FISH with PLANT BASED MAGIC : EPIC OMAKASE

At Wrench and Roden, a lot of our customers do a chef's choice or omakase, which is basically feed us. Here there's no real preset menu hiding behind the scenes, it's whatever we want through the course of the meal. We watch them eat and try to guess what they'll like. Also plan from what's freshest that day, what's best, and what we're most excited about. A lot of times those things just happen to be vegetables, even though we love our fish too. Usually what we do for the first dish is something traditional like Japanese yellowtail. Usually do it nigiri style because it's super honest. There's no way to hide when you only have two or three components of a dish. So that's a good, very subtle psychological way to gain the customer's trust because it really highlights a chef's grasp of the basics. This is where we start sneaking the veggies on the plate. Real kind of crisp, refreshing, ideally the type of food that makes people want to eat more. This is local yellowtail cucumber salad with lemon verbena vinaigrette, ogo seaweed, and tangerine oil. Now we're going to do a ginger blood orange cured wild salmon. I like to walk a fine line between turning people on to new stuff and doing fun spins on old favorites. This one we have strawberry salt from Luke's Strawberries. And these are fun little grapes I found at the Santa Monica Farmer's Market. They start like wine grapes and then have the slight finish of cotton candy. We're super fortunate because we get to choose what to give people. I do think that a lot of times chefs know best. You can't fit everything you've got on a menu. The most we've done in a night is 60 and every omakase is between 10 and 20 courses, the record being 36 courses. You know, if you get a few allergies in the mix it gets real exciting. Vegans got negative connotations, we kind of prefer to say plant-based just because eating plants shouldn't be an exclusive club that you have to be all or nothing just to enjoy what earth provides us. We're definitely not here to tell you how to think, none of it has to be a religion, right? A little bit of a char on these beans. This is just a crunchy garlic chili that we make and we kind of got them blistered but al dente, just kind of hot and fast. We're just going to hit this with a touch of ponzu, just some chopped herbs. So one thing we try to do if you have something that's spicy, try to do something that cleans up the palate afterwards. This is Pacific mackerel, we're going to do it in an almond cream, English style with some rhubarb and these badass dates that taste like butterscotch. In the English countryside, mackerel and rhubarb is super traditional. We don't take ourselves too seriously, we always like to throw something kind of whimsical in the mix. Whimsical is another thing that kind of like helps push the veggies. This is a beet that we made pastrami out of it. We grind it pastrami spice, we boiled it and then finished it on the smoker. Just going to fry that back up, while that's cooking, we're going to get our little rice balls down. You see the way it kind of cooks up like pastrami? Not every veggie prep, to get it to taste like a meat, works out just like a meat prep because you kind of got to change the formula a little bit for vegetables. You know, you start playing around with stuff, you'd be surprised what you're able to come up with. Here we have a little bit of burned cabbage and red cabbage slaw. With the upcoming plant-based restaurant, we've been playing around a lot with vegan mayonnaise, vegan sauces. This is our plant-based spicy mayo, house-made pickles. This is our vegan beet pastrami, nigiri. One thing I love is going from something that's completely plant-based, even though it shouldn't be, to something as primeval as lopping a swordfish bone in half. This is the bone marrow of a relatively large swordfish, and the vertebrae. What we're going to do, we're just going to cook this meat off, and we're going to eat it like a chicken wing. Somebody might be a little weirded out by the idea of eating a swordfish vertebrae, but everybody loves chicken wings. This is just a nice, light, veggie accompaniment. This is a swordfish bone marrow shot with swordfish vertebrae, done chicken wing style, and charred chard and shallots. People kind of get a little weird about imitation crab, so we made imitation imitation crab that just happens to be plant-based. We actually make it in-house from byproducts from other things, so this is something we can't talk too much about, because at a later date, at a later time, we'll have a video just on how to make this. Here's another veggie dish. This is squash that we grilled over mesquite. We're going to serve it with a butternut squash puree, and hopefully it'll turn it into uber-squash. We're adding Thai berry rice for a little bit of texture. Squash puree. Capers that we made out of nasturtiums. We have this mint from the backyard, which is going off right now, and a drizzle of nice olive oil. So this is the perfect fill-up to end the meal after doing multiple courses of fish. You're probably hungry, but you still want something kind of hearty. Here's another fish dish. Here we have gold-spotted sand bass. I love leaving the silver skin on. It's kind of what you're supposed to do. Sometimes, especially in some of the white fish, it can be a little chewy down there. So we just score the top of the meat. We're going to do it with some charred pineapple. Jicama. Pickled onion blossoms. These are pickled broccoli stems. Cucumber. Blueberry water, which is way more subtle than it looks, but it's got this awesome color. This is a great thing with overripe blueberries. It might not hold their form too well on a plate, but probably have the best flavor. Drizzle our trusty tangerine oil and a little charcoal salt. So part of what we try to do with the omakase is there's definitely a progression, but we kind of want to bounce people all over the place. We want to take them on a bit of a roller coaster ride and throw the biggest variety we can in there. Nobody wants to do 21 courses that all taste the same. So throwing the veggie curveball in the mix, not only is it something that makes our customers live longer because it's better for them, but it could be the surprise favorite of the night. Because there's not that expectation, the veggie steals the show.