The Michelin-Star Restaurant Hidden Inside a Caviar Shop

Huso 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.

[upbeat instrumental music]

Hi, it is 10:00 AM, my name's Lois.

I'm the head chef here at Huso in Tribeca.

It's freezing outside, -14 degrees Celsius.

We're just gonna 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. [upbeat music]

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 sturgeon.

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 the gray 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 Marky'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 name.

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 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's 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.

With the ossetra 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.

And it just holds everything up a lot better.

The flavor definitely on the saltier 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 task.

[cheerful jazz music]

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 ossetra caviar

and we also have

a smoke sturgeon bavarois on top,

just to warm people up for the 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 carcass here.

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 bone 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 gonna 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, so 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're more disciplined

and they're cleaning down

and a little bit more thoughtful

in how they get around the jobs with the towels.

If you need six, you gotta come ask me very nicely

and hope I'm in a good mood. [laughs]

So it's gonna go in the oven.

We are gonna put a little bit of oil on it,

to really encourage that 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 gonna get

that stewed, bland flavor.

You're gonna get super light, fresh, some tuna consomme.

Well, 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 wanna be in the sports world of cooking

it's in Michelin.

So I'm just gonna put a little bit of oil on here,

just so it doesn't stick.

If we don't do that, then you're gonna get

all the great caramelization and flavor

is gonna 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.

You're not gonna 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 gonna move it around

until I get the perfect color all the way around,

and that's really gonna intensify that flavor.

They're starting to really get that color there,

as you can see.

Right now, I'm just gonna sweat down these onions.

Yeah, please. Yeah, you got

a towel for me?

[Chef] He just gave up one of his towels?

Yeah. [laughs]

That's the perks of being a head chef.

Everything at your disposal.

I'm gonna hand this over to the meat chef

and he's gonna finish it off for me.

So now it's time to do the cold part of the first course.

So that is our tuna tartar.

So we have our akami saku.

This is the upper loin of the tuna itself.

This type of tuna is super, super lean.

Gonna 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 wanna just press down,

'cause you're just hitting one part of the fish.

You wanna pound and push out.

So you are really like encouraging it where to go.

So we're just gonna fold it up like that.

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 gonna go through

and have a really lovely, perfect cut.

You're gonna have some little rips and tears,

which is obviously not Michelin worthy.

I'm gonna take the trim here, mince this up.

So it has a different texture

that gives it an almost like a chutoro type of feel

to the mouth, like a fatty texture.

And then we're gonna have the lean dice.

So you have two different textures there

when you're biting into it.

Next we are gonna put in is finger limes.

So these just like caviar,

they pop in your mouth, obviously a lot more acidic.

Gives it a really exciting feel to it.

It's like, 'cause every bite,

you are 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.

Molten salt, it has less of a harsh flavor.

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 ossetra 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 are adding that salt layer then.

So this is all done.

Just before service, we start dressing them,

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 are 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 gonna go to the fridge

and the freezer right now,

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 close down 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 tell me everything I'm doing wrong.

She comes back the next month,

she tells me everything I'm still doing wrong,

and the goal is, after two, three months,

that we are perfect, ready to go.

My team are pretty well rehearsed in how I like things.

So we are looking great in here,

and if we have an inspection,

I feel pretty confident about it.

[upbeat music]

Now we're going to prep the beef en croute.

This beef is a teres 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 savory 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 perigueux,

which is a truffle sauce.

We are gonna 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 gonna be my outside.

So now when I roll that,

it's gonna 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 meat 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 gonna 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 you're gonna 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 labor 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 favorite 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 gotta be a little bit more careful with it,

obviously, 'cause it rips,

but just remaining super tight with the braid 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.

[upbeat jazz music]

So that looks like a pretty great one.

So we're gonna 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 scallop stuff.

So these are live in-shell scallops.

This is one of my favorite 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,

of 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 wanna 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.

And this is what we call the skirt,

and then we have the roe underneath.

The roe is edible, and we are gonna 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.

It'll get out.

So this dish is one of the guest favorites 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 stick.

I over reduced a 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 rounder side.

We like to put the flat side on the side of the container,

and then you just match that.

There's flat side on the left.

[Chef 2] Sorry, Chef, could I get a taste?

Yeah.

You need more salt.

I feel like I'm constantly getting spoonfed 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 gonna keep their structure,

and then that's gonna help when we are pan searing,

that they're not gonna fall on themselves.

And we're just gonna get an immaculate sear

on the face side, rather than also down here.

I'm gonna just finish this up and pack them away.

[upbeat music]

We got 30 minutes before service,

so we're just gonna do some tasters right now.

So I do the tasters just since my last chance

to be able to taste what the guest's 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 gonna try it with the bavarois.

So far so good.

So here we have our beef sauce.

This is our truffle perigueux 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.

[Chef 3] Perfect.

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 to have a 360 of the kitchen.

I can look at the garnish, the meat section, the pastry

and the garde manger 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. [chefs cheering]

Have a good service. [chefs cheering]

How many? Seven!

And that means, it's time for you to go.