200 Employees, 3 Michelin Stars: A Day at Eleven Madison Park | On The Line | Bon Appétit

Eleven Madison Park has had three Michelin stars for over a decade. We also got four stars from the New York Times and as well as getting best restaurant in the world by San Pellegrino. Our goal is to reach our accolades every single year. I'm the Chef de Cuisine and partner. I oversee the entire restaurant. During service, the Chef de Cuisine is basically conducting an orchestra. We're managing tickets, managing table, working closely with the dining room. So at the end of the day, every single dish that the guests are eating is the responsibility of the Chef de Cuisine. Welcome to Eleven Madison Park. I'm Dominic Roy. I'm the chef and partner with Chef Dining Room. It's 10 o'clock. We're about to get started, so come on in. This is our famous dining room that's been here for the last 27 years now, where we welcome about 120 guests every single night. It's such a magical place. This is our kitchen. It's still in the morning, so not a lot of the team is there yet, but we have all the sous-chefs already that are getting started. We have a total of 100 team members that work in the kitchen, about 15 sous-chefs, about 50 savory chefs, about 20 pastry chefs. So it's a big team, 200 employees total in the restaurant. Over here, we have Garmanger. Everything that is cold is coming out of this station. And then after that, we're going to go on the hotline. Here we have Savas in charge of Westline and Eastline. Basically, all the hot food and everything savory is coming out of these lines. Over here with Chef Flora, we have the entire pastry department. The back after over here is all prep, commis, production. So all the labor-intensive feeding of onion, peas, etc. is all happening there. 10.30 is family meal time. In the restaurant, we do family meal three times a day. One in the morning at 10.30, one at night at 4 p.m., and then after that, we do one around 1 a.m. for the porter team at the end of the night. The restaurant runs almost 24-7. We're open seven days a week, and also we have first team in the morning starting bread at 5 a.m., and the last person from the porter team leaving at 3 a.m. in the morning. So there's really two hours where there's no one in the kitchen. Besides that, the restaurant is always open and running. How are you doing? Chris, pretty good. Hi, Tia. Stefano and David are all going to be running the New York City Marathon this weekend. That's something that's really special, I think, between running and working in the kitchen. The way that it feels coming into work and putting your head down and starting the day and the way it's intense and you're pushing yourself. It's a little bit more painful, but it's a lot of fun. I did a half Ironman. I did two marathons and three half marathons in one year, and it just broke me. Now the family meal is over. We're getting close to 11. We're going to go back in the kitchen and look at some of the production in the back, so let's do it. We have anywhere from six to ten commis in the back working, plus one sous-chef overseeing all the production. The maitake skewer is a really signature dish in the last five years. One of the coolest parts of the maitake skewer is the seitan part. We're actually inspired from something called namafu, which is a classic shoujin Japanese technique. We started to play around with those recipes and created our own version, and we called it seitan. You can buy seitan on the market. It's completely different. It's really chewy. I don't love it, but this is really different. Basically, when you cut it, it really looks like just a regular loaf of bread, but the difference is the texture. We're going to be slicing those, then we're going to be frying them, and after that, we marinate them. The marinade is made with a little bit of smoke oil, some white soy, a little bit of maple, and a little bit of salt. When it grills, it gets crispy on the outside. It gets tender and juicy in the inside, so it's really cool. We always have anywhere from three to four people every day building skewers because we're going to about 100 skewers a day. From start to finish, this is about a three-day process. We also trim it so it's a beautiful, perfect rectangle because sometimes if we don't, then with pieces coming out, then some pieces are going to burn and not cook evenly. Three-star restaurant, the aesthetic and the look and how it's going to look on the plate at the end is really important, so consistency for everything to look the same is important to us. This is all looking great, and now we're going to go take a look at the butter production. Sunflower butter was one of the first dishes that we worked on when we went plant-based. We started to make sunflower milk to just basically recreate the milk part of the butter, and then we started to ferment it to get that sourness in the butter as well. Butter production is happening right here. Jasper is our fermentation cook. Five years ago with Chef Foum, we decided to go fully plant-based. In the last few years, we realized that obviously as chefs, what represents us the most is not necessarily to be fully plant-based. We're really excited to work with some proteins, so we brought back the duck. We're working with lobster and scallops again. Dairy butter is an amazing thing. It's delicious, but what we created like five years ago, I think is even better. One person is going to work five days a week on butter production. It basically takes a full-time job. Every season, we try to incorporate a different flavor. Right now, we do an allium butter. We do a fermented sunflower and onion milk that we use as the base. We take the base. We incorporate like liquid nitrogen until it goes down to 20 degrees. When it gets there, then we're incorporating our onion jam, and after that, we're going to temper it back down to being a little bit warmer. Now, it's emulsified, and then we're going to be molding it. These silicone molds, we fill them up with the butter, and then after that, we're going to put them in the freezer to get them back to being cold as quick as possible. We're going to be tapping the trays down and working with the cake tester to remove all the bubbles to make sure there's no air bubbles in the butter. Beautiful is so important. The four fundamentals of our food that we talk about all the time is creative, beautiful, delicious, and intentional. If you have those four criteria on the dish, then it's a great dish, and it's a dish that we can put on the menu. Let's look at the duck. Here, Chef Stefano is cooking the duck with us. Really simple. We take the duck that's been dried for 14 days. We glaze it with some honey, and then sprinkle coriander, lavender, cumin, and Sichuan peppercorn, a little bit of salt, and just roast it in the oven. When it's about to be ready, we usually start about 18 minutes, and then we start testing it. So, we're going inside the breast to know that basically the end there is too hot, the end there is too hot, and then you really want to go and check the middle part, because with this, you can have a much thinner needle that won't poke and make holes in the meat. It would be easier to do it with a prop, but the end product would not look as nice. 30 to 40 minutes is ideal time to rest. We're going to be cutting the breast open of the cage. We're trying to really just take away the extra fat or just pieces that won't be nice to eat. After that, we're just going to brush it with some brown butter, finishing it with fleur de sel, and then after that, we'll be ready to go on the plate. We sauce the table side for the guests. So, that's it for the dog. This is what it looks like when it's finished and when we serve it to our guests. 12.45. Now, we're going to go take a look at the skewer while we're grating it with Chef Stefano. So, we brush the skewers with a mushroom taurine made with dried shiitake, maple syrup, some black garlic fermented. We dry it for a little like around 10 minutes in the oven, then we start to grill, and we go really slow. We don't want to burn, but really like a nice caramelization. We finish with a little bit of a pine powder. So, just regular pine that we dehydrate and then blend, and then we put a little bit of fresh lemon. We do a little bit of yuzu kosho, and then we finish with a smoked dry portobello. So, we want to make sure we have a beautiful, clean, soft surface where we can put the plates on to plate the food instead of putting them directly on marble or ceramic. Often, either with metal or ceramic, you can just scratch the plates, and when you put it on a white linen, you're going to get those black marks on the linen. There's different ways that you can go about a dish. There's times where we're going to be centering things. Things are going to be a little bit more on the left, on the right. At the end of the day, it's all about making the dish beautiful and what's going to make the most sense with what we're using. So, right now, we're centering the mushroom skewer. So, mushroom puree, wilted spinach, and then some fresh baby spinach leaves. This is the mushroom skewer as we serve it to our guests, finishing it with the sauce next to the guests in the dining room. So, that's it. Now, we're just about to call five minutes where everyone's going to stop, start breaking down, deep clean the entire kitchen, and then reset for the night before we can go into family meal and then into service. Ready, guys? Five minutes. Okay, let's do it, guys. It's almost 2.30. We're about to do pre-meal and talk about a bunch of different things, but today, we're going to have a guest speaker. We're going to have Chef Anthony come in. Anthony is a chef at Uno, and this restaurant has been named many times best pizza restaurant in the world. Hey, what's up? Okay, yeah, I'm coming. Thank you. Okay, let's go get him. Hey. Oh, hey. How you doing? You good? How are you? Good to see you. Thank you for coming. Oh, thank you. That's awesome. Where should I stand? Yeah, right here. Pre-meal. Okay, good afternoon, everyone. Good afternoon, Chef. Happy Wednesday. Happy Wednesday, Chef. First of all, honestly, we bring you guys up probably almost every pre-shift. I'm not joking. We really use you guys as sort of a benchmark on what I think hospitality is. I've always said to me, food and hospitality, when I know I did my job, is when I leave at the end of the night, and my face hurts. It's funny, but you know what I mean. You walk out, and you feel depleted in your face, and you're just like, and you can barely speak. That's when I'm like, all right, I gave everything. Am I right, though? You guys know that you're laughing. I think a lot of us can relate to what you're saying, and yeah, it's really, really special. Thank you. Appreciate it. Crusher of the week this week, someone who's been a signed crusher for a really, really long time. This week, it's Elizabeth. We've always been crushing it from kitchen to going to pastry, and I keep hearing Chef Laura, Chef Orana, talking about how amazing you're doing your job. Right now, it is critic season. We've literally had three critics that have been coming. There's going to be more coming back. We haven't been reviewed on the New York Times in a long, long time, so we're expecting that to happen anytime soon. It could be tonight. It could be tomorrow. We're going to be re-earning our four stars. Now, we need to be consistent, and you need to work on all the single little details. That makes what we do really special. So let's focus on that. Let's re-earn our star, and let's have a good service. When we talk about consistency and that consistency is everything, this is one of the most important part of the day, where we're just going to go and look at every piece of mise en place and taste everything. We're spending anywhere from an hour to an hour and a half just tasting food and double checking that everything is the way it should be. Every guest is a VIP, but there's also critics. There's a super VIP that are coming, and we do take extra care to make sure that every single little piece of their mise en place of the food is going to be perfect. We usually do about six portions a night. We always use them all throughout the night, but this is what we usually use if a critic walk-in or a very VIP come in, like Chef Stefano. At the end of the day, we'll never change a dish for a guest. We create a menu that we're super proud of, and that's what we're serving to everyone. It's really challenging when you have 10, 15, 20 different dishes to taste, and they all have anywhere from five to 15 components. So to make sure that we don't forget anything, we have this checklist. Let's start from the beginning, but maybe let's start with the crudités. This is a small version of a crudité that we serve at the bar. Bring up the seasoning a little bit, okay? The plating is beautiful, E.T., huh? Yeah. Yeah, it's great. It looks great. The cooking of the league is great, but we need to finish with more to sell. Sometimes we have a completely different dish so that we can have different options, and sometimes we have a similar style of dishes with different vegetables. For example, we do like a really awesome curry squash with a curry sauce, and we also do it with sweet potato in case some people don't like squash. Everything is really good, but it's like if we're scared of seasoning everything today a little bit, you know? Everything is just a little under-seasoned. 3.30 now, we're getting closer to service. We're going to Clemente Bar to taste the food and do similar tasting. Okay, I need a hug. At Clemente Bar, it's a cocktail bar, but also a studio on the other side. Here is more focused on the studio, which is a nine-seat counter where the chef and the bartender cook in front of the guests. It's a really cool experience. I'll start with this first over here. I think this is my favorite thing on the menu that we have right now. It's a portobello burger, so fully plant-based, and then we cook it just to get it like really tender and flavorful. Then tempura, fry it, just brush it with like a Nashville hot, a little bit of ranch, mayonnaise, lettuce, tomatoes. Yesterday was like too juicy. I was dripping. Today is perfect. Yes, chef. Do we find a way to make sure it's consistent like that? Yes, chef. Wait, we'll dry them a little bit more, and then yes, fry a little bit longer. Yeah. That's awesome. Can we take the recipe of the onions from the beginning and just go back and forget about what we've been doing and just take the recipe, read through it, and just do exactly and do a small batch of it? For sure. This is good, but it's not like amazing. There's something missing. Okay, we're good, no? Yeah. It's almost four o'clock. Now we're going to go downstairs. Family meal number two. Yeah. As you can see, there's a lot of people. Our entire team right now is going on family meal. Yeah, it's pretty amazing how many people there are. We have two lines of family meal. Today, where's Marissa and Pooja? Hey. Come. Yeah, yeah, there you go. There you go. So Pooja and Marissa, they both came today. Cooking family, which was awesome. Every day, we usually do family meal where we have each station doing one component, so they took care of everything. It looks amazing. I'm super excited. I'm really hungry, but yeah, thank you. You guys are the best, and some of the toughest sous-chefs in the kitchen. Let's go eat. Now it's 4.30. We're going to our reso meeting, and basically, we're going to meet with the sous-chef, the manager, the reservationist team, and talk about every guest that is coming tonight and make sure that we have all of the information that we need, whether it's allergies, aversions, special celebration, or anything like that, so that we can make every single experience really special. So yeah, come on in. We're with the team in here. Good afternoon. Good afternoon. At Clemente's tonight, we have 88 on the books with six in the studio, 82 at the bar. We also have a PDR at 7.30 now for 24 guests. We have 39 reservations for 94 guests, two available. For the bar casing, we have nine reservations for 21 guests, two available, and we have one bar a la carte reservation for two guests, and a total of 117 covers. 6 p.m. at Cardio 2, the wife has an allergy to honey and is averse to lamb and goat cheese. Attention, captain, please advise the duck has honey. Yeah. Yeah, that's just a no, because you can't do the mushroom. That's all for today. Thank you. Thank you. Back into tasting and then service. 5.05. The first few courses of the meal starts in Garmentier, so that's why we always start in doing like tasting earlier there. Here at 5 o'clock on the hotline, it still gives us like a good hour before we start firing some of the food on the hotline. It's great. Thank you. This is much better. Consistency is good. Thank you, chef. The potato itself needs a little bit more seasoning. The color is like beautiful and perfect, but I wish it was like a little crispier. Dry a little bit more, fry a little bit more, and that's it because the look is like beautiful. Let's do another one and we'll test it all again. I'm going to be helping them seasoning the tea right now. I feel like seasoning things is like one of my favorite thing, and I feel like just working on your palate, working on seasoning thing and understanding how food works is so important. Saying to someone that food is not good as a chef or as a cook or as sous chef just sucks because it doesn't really give you really much direction. Still always makes me happy to be able to do it with the team so I can make sure that I also understand the food just as much as they do. Can you come and we do this together? Right now it's good, but it's still like the acid needs to be a little higher and then it's still like miss like a little bit of like the seasoning needs some of the salt and then this is a lot. It needs just a little bit of the umami. The spiciness is better now that we added a little bit of base, but it also needs like just a touch of white soy. Okay, let's mix it. Let's taste it together. Now the acidity is there, but it's not fully run. This is a really like comforting allium and celery broth kind of reminds you a little bit of the chicken soup you would have when you're a kid and it's a really really cool way to start the meal as it's great. It makes a huge difference. It's crazy when you taste something that's good it makes you smile. Now it's 5 30. We're right about to start. It's gonna get busy. We basically like are starting with anywhere from 40 to 60 covers within the first 30 to 45 minutes of service so it starts really fast. So now we're already ready to start sending the first dishes. We're sending up the pass. We have little plate wipes here. We have sauces, oils, dry wipes as well so that we can just polish and finish all the plating and as soon as it's ready we get the orders. We finish the sauce and all the plates and then after that it's going to get going and start to go right away. On the pass here at night there's a few things that's happened. We have two boards. This is my expediting board. This position is intended to be able to oversee everything. I see I see pastry, I see the hotline, the production in the back so I can tell if there's anything wrong or if anything is on the pass doesn't look the way it should look and I expedite the first three courses, three to four courses and then the rest is expedited by a member of the dining room team that we call expediter. We have like little hidden things here, hidden tools, a few things about the cover, spreads of the night, what is the first table, last table, what size of tables we have, reservation report that we went through earlier talking about every single guest that we have and then also really important the dining room plan of the night so basically who's working where and what section, who's the sommelier, the captain, the server, the assistant server so every time there's a ticket if there's something wrong or there's something happening with the table or the timing or ticket whatever it is then we can easily like know what happened with who and get the team to come and communicate with us and same thing here we have a plan with everyone who's working where in the entire restaurant so that helps with logistics during service. That's it, every single sous-chef is going to be staged on their station and basically I'm working with all the sous-chefs, all the sous-chefs are working with their cooks and then all together as a team we try to do the best we can every night and try to re-earn those three stars over there. Service is starting now, let's do this. Okay ordering two top at the bar. It's a good service. When service starts we always call the tickets, we call the amount of guests that are at a table so everyone gets ready especially in Carmage but also the hotline knows that they have a new ticket in order they need to get ready. Besides that time everyone is really quiet so that we can just focus on what we were doing. Can we go check 17, make sure they're ready, they didn't set a fire. Bring the other cup here. I need two teas behind that. Oui, chef. Thank you. Smoking hot, right Kevin? No, not enough. Good, take it back. Smoking, it has to be like smoking hot. That means this is not good so let's fix it. Oui, chef. Let's get it back in the pot, much hotter. Okay, let's go guys, two more teas, two by two. It's getting really busy and intense, the service. We're going to be here until probably midnight, 1 a.m. so now we need you guys to go and focus on service so thank you for today, it was awesome. All right, two top at the bar. Oui. Do we still have anything to taste?