Meet the Chef Who Brought Wafu Italian Ramen to NJ — The Experts

Now we're gonna get ready to make one of our most popular dishes on the menu, our tzatziki carbonara. There's certain Italian dishes that I knew I had to just do and do in the style of Wafu. Carbonara was one of them and when we set up to open this restaurant I was like listen I want to make this dish exciting and I don't want it to be messy for people. We made it even more exciting by making that carbonara table side. So the bowl of ramen is our mochi ramen, we basically dress that in chicken fat. We're covering the whole bowl of ramen with parmesan reggiano cheese and then we have a small bowl on the side that has our carbonara sauce in it. We put an egg yolk in there, cover it with scallions, a little bit of black pepper and table side our servers will mix the yolk down into the carbonara sauce and then they pour it over the top of the mochi ramen and it turned into a way more exciting dish than your traditional just noodles and carbonara. Asa ramen is Wafu Italian cuisine. The word Wafu means in the style of Japanese. Started as a secret pop-up omakase, we took it around the country before eventually bringing it back here to Montclair, New Jersey. Everyone in the world loves pasta and everyone in the world loves ramen and it describes us perfectly. It's around 9 a.m. we are going to get on our ramen base broth that we're using for all of our ramens on the menu. To get this broth started we have some chicken bodies in the oven, we're roasting them off, we're gonna get them a nice deep golden brown color. We also have chicken feet, dried porcini mushrooms coming in from Italy, dried shiitakes, scallion bottoms and then ginger and parm rinds. Parm rinds is really gonna give it that kind of like umami from the Italian flavor. So now we're gonna add about 80 quarts of water and then we add pork base into it for our pork eddestock. So this is probably gonna go for three, four hours. I was first introduced to Wafu Italian when I was backpacking throughout Italy, going to high-end restaurants that were using Japanese ingredients. I just like fell in love with it. I thought it was the coolest thing ever. Now we are taking our belly out. This is probably the most important part of our porchetta tonkatsu ramen. So we started the broth earlier this morning. This was one of my first real ideas when it came to Wafu Italian cuisine. I wanted to take your and combine it with porchetta. So this came out of the brine and now he's just gonna get a really hard sear on it. When we're searing this off, it's gonna get like a really nice caramelization on the outside. That caramelization is gonna be a lot of where the flavor comes from. So here we have our seared off pork belly. So our next step is going to be this magical rub that we make. This is our porchetta rub, very Italian, no Japanese ingredients in it whatsoever. Fennel pollen, black pepper, raw garlic, rosemary, thyme, olive oil. We're just going to take this and we're going to rub this all on the outside. So we're not rolling our porchetta or even, you know, a lot of ramen shops roll their chashu as well. When I went to Japan, not every single chashu was rolled. They had some were just flat bellies. And that was actually the turning point of where I was like, you know what? If they do it in Japan, they leave it like flat like this. I think it's okay for us to leave it flat as well. Every time we cook our porchetta pork belly, the juices that come out of the pork belly and the fat that comes out is like this really green, flavorful porchetta fat. So we're going to take this, we're going to pour enough of this in here so that the belly essentially floats. Now we're going to put this pork belly into the oven for about three hours. So we just got our sun noodle delivery in for the week. We get approximately anywhere from 10 to 13 cases of ramen a week. We've been working with Sun Noodle ever since day one. My business partner Luck, he introduced me to Ken. He really has a love for Wafu Italian, Japanese Italian. So we're getting a couple different kinds of ramen noodles here today. We're getting our mochi ramen noodles and our tamomi ramen noodles. This mochi noodle, they've had it, he introduced me to it. It's made with far more mochi or rice flour. It's going to give it like way more chew and sauces stick to it so well. And then our tamomi ramen noodle is used for more of our broth ramens. It has a little bit different of a bite. Our boys at Sun Noodle did us well. This is our pork belly. That's essentially our chashu porchetta. So now we're going to cut a few portions of this belly for our chashu porchetta. That's basically going to be the braised pork belly or porchetta on top of the ramen dish. And then we're kind of putting that whole ramen together, still using all these same flavors. I just think it's one of our most elegant Wafu Italian dishes. And I feel like the Italian and Japanese flavors just come out so well. All right, so we are going to start our R&D process here for these Japanese Italian or Wafu Italian sandos. And then one of my favorite people to taste is going to let us know his opinion. Good friend of mine, mentor, Chef Morimoto, he's opening one of his New Jersey flagships down the street, MM by Morimoto. So we're going to run one of these down the street and give him a taste. Now that's a piece of pork. You ready? We got streets to cross. This is real life ----. My business partner just signed with Morimoto. They're opening some restaurants together. So we have MM by Morimoto opening down the street here in Montclair, New Jersey. Wagyu chicken pork. This is pork. So pork belly and pork cutlet. And this is chicken thigh. So no Japanese milk bread. Instead, it's pinza Romana. It's a Roman like flatbread. This is Tonkatsu. All right. That's perfect. He's an insane mentor, and I feel forever grateful that I'm able to do things like walk down, butt in on his new restaurant opening. He had close to 70 people in there, and he put everything on hold to taste one of my Japanese Italian sandwiches. So forever grateful for that. Now Chef Mike's going to help me out with making the gyoza filling. Mike's really the one that kind of mastered this recipe. This recipe is like really, really, really difficult to execute. We originally didn't want to put it on the menu here. It's just super labor intensive, but it's 1000% one of our top sellers here. All right. So now we're starting the filling for our cacio pepe gyoza. Starts with a roux. Now we're going to add in the rest of the liquid ingredients, heavy cream, milk, and water. Cacio pepe sauce is a runny, loose sauce, and we had to come up with a way to thicken it. I didn't want it to like really burst when you bit into it, but I wanted it to be like stringy and cheesy. We put tons of Parmesan Reggiano. That's where the flavor's coming from. Shredded mozzarella is just going to be used to like thicken it. When I decided to embark on kind of wafu Italian cuisine, I met a guy named Nobu. He runs a company called Yama Seafood, and I was at Yama Seafood 3.30 every morning during the pandemic learning all about Japanese cuisine. And that's when I really learned that I am horrible at pronouncing Japanese words, and he is the one that like rides me till the end. But he's probably one of our most supportive purveyors. So we made our filling earlier. So we're going to hand fold a bunch of these gyoza, being that we need around 1,600 of them for this week. Once they're all hand folded, we basically put them onto sheet trays. We coat them in rice flour, and then we actually learned drying them out helps. So we'll leave them to dry out in the refrigerator, and then we'll be able to use them for service. In the beginning of pasta ramen, we were making close to 2,400 pieces of gyoza a week. It's basically five gyoza, Parmesan Reggiano, fresh clarac, black pepper, a little bit of salt, and that's it. Everyone loves to ask me, like, how do you know what you're doing and doing right? And there's no real right or wrong. Like, it doesn't matter how many Japanese techniques or Italian techniques. If you're eating something and you can't tell if it's Japanese or Italian, that personally to me is what Waffle Italian is. In the food industry, something that I always ask, especially like parents, is like, is your child open to trying new foods? And I think that's kind of like where this Waffle Italian thing comes in. I want people to be open-minded when they come into pasta ramen or open-minded to trying any new food concept. I'm very proud of New Jersey. I think a lot of food-driven individuals, we're all very proud of, like, what New Jersey has to offer. So I'm just super excited to be doing something as special as pasta ramen here in Montclair and kind of putting Jersey more and more on the map.