How This Chef Duo Quickly Dominated the D.C. Restaurant Scene — Mise En Place

One of the first things we get going, this is the trompo. Patty builds our trompo here every day. So we get really nice heritage pork. This is going to be very thinly sliced meat. It's going to get marinated in an adobo. We've got guajillos and anchos, garlic, cumin, all that stuff in there. So what she's going to do is put a layer of meat, and then she'll pile some onions in there, more meat. All the onions end up getting just covered with all the meat. So Pascual is based and inspired on Mexican city cuisine. We're like, we're not going to open a taqueria, and if we're going to choose one taco, it has to be al pastor taco. That, for me, is the best taco that exists. Isabel being from Mexico City, home of the pastor taco, we had to have it on the menu. It's inspired by Lebanese cuisine, and it used to be traditionally made with lamb, but coming to Mexico, lamb was harder to get, and pork was very abundant. So it's basically a shawarma that is made with pork. Pastor and an octo to 41. We're going to wrap this up, let it marinate for a couple hours, and then we'll set it up on the hearth around 1.30. First thing in the morning, the most important part of a Mexican kitchen, we do corn. Today we're cleaning yellow corn, conico, and bolita azul. So the corn gets cooked the night before in lime and cal. Our first person that comes is going to wash it to remove all that skin that got released out of the corn. This is how it looks before it's cooked, and this is how it looks after. Like, the outer shell of the corn starts, like, becomes softer. That's what breaks the starches inside of it. Mexican cuisine starts with corn. Everybody that thinks of Mexican cuisine, you think of corn. So it's important for us to have the best ingredient and showcase it in the best way. Corn's going to go through here, it's going to get feed through these areas. So the family of corns are for white, blue, yellow, and red corn. They all taste different, you know, just like the blue corn tastes more like umami, mushrooms, earth. For me, this one tastes more like butter. And you can smell it, it smells so, so good. Like, the starch, you know, the corn starch. But it smells like a tortilleria. The next part of that process, after we have the masa, we're going to paddle it to season and to check that the water content that it has is where we want it and where we know it's going to create a very nice tortilla, that it's soft, it's malleable. The next step of the process, we're going to weigh the corn because we need to season it with salt, so we have a percentage for it. We're going to paddle it, adjust water, and then we're going to portion it for everything that we want. For me, I'm a pastry chef, I'm trained in pastry. I see masa as if it was, like, my flour or my starch, and the combinations and shapes you could do, it's infinitum, you know? The next step is going to get portioned. Maria's going to start portioning the corn. It all has different weights. This one's going to get divided mostly for tetelas, tortillas. The blue is going to be for tlayudas, tortillas, and flautas. We just got our delivery from Regalos, so they delivered to us overnight from New York. So we get golden chickens, they're from Pennsylvania. We're going to get the process going, we'll pass these off to Chef Brandon. He's going to break them down, get them in brine, and then get them on marinade so they're ready to go for tonight. I'm removing the head and the backbone so I can split the chicken in half. So once these are split, they're going to go into brine that's made with oranges, arbol chile, and some garlic, and they'll stay in brine for four hours. After being brined, we put them on a tray to allow the skins to dry so that the marinade can stick better. What we really like about them is you can kind of see all this beautiful fat that's in here, whereas most chickens in stores, everyone wants no fat, they want big chicken breasts that have grown super fast. They grow these a lot slower, and they get a lot more time to feed, so they've developed all this fat. So that's what we're after. We probably sell 10 to 14 half chickens a day, so a case of chickens lasts us about two days. So now these will sit in the brine for a couple hours, we'll pull them out, we'll marinate them in an adobo, and from there they'll get roasted off over our wood fire. This is the centerpiece of the restaurant. We put this in and then kind of built everything else around it. I think when we were looking for spaces, that was one of our number one things, is how can we do something with live fire. We've been to Oaxaca, and I think that was kind of, for me, one of the first times that I was like, oh, this is really special. You walk into the market, and there's just people cooking with charcoal, and they're making clayudas and grilling meats and stuff like that. We have the maguey here, the leaf, that we're going to roast pretty hard, and this is what we're going to wrap the lamb necks in after we grill them off. Traditionally in Hidalgo, when they're making barbacoa, it's like a pit. You build a bed of agave, and then you put your meat. We're in Capitol Hill, there's no way they're going to let us dig a hole in it, but we can get the closest to it. We're going to roast this, so again, to kind of build another layer of flavor that's in the dish. That water that's inside, we really want to cook that out. This is a very important step to make sure that it's roasted correctly before we wrap it, because we don't want to put all this work into the lamb that takes us three days to get on a plate, and all it takes is not roasting this correctly, and it ruins the dish. So now we're going to set up our lamb barbacoa here. So we get the neck. These are coming from Pennsylvania. We do about 150 pounds of this a week. So what Brandon's setting up here right now is the brine for the lamb. We brine this for 24 to 36 hours. It's very straightforward, salt, sugar, some aromatics. This is the lamb neck that has already been brined. So now we're going to take it and rub it in our adobo, ready it for the grill. So we have two different dried chiles in here, guajillo and pasilla oaxaqueña. There is some cumin, garlic, avocado leaf, some apple cider vinegar, and then that's all blended together with the water that we soak the chiles in. So we go through a couple hundred pounds pretty easily in a week. Each of these lamb necks runs about two pounds. So it's a good amount of meat once it's been cooked off, very tender, very flavorful. For me in particular, I think of after-church tacos with my grandpa growing up. We have our lamb necks that have come out of brine. They've been on brine for about 30 hours. And then we're going to really start to get some char and smoke on these before we braise them. So kind of rendering some of the fat, getting that nice smoke on here before these go in the oven to finish. Instead of fanning like crazy, we got one of these, and we had all seen it on YouTube from another chef, and we bought this, and it's a game-changer. Gets the fire going much faster. We'll wrap that in agave leaf that we've grilled. We're trying to really mimic that, burying it in a pit in the ground. They got nice and caramelized like that. All those nice bits in there are going to be really, really good. Part of why we use this cut, all this bone that's in here, you know, there's cartilage and there's fat. That's just going to add more flavor in there. This was the one we were marinating in earlier, and we don't want to waste any of that adobo that's in there. It's all going to go together, and this will end up being the consomme. So this will get wrapped and then put in the oven for a couple hours. It's 2.30 now, so we're going to get the trumpeau that we built earlier in the day. We're going to get it on so we can start cooking. Getting it on about 2.30, it should put us right in line for 5 o'clock for service. So it's set up there, and then just kind of the heat from our burn box will get it going, and it's just going to, low and slow, pick up smoke. We'll throw more wood in there so it'll really start to cook as we get closer to service. But for right now, we just want to start bringing up the temperature. And this onion and pineapple will all start to kind of drip down there and flavor it for service. So these are the chickens. They've come out of brine after a couple hours. We have a marinade here that we've made with some chilies, honey, orange juice, cumin, black pepper. So this will kind of go all over the chickens itself. Because of the sugar and stuff like that, the smoke and char will stick to these nicely. And then we'll take our meat hooks, and we just go right through. There's still some of the bones in here. We've only removed some of them, so it will help protect the meat as well. And these guys are just going to get hung right up over here over the fire. And we'll move them around as we need during service, depending on how fast or how slow they're cooking. And we'll see, as these start to go, we'll start to see fat dripping and rendering out of here. This meat will almost start to retract off the bone. That's how we know the leg will be done. Another one of the desserts that we did from the beginning, buñuelos. I'm obsessed with buñuelos. What we're doing today is buñuelo de viento. It is more traditional, kind of like the Danish fritters. I'm a pastry chef, but I also like to do this menu in a collaborative way. So this is Patty's project, and she killed it. And I think her palate is very similar to what I grew up with. So this was like one of those dishes that I'm like, we're making buñuelos. And she's like, oh, I got you, I got you, chef. In Mexico kitchens, there's always a position for a mayora. Like you have your chefs, your sous-chefs, you know, your line cook. There's always going to be a mayora, and it's a position of respect. It's usually a woman with a lot of knowledge that will play the part of making delicious food. You know, for everybody, it's the person that, if you don't know why your tamale is not working, she's going to answer to you. Here, I think we have a couple mayoras. Our AM definitely would be Patty. The mold needs to be warm. We preheat it on the oil, and then it goes into the batter, and then it touches the oil. The fry oil will cook it really fast. It takes like, we definitely have to hold it for like a minute, just because we don't want it to lose the shape. So this is where the mold goes, creating kind of like a tar shell. You see it in fine dining restaurants, they do it for those little tartlets. It's the same technique, you know, we just do it on a bigger scale. And this is not the biggest mold I've had. I have a bigger mold than this, but they prohibited me from using it, just because, you know, we didn't have a plate that could host that big of a buñuelo. And in the next step for this, we're going to make a chocolate sauce. We're going to make a ganache, but instead of using milk or cream, we're using water. We're making a tea with Mexican cinnamon, some star anise, some piloncillo, some brown sugar, that's going to take a little longer. So I'm just going to get the tea melted over here. And then for chocolate, we have two types of chocolate. We have dark chocolate, like a 65% like Valrhona brand, and we also mix it with Mexican chocolate. This is a very bitter chocolate. It smells incredible. This is come from Chiapas. So I'm just going to wait for my tea to get warm, get flavor, and then I'm going to strain it and put it on top of the chocolate. And that's going to be my chocolate sauce for service tonight. The last part of the buñuelo, it gets tossed into a cinnamon and sugar mixture. We want the sugar to definitely add some color from the cinnamon. So we're arranging a new dish for the menu. We're heading into fall. It's definitely gotten a little cooler, so we've kind of noticed where crudo sales have kind of slowed down a little bit. Kind of started to want to mess around with how do we serve raw fish or slightly cooked fish, a little warm. So we got a nice piece of stillhead trout. We marinate it in mezcal. We're going to smoke it above the grill. We're just basically going to drop it up here and let it pick up some of that smoke for an hour or so. Not to cook it, just to hopefully get some of that flavor on there. To keep with the thought of everything's been touching the grill. So we're making a mojo de ajo. This one, instead of oil, we're replacing the oil for brown butter. The idea is a fish that's cured that looks like a tiradito. And on top of it has warm butter sauce on it. And the butter, we're going to flavor it with some yuzu kosho. Our thought of this is that we would do this at the table. So like usually the mojo de ajo is just like lots of garlic and stuff. So it'd be really aromatic when it hits the table. I think when we're tasting now, our palates have aligned a lot. Yeah, I think we both love food that's like bright and fresh and acidic. So we love having that like chili and acid and salt. I think that's what we crave with food. We'll cut this down so we can do some nice slices. So like the tail definitely got like a little warm up there. So we'll have to watch that. And then you want to garnish with radish? I might be getting excited with radish. That's my issue. I always want to take it like too far. And I think there's two ways. We take it like... In between the leaves? In between the leaves, but it'd be too... No, I like that. I think we're always running to like the comment of like, how can you work with your partner, you know? And how could you not, you know? Like your partner is the person you admire the most. So why would I not? I like the radish. The radish is almost like a pop of wasabi. Do we need more lime juice on it? A little salt. Like working together is great for us. I think we get to bounce ideas off of each other and there's what her strong points are or probably my weaknesses and vice versa. So it's like, it really helps in the kitchen. I think it needed a little salt. I think we need to figure out exactly how we get it to the table. But I think for the weekend it can get on the menu. No, tonight, no? Tonight? I think we can do it tonight. Let's do it tonight. I think we can definitely do it tonight. All right. It's four o'clock here now. So all the PM crew has started to show up. The AM crew that has been here since about 8.30 is heading in towards the finish line. This is a major crunch time. Like you can see the stove's all full and everything for our PM cooks to be ready for five o'clock. So there's a lot happening right now to be ready in the next hour. What do we have? So we have a couple of announcements. We have no dogs tonight. We do have a new special today. It's going to be steel-cut trout. And we're going to put it table-sized. So I'm going to give you guys a pot. I can come to the tables. We'll do a couple together. That's all I have, guys. Let's have fun. All right, guys. We've got 15 minutes till service. So this is all the masa. And now we're going to start cooking tortillas. This is a process that we do all day. Tortillas, it's one of those techniques. It's about how you press it and also about how you flip it. The tortilla only gets flipped three times. The first one to set up the corn. A second one to cook it. And then we do a third one to inflate the corn. So these ones, we're going to dry them after. Those get used to eat with your guacamole. Right now we're getting the setup for all of our guacamole plate. So this is our guacamole. We've made pickled jalapenos and onions and cilantro. One little twist that we do here is this is, again, the avocado leaf. This was our way to get burnt flavor into the guacamole. We've charred avocado leaf and onions. Looks kind of dark when you get it. And then as soon as you dig in, it's going to be this really nice bright color green under there. So you're going to get your chips. This is crema with onion and cilantro. This is our escabeche. There's going to be some smoked pineapple and radish. And then we're going to go our salsas, which we always go for mild. So we're going to have our salsa cruda. There'll be habanero, salsa macha. And then we'll finish this with a little bit of olive oil and lime juice over the top and send it up. That's kind of the base of everything. Salt and lime at the end is like what makes Mexican food so good. Mexico City is usually salsa morita. Salsa verde is like the fresh one. We're going to do some fresh white onion. Jafar, your head's up on a lamb, a side of rice, and a chicken. We serve this with spring onions. So what we do is we have these just kind of slowly roasting, served along with the chicken. So all these dishes are kind of meant to be served family style. We break this down a little bit. It's still served on some of the bones, but we'll cut this into four pieces just for ease of eating. So we serve the chicken with fried rice. So we're kind of looking for that crispy fried rice. Aguachile, chayote, followed by hamachi, tartar, followed by a chicken, third course, please. Fire an octo, fire an aguachile, second course hamachi, third course eggplant, and a tartar. Hands, please. Let's fire table 32. That's a barbacoa and a side of rice, please. So this will go right on top. You owe me, chef, one aguachile, one fig, one tartar. We're in the middle of service. We're having a great time. The energy is like really good. I think the kitchen's killing it and everything's going according to plan. We're going to have a really good service today. Thank you, aguachile, chayote. Para pascualgua, I'll take six tostadas, please. We wanted to do Mexican food and represent it correctly in D.C. And showcase how diverse it is and how much more we can do with it. So it was really about like, let's do all the techniques and the flavors that we love and showcase it to people and show them, you know, it doesn't have to just be a taqueria. So that's kind of what Pascual is. Mexican cuisine was the base. I'm from Mexico City and that's kind of where we met. And that's kind of like the story that we have together. It's a place to make me feel closer to home. It's a place where I get to meet and cook with more Mexican cooks. And it's a place where I get to cook with a lot of talented chefs here too that we get to bring. And just explore Mexican cuisine, you know, to as far as we could in the best way possible.