Miami's Best New Restaurant Serves a Peruvian Grandma’s Recipes | On The Line | Bon Appétit

Ever since we started a year ago with Matis, the restaurant just blew up. We entered the Michelin Guide. Over 10 publications have written about us. I oversee the prep kitchen. My team preps for the entire week, not only for one day. We are ready for war. We are ready to keep crushing. We use traditional Peruvian techniques, but elevate it with influences from Miami. Mati is actually Chef Val's grandmother. Most of the recipes have been passed down four generations. Learning these recipes from a family that I didn't come from is very special. I will forever be grateful. Oh my God. Hi, how are you? Good morning, I'm Julie. I'm the prep chef here at Matis. I just got 200 pounds of oxtail. Let's get to work. Coming in. I do this probably once a week, twice, depending on how busy we are. This is our dining room. Follow me, I'm taking you through the kitchen where magic happens every day. This is the first thing we should do in the morning since it takes six hours to braise. We're just gonna do 25 pounds this morning. I'm gonna put this away, I'm gonna change. No one has come yet. I'm the first one here. Oxtail is the tail of the ox. This is the bone and it is surrounded by a lot of tendons and meat and fat. So that's what we're gonna sear first so we get all the caramelization from the fat and the meat. We stir fry it during service with onions, scallions, tomatoes, and crispy potatoes coming all the way from Peru. This is a hot skillet, big quantities. This is where we do it. We're gonna start putting some oil. We're using oxtail just to make honor of the Caribbean culture. My boss is Valerio Hernando. I grew up here in Miami eating Caribbean food. But the braise and the sauce we're making is from Mati's recipe. See the color? That's what we want. Every single piece, every side, and this is very hot. Everything is good when we cook it slow. I am a very patient person, honestly. I think you have to have a lot of patience to be a chef. If you're gonna deal with people, if you're gonna, you kind of act like a psychologist also with working and leading the kitchen, you know? So this, all of that is left right here in the skillet is the caramelization of the oxtail, the fat, and that's where we wanna cook all the vegetables so they get all the flavor from the meat. 200 pounds makes like 50 portions. We just started doing like 300 covers a night. And maybe before when we started, we started cooking only 25 pounds. This is nonstop, nonstop, nonstop. And it's pretty fun. Not even in our wildest dreams, we thought we were gonna be where we are right now. But like right around September, we just got three nominations, like in the same week, and it just popped. These are scotch bonnet peppers. Can you feel that? We're just trying to sweat all the vegetables. A little bit of soy sauce so everything can come out from the bottom. Oyster sauce. This is a very Asian ingredient. There's a lot of Asian culture in the Peruvian cuisine, hoisin sauce. Hey! Where's it at? Where's the Asian influence come from? You see it right here, you know? My grandmother and my grandparents. My great-grandparents immigrated from China to Peru in the late 1800s, and then here we are. I think our menu is a mix of all the Peruvian traditions, but somebody who's already left Peru 20 years ago, so we have to work with a product we have here. My grandmother did write a lot of recipes, but also we were just born in a house that cooked. Food was so important that we just grew up eating really good food and watching our grandparents cook really good food, and our great-grandparents cook really good food. We are very much, we're besting. This is sauce from the previous oxtail, so that's why we're not adding salt, we're not adding any chicken stock, since this has already a lot of flavor from the six hours that cooked last time. It's like a mother's husk. Oh my God, hold up. There you go. There is a lot of heavy lifting, and we are pretty much all women here. Working with a lot of women feels very powerful. It's a women-dominated kitchen, so it feels great. We're gonna add the water, oxtail, mushrooms, and then that's it. Now this is gonna go for about 45 hours. So now it's 9.15, I'm gonna go to the prep kitchen in the back, let's go check on the list and see what we're gonna do for the day and assign tasks to everyone. Good morning! This is Mama D. She's the mama from everyone. This is our fish counts for the day. This is what we have from the night before. Normally I get the counts of what we did in the week to have an idea of how much I can prep for the day. We're missing three other people. They're late. They're gonna make family meal. When they're late, they make family meal. So we're gonna do six cases of limes today. Mama Leche. The Leche de Tire, we squeeze every lime with the hand squeezer, so it's very painful. If we over-squeeze the limes, we get the oil from the limes, the cascara. We don't want the bitterness in our Leche de Tire, which is the main thing probably for every dish. I'm responsible of overseeing the prep and making sure everything is ready for service. And I also think I'm very organized, one of the most organized here. I am gonna work on Gouy Dog. This board is only for fish. For today, we're gonna do 30 mixtos. I want 100 oysters pre-shocked. I want 60 portions of scallops, 25 tunas, and 25 kampaches. By 3 p.m., I want this ready, okay? I'm gonna put this where I want for everyone to see. And then we have some Gouy Dog that we're gonna clean. This is heavy. Oh, my God. We just got this Gouy Dog from Washington. Gouy Dog is one of the largest clams that we get from shellfish farms. It's part of our Ceviche Mixto. In our Ceviche Mixto right now, we are working with black grouper. We have surf clams, shrimp, and octopus. We make it with our Rocoto Leche de Tigre, which is very spicy. It's one of the hottest peppers in Peru. I love ceviche. I can eat that every day. Look at the reflexes of the Gouy Dog. We're still moving. See that? This means it's very fresh. Water is ready. So we're gonna put and cook the Gouy Dog to change the texture of the Gouy Dog a little bit. We're gonna put three first. We're gonna count one minute just to not to lower the temperature of the water and make sure that it's cooked properly. We don't wanna overcook the Gouy Dog, so that's why we put it right away into ice bath. It helps to remove everything from the Gouy Dog. Oh! It's like, I don't wanna get cooked. Probably. So Papa Cheng, who is the dad of the family, he's the master, migrated to the U.S. years and years ago to provide for his family, of course. After he arrived, his first job here was as a sushi chef. That's why we work with a lot of seafood here. They pretty much, that's what they did their entire life, so, wow. It's crazy, because out of this whole thing, we just get this part to actually use it for the ceviche. The other part that we don't slice for ceviche, we use it to make stocks. I'm gonna take out the shell first. I'm taking out the membrane, the first membrane. Gouy Dog is probably the sweetest clam from all the clams. This is the inside of the shell. Look at that. I wonder who dig in the sand and thought, oh, let's try this, let's eat this. Who thought? But here we are. Okay, so we're gonna cut it in half. This is how it looks. I'm gonna let it air dry in the walk-in cooler. It's already 10.30. Let's go make some huacatay oil for our scallop ceviche. This is our service kitchen, actually. This is our huacatay. We get it frozen from our purveyor just because we want big quantities. I wish you can smell this, but it is delicious. Delicious. It tastes like licorice, like peso. It's a mix of tarragon, limes, very powerful. I know Peruvians use it for a lot of dishes, especially like stews and soups. So we're just gonna pass it through boiling water. Just like shock the huacatay and sear that green color. And then we're just gonna stop the cooking in ice. Just a super fast procedure. I do this to help oxidation. So if we don't do this, it will turn very dark super fast and it won't last for our last purpose, you know? So for the shelf life. This huacatay oil, mainly we use it for the scallop ceviche, which is also one of our biggest sales here at Matis. The scallop ceviche has the Hokkaido scallop that we get from Japan. We cover the scallop ceviche with some green grapes. Normally the person in charge of that station, of the ceviche station, has to shave the grapes every day for that dish. Probably like four to five cases on a busy Saturday. The dish actually is very beautiful. It's green. It's just a mix of sweet and spicy and limey. It's perfect. This is ready. I like being a prep chef. I'm a morning person. I like my routines. I like waking up early, get here. Like I need to master things and to know what we're doing during the day. We're just gonna squeeze. I like to do it in small parts. I'm just taking out the water, so we make sure we separate the water from the oil. So what we're gonna do right now is we're gonna weigh what we got after squeezing the huacatay and adding double of the amount of olive oil and canola oil. We're gonna blend until the base is very hot. It emulsifies better because of the heat. It's very dense. It's gonna take a day to actually get the oil from this. We don't squeeze it by hand because we don't want the sediments in our oil. We want it as clean, as green as possible. Okay, so I'm gonna leave this here. It will be ready tomorrow. I have to go and break some durats that just arrived, so let's go. Follow me for my next task. We're gonna start breaking down the fish the way we cook it. Normally, we do like 60 durats a day. On a busy Saturday, we've done 80. It comes with a beurre blanc sauce, which is a very French cheese sauce based of white wine and shallots and garlic, and we make it Peruvian, adding aji amarillo crema, which is another pepper that Peruvians use. We over-roast it with the skin side up so we can protect the meat. The skin gets crispy, crunchy. You can eat it. It's probably one of the most delicious fish in Peru due to their fat content. It's like very hearty and tasty. So we're gonna open it through the head. Slice it very tight to the bone and very careful. We go all the way down without making a hole on the other side. What I like to do here is to open with my scissors. We use a lot of scissors for precision, and you will see why. I'm just taking apart the spine from the meat. I am butterflying this fish from the head. We do the same on the other side. Take a little bag. You always have to wipe your knives before doing another transition, not to get the meat dirty with blood, you know? Here comes the fun part. Before taking the spine, I like to open it through the mouth. So my dad used to be a shrimp farmer, and I remember him waking us up at 4 a.m. in the morning to go fish. And I remember seeing all of these. I never thought I would actually live by doing this, not even in my wildest dreams, like I always said. Definitely cooking is my lifestyle right now. Now I think, what would I do if I'm not doing this? I have no idea. I thought I wanted to be a professional gymnast, and I'm here, breaking down a lot of fish. I moved from my house when I was 18, and I started traveling. I went to Argentina. I studied in Argentina, and then I went to Colombia. After that, I ended up in Mexico, and then I ended up here six years ago. I miss home. One day, I'll be back. We're just gonna cover it with our maguro. This is bamboo paper, which will preserve better the meat of the fish. So now I have to finish 30 dorads for today. So let's keep working before service starts at four. We're ready to go eat. After we have family meal, we're gonna give the counts for today's service. So let's do it. As the morning sous chef, I have to make sure everything is ready for service and making sure that I'm giving all the counts to my team that's gonna take on for the rest of the night. This is Chef Lucy. Hello. So basically, we have two lists. We have our opening list and our closing list. At the end of the night, I leave Chef Julie our accounts of what was our remaining inventory, and then she tells me what the pars are for the rest of the night, and then I delegate that to my team over here. For today, oysters. We have pink moon. For the mixes, we're gonna do... All the tartare has been cut? Everything has been cut. So, Lucy, I'm out. That's all. I am done now. I hope you had a glimpse of my life here at Matisse. I'm done, and I'm out. I'm going to the beach. Peace out. Bye.