobster for sure. We're gonna make an oil out of all this roasted, like, head fat and stuff. The tails get lightly poached in rice wine and dashi. Basically, we just let it sit in that warm poaching liquid and then he's gonna take it out of the shell and portion it. This is Lalo. He's very handsome. This is really lightly cooked, so on the outside, it's still a little bit translucent and it kind of looks like it's fully cooked, but when you bite into it, it's a really interesting texture. It's just, like, barely set. There's no give. And then it gets a roasted sesame vinegar right over the top. It's just a sauce that was kind of based on my mom's cold noodle sauce. So this is Alex. He's doing a sea bream for the raw course today. He's really good at it. This is a sea bream from Japan. That was pretty bad when I first started. We'd have to get, like, extra fish just so we'd be able to have enough for service because I would just wreck fish. Yeah, but that's, we're always willing to at least make that investment in letting something get better. Because other places, like, if you **** up once, they're like, give me that. Like, you're not gonna do this for at least two months and then you get to revisit it and, like, how the **** are you supposed to get better in, like, another two months, right? Everyone gets to touch everything. No. I'm just kidding. I feel like people here are closer and they get better a lot faster than, like, other places, for sure. So this is gonna cure for 10 minutes and then we'll rinse off the salt and we'll cure it in kombu. You just wrap it? Yeah, we always try to call things by the Chinese version here. But Chinese don't really eat raw fish, so we use English, just raw fish. We always say, nope, it's not sashimi, it's raw fish. This is farm Spanish turbo. This is for our, basically our most important dish on the menu right now. I've never really felt like we're a Taiwanese restaurant until we started doing the steamed fish. I was always scared to do food I grew up eating because you just take it for granted. People always have a skewed perception of the value of Chinese food. You always wanna use, like, a live fish, so they always use, like, a live tilapia, which is, like, the only live fish you can get at the supermarket. So we just wanted to use something that was a little more, like, luxurious, I guess. This is, like, the rack in the center that we, like, make a tea with ginger. I have to do, like, 10 a day, every day, so I try to get the fastest way. Everyone has their different style. He goes around the center bone. I hope you go viral for this, dude. It's the fastest turbo. I think that's, like, that's everything that we do here. You teach someone the basics and they take it further. Basically, every Chinese household does a version of this. It's, uh, crabby. So after sheeting, you get these, like, nice little ribbons. Traditionally, it'll be steamed, and then they'll put ginger and scallion over the top. Get a little bit of relish, and then this will get wrapped around the turbo. And then they'll pour soy sauce over it, so, like, the hot soy sauce essentially creates a broth for the fish. This is for the turbo dish. This is the broth that gets poured. This gets about seven to, like, 10 different types of soy. This is probably the hardest thing to learn for me was this broth, because I was like, okay, well, what's the recipe? They're like, oh, there's no recipe. A difficult thing to try to master. The first time we put it on was maybe two years ago, and you never really know, putting something like that on the menu, if you can really convey the same feeling that you get when you eat it. But I think people really got it, which was a pleasant surprise. Ever since then, I've felt more confident calling ourselves a Taiwanese restaurant. Tony, you want to start steaming crab? This is dungeness crab. This goes into our chawanmushi. It's kind of pretty big for that. Yeah, that's a huge... That's a big boy. This is Tony, a close friend of ours, slash roommate, slash sous chef. He'll reserve any of the steaming liquid left inside the carapace, and then he'll save all the head fat, and then pick everything else. We have so many staff that we can't necessarily all fit. If something's not temperature-sensitive, we'll prep in the dining room sometimes. He has to make sure to flip it backwards so all that juice stays in there. That's gold. Oh, that's delicious. That's arguably the best part of the crab. There's a dish in Taiwan where it's like tofu, or egg tofu, either or, and it's smothered with crab fat sauce. This is our version of it. This is gonna be all-picks. I'll break through all these, kind of go through that after, and check for shells just for like a second and third time. Then, these are abalone. This is one of my favorite dishes. It's like our version of three-cup chicken. So I tell people I work with abalone every day, and then they look at me, and they're like, what's an abalone? I'm like, ah, it's kind of like a gigantic snail. Abalone Tony? Yeah, what's up, bro? So we go through about maybe 45 for a day, and that's a three-hour to four-hour process. Just doing the last touch-up, just cleaning off the edges, take off the, I don't know if it's like mucus, kind of. For sure don't say mucus. But it's like a sticky texture on the outside. And then this is dashi in the pot over here. Two hours to three hours braising on a very low simmer. Dried abalone is really big in Chinese culture. It's one of those luxury ingredients that Chinese people really value. Getting diners used to having abalone and treating it as a luxury ingredient is like an education process. It's called three-cup because it's equal parts sesame oil, rice wine, and soy sauce. So we make our own version here, and we turn it into a syrup, and we marinate the abalone in it. So it's basically the same flavors, but with fresh abalone. I think it's important to like, not necessarily adhere to like, one culture's perception of luxury. That's part of sharing our culture, right? Like sharing what we value. These are boniato yams. They're like Japanese roasting potatoes. Like when I grew up, my parents ate these all the time for supposed health benefits. So this is our CBC, Dara, also another roommate. We've lived together since the restaurant opened. I think we've been living together for almost four years now. We get along pretty well. We don't really fight or anything like that, which is nice. Dara, you wanna move that up here? It just gets boiled and turned into like, a tapioca dumpling. It's gonna be our version of like, shaved ice or bubble milk tea. It's almost the exact same flavors, but just rearranged. Yeah, people go apeshit for this thing. I'm slowly folding it in. This gets mixed with a certain ratio of tapioca starch. It gets cooked until they're completely tender all the way through, and that gets soaked in muscovado syrup. And then we make a fresh cheese that gets whipped and placed on top of the boba, and it gets shaved brown butter sablé. Yeah, it's like 4.30 right now. We're gonna get ready for service. We'll do tasters around five, but right now is like, when everyone has to hustle. This is the cordyceps for our beef dish. So our meat dish is basically our version of red braised meat. Red braised means to braise a meat in soy, sugar, sometimes chilies, five spice. Ours is a slow grilled beef, and then other components of that dish are red braised. So we're gonna add the cordyceps. So over the next 30 minutes, we'll keep continuously rolling it on the grill. It doesn't look like it's doing anything, but internally, the heat travels inward. It's five o'clock. Five o'clock every day, we taste everything, make sure it's okay. Your liver's a little salty. Go a little sake glaze in your tuna. Yeah, and this is the turbo soy. Go a little salt and sugar in this. Just a little bit more. I don't have to taste it. Line up, please. Okay, we're at 44 today. Fairly smooth. There's only a seven cover bump at six. Okay. Are we gonna do it? Yeah. We play heads up every day before service. It's a bonding exercise. Wait, who lost last time? We did, right? The chocolate bar that's caramel on the outside. People were eating it. It's for laundry. Oh, Tide Pods. Yeah. It's a mint. You put it in coconut milk. Fresh made. Let's go. That was good. It's red. F***ing the green. What's that one? Spicy? Yeah. What's that one? You stop on a green, green flavored watermelon. Sour. Apple, sour. It's like. It's rectangle. It's like kind of hard, fruity. Perfect. What? It was Jolly Rancher. That was close. They're like the two-star restaurants don't do that. It's 5.45. We're about to hit our rush in. You're gonna start seeing some plates come out now. Yeah. The first course is a set of three snacks. I always say this restaurant has been an exercise in me understanding my culture and finding my identity. So the limitations are good. It's pushed us to be creative with a lot of the things that we do. I think they expand how you think and how you execute. It challenges us to be the best that we can be and represent our perspective well. But we want to move into a new space and shoot for three Michelin stars and do the food that we really want to do. We just don't want to compromise on things anymore. Yo, we're doing seven lobster, yeah? You don't need to record slow-mo. He's going pretty slow, honestly. Yes, order in one rice. This is grilled black cod for the rice course. Cooking isn't a glorified career in East Asian culture, so I just want to not disappoint my entire family. You're fine on two seabream, yeah? I was on a different career trajectory when I was in college, and I just suddenly dropped everything and started cooking, so I don't want my parents to feel like they wasted their efforts on me. Fire seven chow wan. It's the steamed egg custard. It's where all the crab went into. Like, it's always a risk going against the norm. But it's also that point of friction where exciting things happen. So it's exciting to be in, like, uncharted ground. Can I get hatch for seven, please? It just feels like you're championing your culture and sharing, like, an under-realized cuisine with everybody.