NYC’s Hottest New Steakhouse is Indian ¦ On The Line ¦ Bon Appétit

Elder is a modern British Indian shop house. Shop house is very different than the regular steak house. If a guest wants a fillet, but if they want it a little bigger or smaller, we always cater that. We try to use our steaks, but with the techniques of Indian cuisine. We do a 32-age ribeye with a nahari, which is very traditionally Indian. Stewed broth. I'm the head chef at Elder. I've got to learn how to open a restaurant, how to bring in people and the creative ones and the most skilled ones and create a team which i can work with and move forward good morning it's 9:00 a.m. in the morning i'm iqbal siddiqui head chef at elder please come on in we are doing 100 covers tonight so we need to get prepared welcome to our kitchen this is a huge kitchen we work with around 15 cooks we are going to do the meats or the proteins for the day Right now we have a Berkshire pork chop over here. Our chop house is better than most of the steak house. What we do is custom every order. If the guest wants it, maybe 16 ounces. We weigh them out and we cook it accordingly. That's what we expertise in pretty much giving what guests wants. We take a little bit of fat off. It's more about how we make a simple ingredient shine better or look better. And on a plate it looks just fantastic like the white bone coming off the grill. After the pork chops right age we brine them in brown sugar and a little soy and then cook it on the grill we've let it rest on on top of vindaloo which is like a very portuguese gravy from india so it adds a little wine a little vinegar a little chili it's a definitely a little spicy dish than the rest but it's one of my favorites if you see like the bones coming off clean and nice that what makes a difference you have to sharpen your knives every day because it makes your work way easier most of the big knives cannot go through just because they are big and long i use a paring knife because again it can go through right seemingly in between the bones and it makes the cut much more cleaner and sharper too and it's easy to maintain so we are done with the pork and now we are just going to wrap it i'm very tedious about like how we wrap our pork i want no wrinkles when it comes to wrapping it gives you a little edge over like how your work ethics flows in the kitchen and it just makes your walk-in look better once the pork is fired what we do we take over it to the grill then we're nice really good sear two minutes on each side if you look at the grill it has both the charcoal and the fire it generates more of a heat which is more even. If you see the racks inside there are different levels to it. We can definitely rest some of the meats over here or let them dry or get them a little more colored than the usual and it gives a lot of flavor to the meat. Now we are going to work on our paneer which is made up with buffalo milk. The milk comes in a big bag like this. If I can lift it up it's too heavy. That's like a five gallon of milk which is maybe run through half of the week. We don't use the regular milk because of buffalo milk having a lot of high density in fat and cream we use what we are going to do is layer the paneer like a lasagna with a little bit of filling in pistachio and other nuts like cashew a little spices from india serve it over like a saag which is another very traditional indian gravy this is siddharth is my morning sous so he's basically worked with me almost for three or four years pretty much he knows me better than i do we have a huge tilting pan which can hold up a liter of 30 gallons that's a lot of liquid cooking or simmering we can cook in it and tilt it down too and that makes it much more easier to get the milk or any liquid out of the tilting like cooking pan it's it's quite mechanical it's fun we'll let the milk simmer to separate the whey from the water what we do we add a little vinegar and it cuddles up right away you can see the difference the water and the whey separating we need to press it as fast as possible and cool it down to get the even shape if you're too slow you won't get the paneer at the right time for the service so we see we even out all the paneer make sure there's no air bubbles so we try to use the same pans with regular sizes we put on a little weight we press it down so that the water gets dripped on and caught at the bottom let's cool it down we have a blast chiller we'll throw it in for like say about 10 minutes 15 minutes and then put it back into the cooler Jared over here, my sous, he's trying to help me out with the paneer. As soon you put the weight, you see the water gushing out. That's what we want, but in the pan, not out the pan. The paneer is all set. Meanwhile, I have all my sous chefs coming in. Let's have a little chitchat with them and then move on with our whole day. Jared is my evening sous, where Siddharth is my morning sous. We'll get a little brief on how the day looks like. We are definitely waiting on the ribeye. So as soon as the ribeye comes in, we'll jump onto that too. yesterday we had a little problem with the boiling water next to the pasta so make sure the water is already salted ready to go my sous chefs are involved in every day daily to daily cooking it's a really really tough job because we work almost like 12 or 15 hours every day and and we have to be on our point you can get on with the other stuff My beef delivery is here, we got our steak, I think this is the time to break it down so 32 ounces and 30 ounces are standardized weigh in. We definitely want people to choose what they want. If they want the whole rack, we give them the whole rack. I am trying to get the sinew out and we want that beautiful white bone shining over the ribeye. I sharpen only my tip of my knife. Sharpness on the edge so I can go back and forth with my finger and that gives me if I want to go too deep I can go either hold my knife back forth and then go too deep or when I want to go a little sharp so I'm not puncturing the meat all the way through, perfect chop, take the oxidized meat and we'll use it, some of them which is a little cleaner for our sauces, now as we see these are really heavier steak than the rest of them, we will keep it to dry age a little longer maybe do a 42 day age ribeye if somebody wants it we custom clean it and then we give it to them on the table, we definitely do a taste check just the salt, so to check the quality we salt it really hard, it's remember it's 32 ounces ribeye last week we sold a ribeye 72 ounces, there was a table for eight people and they took the whole ribeye when we call out our chop house, what we exactly mean like if our guest wants it we deliver really really market really well and you see the smoke that builds up like the whole flavor, the grill marks I like it like a crisscross. It just makes the whole presentation much more better. So our steak is well grilled. You need a little charrness, a little nuttiness that brings out the whole flavor of an aged ribeye. We'll do a little blast of tallow. Tallow is a great lubricant for any steak and it adds up more of a nutty flavor. It enhances the aged ribeye and it has a high melting point or a heat level. Put it in the oven, cook it to temp and then we see how it's done. put on the side, Nahari is like a thick broth made out of lamb stock and a lot of spices and yogurt and that looks like a wonderful steak we are doing a very classic roulade out of chicken with Indian spices and flavors, this is like the integral part of british shop house the filling is more indian and the terrine or the roulade what we make is more british by itself it's like a very cohesive dish on a makhani so it's pretty much the whole elder together in one dish. This is ivory chicken from upstate New York. It has the right amount of fat to a meat ratio just because if you see most of the birds won't have under like the skin fat so that keeps the chicken much more moist and tender. I try to break it down from the back. The history goes back either from from the cannoli region or even from france but it's more of a technical term like where you make a roulade is like rolling up anything or any meat but we made it our own just because this dish was taught by chef sujin and then even i bought in a little idea that why don't we do the whole chicken rather than doing just half a chicken or like a full chicken every roulade is like a full chicken folded into one whole roll. It requires a lot of strength and skill. I did martial arts for a little while. That gets me a little more strength to butcher this chicken. I stepped away from fighting. I still love it. I'm still passionate. I train every day. There are so many commonalities with fighting and cooking. You have to be disciplined. You have to put in your hours. you have to train every day to get your skill right you're mostly like 15 or 18 hours away from your family doing it every day every day out imagine on a holiday where you want to sit have a cup of coffee chill with your friends and family you're working but i love it i love every aspect of it you have separated the breasts and the skin it's gonna be noisy so just a heads up This is where my martial arts skills come to play. I'm just kidding. You want to pound it to the point where it stays together but it's flattened out. So I don't use all the time the tip of it. I use the other side of it. If you see why we use the clean wrap because it clings and so it's easy to maneuver everything on intact. I have a little slurry made out of cornstarch and salt. It's kind of a natural glue. What we did over here with the leg is made of like i would say a filling for the chicken this just got made yesterday from the other chicken we butchered so it goes through the grinder and then we add a lot of spices a little bit of cilantro a little fat so it keeps the chicken moist as well and more flavorful make sure the roulade filling are firm and filled in a proper size i use a slicer long very efficient to roll it up now we encase it in the skin we'll roll the clean wrap this is the trickier part so we want our chicken to be tight we take out the air because if you see that it has like air bubbles or air gaps when you cook it that will cook much more faster than the other stuff so it bulges up which we don't want in service and we sear it to golden brown we cut it into pieces and lay it out on a makhni which is a very Indian traditional tomato sauce we do a briefing every day just to make sure that everybody is lined up knowing what they're doing today we have 85 plus 20 105 on the books uh make sure there's no allergens on the table the rush we are getting around 6 6 35 then the second rush would be around 7 30 or 7 35 okay we have chef Sujan uh pretty much very busy he's my mentor he's the chef too everyone is happy that's good spot okay we are getting busier now so we have to pull out our A game that's what it is yeah thank you guys and i'll see you in the evening thank you chef thank you one two three there you go good job guys me and Siddharth are gonna jump into because i think we are really low on it celeriac is a root vegetable like piece between a cassava and a potato the consistency is much more thicker than a potato we talk about Wellington from England or Wellington from Europe everybody things like Wellington can be done by a meat or a tenderloin but we want to showcase like how authentic we are to our cuisine we do a very traditional Indian method which is like doing a kebab out of it we do a duxelle which is very British and then we do a confit celeriac cooked in a very slow heat of oil for say about two hours we wrap around with the filo layering it up we'll start the Swiss chard around the bowl so we'll take one by one we'll try to place the other ones over here the idea was to do a Wellington really good Wellington incorporate the British ethos and and what's new and what's different do a celeriac which is gives you a more room for the vegetarians coming into a steakhouse which is quite repulsive like for a vegetarian or a vegan but we made sure that we have enough dishes on the menu that they can come to a steakhouse and enjoy vegetarian dishes we'll hand it over to the pastry department and they're going to finish it up for us this is our shogun and our pastry chef Me and her had been working for many other restaurants so i know her really well she's like my elder sister this is for you Wellington thanks bye bye for today and then we can continue tomorrow yeah thank you so much so i'm gonna set up for my station which is the expo keep all my mise en place a little garnishes this is like a walnut crunch we do it with a little panko walnut this is like a crispy garlic and this is we call it like a walnut dukkah basically nut mix with little bit of cumin fenugreek spices mixed with it and this is the barista which is very traditional in india uh we just shallow fry them i would say like more caramelized onion which has the sugar breakdown really well and it tastes like a little umami and sweeter on any meat we are gonna go in service in like 10 minutes basically i stand here call out the tickets manage everything taste everything plate everything i would love to have you over here but i think it's time to leave um have a good day bye