This Restaurant Earned A Michelin Star in Just 9 Months | On The Line | Bon Appétit

Husso is a restaurant at the back of a caviar store in New York City. In nine months we got our first star which is a tremendous achievement for all of us involved. I'm the head chef therefore my role is making sure the kitchen is running, everyone's doing what they're meant to be doing and doing it correctly. We change the menu seasonally according to the solstice so we are not even at our one year mark and we're on our fifth menu. So it's constant R&D, it's constantly a chef coming up with ideas, me facilitating how to make those ideas come to life. Hi it's 10am my name's Lois, I'm the head chef here at Husso Tribeca. It's freezing outside minus 14 degrees celsius. We're just going to go into our caviar store and sneak into the restaurant. This is our caviar store, this is where everyone enters through. We have a speakeasy vibe so let me take you through. This is our dining room, we have 11 tables upstairs. The kitchen is downstairs that's where my world is so let's go down. As the first job of my day when I come in I like to just check one of our most valuable deliveries that we get in this restaurant which is our caviar. We have our ossetra and we also have our beluga. Caviar is eggs from a surgeon. We use it in this restaurant as something to enhance our dishes. I think it's a great seasoning as well. As you can see visually they do look quite different. This is the beluga, it has a grey tone to it and a little bit lighter color. And then we have the ossetra here which has a little bit of a green tinge to it and you can definitely see the structure of the egg a lot better. Beluga is, you can't get it anywhere else in the United States of America unless it's from Markey's who is the company that we are associated with. It was nearly extinct, we took it on and we nurtured that species and brought it back to life and because of that we earned the right to have them under our harness. So that's something that we're extremely proud of. The fun thing about the name of the restaurant is that the scientific name for beluga is huso huso so it kind of ties everything together. You just want to always use a mother of pearl spoon so you're not damaging any of those eggs. So on a metal spoon the sharpness of the edge can really break all the eggs and make all of the inside ooze out. The mother of pearl spoon is a lot softer and it works more with the eggs than against the eggs. What I like to do is put it on my hand just so I can really inspect in the light each individual egg. This seems to all the way down be pretty stunning and then the best part of the job is I get to taste beluga. The osetra here so this is the one that we have on the menu every day and it can also be an add-on to extra dishes if the guest wishes. Seems like a really good batch today. It's harder to pop them in my mouth because they have way more structural integrity which is exactly why we use it on the menu just as our standard caviar. It just holds everything up a lot better. The flavor definitely on the saltiest side this time so we will have to adjust a few of our dishes just to make sure that everything's harmonious. Now that all this is done we can move on to the next sauce. Now it's time of the day to do the tuna. This is for our first course of the tasting menu. It's served cold as a tartar with osetra caviar and we also have a smoked sturgeon babouar on top. Just to warm people up for their first course of the evening we also serve it with a tuna consomme which is what I'm about to prep. We have our bluefin tuna carcasses. As we are a small restaurant we don't go through a whole tuna throughout the whole week therefore we do get the piece of tuna and the bones separate. It's pretty small but it does the job for us and it's super super flavorful. So the smaller we cut it up into pieces the more surface area we're going to get for the caramelization around the outside and that equals more flavor for us in our consomme. As you can see I am ripping the towel but that's a hell of a lot cheaper than ruining my chopping board. These towels we actually have a little bit of a rule with the chefs that they have five towels a day which from where I come from that's very very generous but it's just to make sure that they are more disciplined and they're cleaning down and a little bit more thoughtful on how they get around the jobs of the towels. If you need six you've got to come ask me very nicely and hope I'm in a good mood. So it's gonna go in the oven. We're gonna put a little bit of oil on it to really encourage that matter of reaction. Super hot oven about 450 degrees Fahrenheit. We are gonna get the base ready so we're gonna slice up some onions, some fennel. So for the charred ones we just cut those in half they will go straight on the flat top on some foil and these other ones we just slice super thin. When you are cooking something so delicate as a fish especially for a consomme you want everything really finely sliced so everything cooked super super quick. That means that you're not going to get that stewed bland flavor you're going to get super light fresh some tuna consomme. I started cooking when I was 15 years old professionally. I've been cooking my whole life. I told my dad I wanted to be a chef when I was four years old and that I wanted one restaurant in London and one restaurant in New York City so we're getting there on the dream. I love sports in general as a person. I love the competitiveness, the drive to succeed at something that may seem somewhat impossible and I'm not that athletic so cooking is my thing and if you want to be in the sports world of cooking it's in Michigan. So I'm just going to put a little bit of oil on here just so it doesn't stick. If we don't do that then you're going to get all the great caramelization and flavor is going to stick onto the foil. If you were to put it in a pan the heat would have to go from the stove through the pan to the onion. It's not going to you're not going to get that dark, dark caramelization so if you stick it straight on the flat top this is called the bullseye of the stove. This is where it gets the hottest so I'm just going to move it around until I get the perfect color all the way around and that's really going to intensify that flavor. They're starting to really get that color there as you can see. Right now I'm just going to sweat down these onions. Yeah you got a towel for me? Yeah that's the perks of being a head chef, everything at your disposal. I'm going to hand this over to the meat chef and he's going to finish it off for me. So now it's time to do the cold part of the first course so that is our tuna tartare. So we have our ikami saku, this is the upper loin of the of the tuna itself. This type of tuna is super super lean. I'm going to cut it into quite a thick steak. Our dish consists of a pounded little puck on top which is a really lovely presentation side and then we also have the dice at the bottom. I lay these out so this is where we get our anger out. Very gently start to pound it and when you're pounding you don't want to just press down because you're just hitting one part of the fish. You want to pound and push out so you're really like encouraging it where to go. So we're just going to fold it up like that. I'm gonna go put that in our freezer and let that freeze up before we punch it into little pucks. And now our pucks are ready to punch out, nice and frozen. If you cut it too warm your ring punch is not going to go through and have a really lovely perfect cut. You're going to have some little rips and tears which is obviously not Michelin worthy. I'm going to take the trim here, mince this up so it has a different texture. That gives an almost like a chutoro type of feel to the mouth, like a fatty texture and then we're going to have the lean dice so you have two different textures there when you're biting into it. Next we're going to put in is finger limes. So these, just like caviar, they pop in your mouth obviously a lot more acidic. Gives a really exciting feel to it. It's like because every bite you're popping with different acidity levels. These are pretty expensive so it's really important that we get every single piece out. We get our tweezers and we just pick through, making sure we get every single seed out. Go ahead put that in. We also add some chives, Maldon salt. It has less of a harsh flavour. Black garlic shoyu glaze. I would describe it as similar to an eel sauce. As I've been seasoning this, I always keep in the back of my mind that this is served with osetra caviar. So that's where I need to really take in the fact that it doesn't need too much salt right now because we're adding that salt layer then. So this is all done. Just before service we start dressing them and making them super pretty for the guests. Now's the time of the day that I can go into the office and do my invoices. Just have to wade through the jungle. Every day the invoices come in. I check the prices. I check the quantity. Then I just scan them on my phone and then I have to send those to two different places. One is to our accounting team in Miami and then also I have to upload it to Toast so it can go on my inventory. So my food cost is great. After the invoices, the DOH side of things. So that's the Department of Health. So we're getting up to one year of opening this restaurant and we haven't had an inspection yet. So any day it can happen. So I'm just going to go to the fridge and the freezer right now and just have a look around the kitchen as well just to make sure everything's in tip-top. What I'm looking for is all of the seafood at the bottom. Any raw proteins at the bottom as well and then we build it up going from ready to eat at the top. For example, if I was to move this chicken up next to our English muffins here that would be a huge no-no. That would be at least 10 points. If you fail an inspection, that is pretty much closed down at the restaurant. Just to make sure that I set myself up for success, we do hire someone to come in who is an old inspector. She has 20 years experience. She comes in, she tells me everything I'm doing wrong. She comes back the next month, she tells me everything I'm still doing wrong and then the goal is after two, three months that we're perfect, ready to go. My team are pretty well rehearsed in how I like things. So we're looking great in here and if we have an inspection, I feel pretty confident about it. Now we're going to prep the beef en croute. This beef is a terrace major cut, so it's known as the petit filet. So there is two pieces in the whole cow, which makes it a little bit more desirable to have. This is the final savoury course before you head into the desserts. With it being a beef en croute, it's quite decadent. It's also served with a sauce perigo, which is a truffle sauce. We are going to wrap the wagyu in the pancetta. Even though it will be wrapped in pastry and no one will see it, it's important for us to keep the techniques of everything looking nice. So what I am doing is making sure that this meat side here is always on the same part because that's going to be my outside. So now when I roll that, it's going to be the most beautiful layering on the other side. How we encourage the pancetta to stick to the wagyu is that we use a GS, which is the chef's term for neat glue. Just a very light sprinkle just encourages it to make sure everything sticks together. Really important that we wrap it super tight just to encourage the sticking even more. It's easier when you get another piece of cling film to help with the friction and we just roll it and roll it until it's in a perfect cylinder. A pet peeve of mine is people not cutting the little tails off. It upsets me immensely. We just need to give it some time for the glue to activate. In that time, we're going to get the pastry ready. So we egg wash the inside to make sure that everything is one whole structure and nothing's peeling away from each other. Our meat that's completely stuck together here, so we're going to put that in the pastry and we roll it around until the seams they meet there. We egg wash it first. We let the whole of the egg wash dry. Whilst we're doing that, we do all of our braids. Every single guest gets a braid on each of their portions. It's quite labour intensive, but it's pretty striking when it's on the plate, so it's definitely worth it. Some of the male chefs seem to have a bit of a problem with this task, but the female chefs seem to smash it out. This is honestly one of my favourite tasks that I've been given in this kitchen. A lot of other people can't do it and I like to do stuff that other people can't do. It's a little bit different to braiding hair. You've got to be a little bit more careful with it, obviously because it rips, but just remaining super tight with the itself. Since they could unravel in the oven, we like to just give them a little press down at the end, just to make it a little bit more secure. Another thing that makes it look a lot nicer is making sure that the grain of the braid is coming the same way every single time. So that looks like a pretty great one, so we're going to go put that in the freezer to firm up before we put it in the oven. So now it's the time of the day where I prep the scallops now. So these are live in-shell scallops. This is one of my favourite jobs to do. Pretty much throughout my career, wherever I go, I try and make it my responsibility. And in past restaurants where I've worked, it's definitely been a bit of a gateway to the more senior members of the team, or racing, who can do it fastest and the most precise and the best. We have a flat side of the shell and we have a rounded side. The flat side is where I want to keep my knife against. That's why I use a flexi knife. I'll flex it against there and I'll push down to try and scrape everything out. This is what we call the skirt and then we have the roe underneath. The roe is edible. We're going to keep it for a later date to use it, dry it out and make some powder with it. You flip the skirt around, you just tease the scallop out with your knife. Look it out. So this dish is one of the guest favourites at the moment. It's a celebration of sunchokes. We serve it with a salt-baked sunchoke puree. We also have pickled and roasted sunchokes and we make our own sunchoke caramel with that. So that's something that is really special because I learned it through a mistake. I over reduced the consomme one day and I made caramel and I decided to keep that in my repertoire and try and use it and it's made it onto the menu today. When we're packing away scallops, there's a few things to check for. Naturally, there is a muscle on the left-hand side of the scallop itself. As you can see here, we have a flat side to a container and then you just match that, this flat side on the left. Yeah, you need more salt. I feel like I'm constantly getting spoon fed all day, which is part of the job and not a bad part of the job, especially with food like this. But one of my roles is to taste every single thing that is prepped throughout the whole day and make sure it's up to the standard. As long as we go left to left every single time, when they sit up in the fridge, they're going to keep their structure and then that's going to help when we're pan searing, that they're not going to fall on themselves and we're just going to get an immaculate sear on the face side rather than also down here. I'm going to just finish this up and pack them away. We've got 30 minutes before service, so we're just going to do some tasters right now. So I do the tasters just as my last chance to be able to taste what the guest is tasting and I'm the last line of defense. So if there's something wrong right now, we fix it straight away and make sure the guest doesn't have to experience that. So here we have the first course, the one that we made together earlier. So this is the tuna. Just going to try it with the bavoire. So far so good. So here we have our beef sauce. This is our truffle perigo sauce. Really beautiful chopped up truffles in there. You need sherry vinegar in there and some butter. Yeah, it's just a little bit like flat and there's not a lot of body feel. That's way better. So just getting ready for service. This is my expo station. So this is where I stand pretty much 99% of service unless I'm going to check out the sections. I have eyes everywhere. It's a fantastic place. I have a 360 of the kitchen. I can look at the garnish, the meat section, the pastry and the garniture all at the same time. Just spot things before they go too wrong. I get my tickets through here and then I have this sheet that is here every single day and that just tells me the times people are coming in, any of their allergies and then any guest notes if they've been already before, when they came and then if there was anything that happened that was something that I need to know from their last visit. Check on four top. Have a good service. How many? Seven. That means it's time for you to go.