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3x2, 3x2. I'll take that five fish, five fish. Wait. I'll take broth three and two, please, right now. Wait. Two more amuse. Wait. Ordering two tasting. Wait. I need three risotto here. Wait. It's 7:30 p.m. on a Friday night in New York City and you're at The Modern. The Modern's held two Michelin stars since 2016. Right now, we've got about 75 guests in our dining room, 45 guests in our private space, about 120 in our bar room, and all of it's happening in real time.
Let's go, Pharaoh. Wait. Lamb, please. My name is Thomas Allan. I'm the executive chef. I've been at The Modern for 12 years now. You can plate right here, these four. Let's go. Get involved. We can't all what run at the same time, right? Wait. Look, behind me right here is three risotto and one turbo. Wait. Let's go. That's it. Pick up, please. Behind me is three risotto. We ran out of space. It's already up. Sorry. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. When we're super busy, I got a little soundtrack playing in my head. It'll be this busy,
but we'll start to slow down in a second. We just got to get through the ebbs and flows, you know? It's going to feel really condensed like it does right now, but if once we can push out, let's say the first three courses of all these big tickets, we'll be in the clear and we can uh start to breathe again. All right, pick up here, please. Pedro. Yes, sir. Five, let's go. Wait. Two though. So, I just finished five caviar. We just finished five caviar and now Pedro is going to help us get it out and onto a tray into the hands of the servers.
Take your time. For me, I always view it like I have like it's like a mental queue, right? Where like as soon as one thing is finished, one thing is added onto the back. And the queue never you know, the list never ends even when we leave the building, the next day's queue starts right back up and we have to keep going and doing more things like different events and cooking for different people. Basil, please. Basil. Wait. Pick up one more lobster. Wait. So, Katie's walked. Wait. Now, I need six. Wait. 4x2x1. Wait. Behind that on the board all day, there's two more. Wait.
We use words like on deck or backside. All that means is like a shortened vernacular to give the cooks like a mental queue of the things they have to do. So, I'll say we're picked up on four lobster, which means right now your backside is three more, which means there's three more behind that, or on the end, which is typically on the last part of the queue, there's two more. So, all day long, we're shouting things like 4x2x3 or up next or on deck. If you look over here to the left, it's the bar room side of the kitchen. So, when you walk into our restaurant, the first thing you see is the bar room, which is the neighborhood restaurant. Um it's where I would go up nine times out of
10. Um so, that entire team on that side is working on the bar room, which is its own menu, its own staff. And then as you come towards this side of the kitchen, we're cooking for the dining room, we're cooking for the kitchen table and anybody else who wants to walk in and have something to eat. Over here is the garde manger. Garde manger is the cold side of the kitchen. So, we consider anybody that works garde manger to not have to cook during service. They may have cooked prior to the service beginning, but all their mise en place is done and either room temperature or cold. Over here on the right side is where the first couple bites come from. These are venison tartar tartlets. This is the galette with celery. This is served over ice.
And over here, Isaac's helping plate the lobster salad, which is a little composition with shiso, radish, um and mandarin orange. Uh and that gets a an anglaise on the plate before it walks out to the guest. There's no shelves. There's nothing that's really like uh restricts your vision, which is great so cuz you can stand anywhere in this kitchen and see where, you know, most help is required. And typically, it means where the most people are. So, right now, a couple of chefs from the bar room side are over here helping Chef Nick and Chef Michelle. Two more amuse. Wait. That's four duck and two Rizzo. Wait. So, nobody in this kitchen except for the sous chefs on the pass, both for the bar room and the modern dining room,
have tickets. A lot of kitchens, even at, you know, this level, they have their own printers, but we really believe the less they have to deal with outside of the cooking, the better is that they can focus on the food. All the notes we make on the ticket shows the timing of when the food is fired. And what that means is that there's a team out in the dining room that are in control of their section and their tables and they let us know when they want us to start preparing each course. So, all the numbers you see on the right indicate the time on the minute of when that course was fired. And so, if this is 27, right now, it's 34.
We are um you know, Wait. minutes away from getting this rice, which is actually right behind us. So, seven minutes is a window that we want to stay in. We don't really want to go above 10. And there's a really small window where the food is acceptable to send to the guest, which is uh right about now. Pick up two turbo. Wait. Behind that, let's get ready on three turbo and one rap. Wait. We're finishing two lobster. Wait. Behind two lobster, we're going to go right into six more. Wait. Michelle, pull the plates, please. Wait. Pull the plate. That way you know we have to do it, right? It's your way of saying I have six lobster to do after these two.
If we don't pull the plate immediately, we're going to forget. Okay? So, there's rarely a moment where a chef will say "Hey, Chef, remind me what I'm supposed to do again?" Ideally, everybody's listening and everybody's paying attention and retaining information. So, a way that we can kind of like negate falling behind or negate forgetting what we have to do is we pull a plate and put it on our pass and that shows us that, hey, you know, if this plate's out and it's spread and it's wiped, probably in the next four minutes, I'm I'm putting food on it. That's that way we don't forget that, you know, we have to plate 2x6 lobster. These are extra.
Brian. So, right now, we're picking up one of the mid courses in our PDR. It's a private dining room. Roasted lobster, maitake mushrooms, and an emulsion made with uh pimenton, which is kind of like a smoked uh paprika aioli. The organization here is assembly line style. One person does one job. All the food is cooked in advance before it's the course is fired. Everything is hot, everything is seasoned, everything is delicious, and we're going to do our best to get it on every single plate as fast as possible.
Same orientation. Tonight, we're plating for 40 guests a tasting menu of eight courses, nine courses. Difference here is that everybody's eating the same time. So, there's no way we can pick up 40 of anything off this side of the kitchen because there's just not enough space or not enough people um to put it that much food and serve it at one time. So, we have our own team dedicated just for the PDR. We have our own sous chefs, our own chefs de partie, our own maitre d's, our own food runners, our own managers over there. The event space can be up to 64 people at one time seated. Once we start, we can't delay for the next table or the third table or fourth table. It has to start. And once we start, it doesn't stop. We
just go until it's done and hopefully by two, two and a half minutes, it's all out of the kitchen. This is Chef Brendan Durst. He's uh he's in charge of what we call of the PDR. This guy runs this mini kitchen back here, which does as much revenue as a small restaurant in the West Village. Push, push, push, push, push. Isaac, go faster. Rice ready? When we say push, it means uh go a little faster than you were before. Rice, please. Ready?
Well, there's a saying in this kitchen, uh if you find yourself falling behind, just go faster. So, this is our signature dish. This is called uh eggs on eggs. And anybody who gets the long version of the tasting menu is going to start with this after a couple of small bites. At the bottom of the bowl is a fried egg sauce and it's broken with a dill oil. With a second egg, it's a poached egg yolk. We actually poach it eggs in a saline solution uh just so they're warmed through, not so they're like, you know, thicker or custardy. We want the yolk to spill into the sauce. But, it's really tricky because we don't want there to be too much yolk. So, we have to actually work with farmers to get really small eggs, which
drives you crazy because the farmers are like, "Why don't you want big eggs?" And we're like, "Because we want the littlest ones you have." Uh Chef, toast we go, right? We finish this dish with pickled shallots and more fresh dill for acidity and freshness. And then we're going to drop a huge spoonful of caviar right on top. Seven amuse. Wait. You notice this plate looks a little bit different. It's because this dish is a vegetarian or has an allergy or has an aversion and this allows us to notate that position one on this table should not be getting any fish.
Again, it's just another layer of security that we have to keep people safe and to give them what we want. All right, let's go. Toast, toast, toast, toast, toast. Two more amuse. Wait. It's only three P4s. She goes, "I'm so sorry. I didn't tell you, but I actually don't eat red meat." She doesn't eat red meat. On 74? 73 P4. Eamon. Pick up one pork tasting. Wait. So, a guest just uh let us know as her food was being dropped that she doesn't eat red meat and uh we had prepared her lamb, which sometimes happens. So, we're going to make a pork as fast as we possibly can now.
Tasting one slice. Wait. Go, right? Because I don't have anything ready for the guest, I'm going to rely on my team in the bar room because they have a completely different menu and then we have a beautiful Iberian pork chop. So, we're going to give her pork instead of lamb cuz she doesn't eat red meat. So, hopefully she likes the pork. Cuz otherwise we have to wait 20 minutes to cook her a new piece of meat. One slice. One slice from butter brush. One Super tight. Allegra. We can't tell the guests, "Oh, because you didn't tell us that you don't eat red meat earlier, now that your experience is going to be sacrificed." We want to make their experiences seamless as possible. So, we're lucky we can utilize our other
spaces to give us a little head start and give us like a way out of this cuz the our other guests are actually eating the food already. So, we have to kind of prepare for all those scenarios all the time. I think the mindset needs to be that everything that we do is going to, you know, is out of our control in reality. Um all we can do is kind of uh be prepared and react to situations as they come in. All right. Slice please. Tonight's fish course is turbo. Uh these come from Spain and Portugal. We cure the fish, let it dry for a full day, and then we roast it with pretty aggressive heat. Cooks for about an hour. Then we
rest it in an emulsified butter that we call beurre monté just so it doesn't dry out and allows us to almost slice the fish like sashimi. And you see a really beautiful, almost rainbow effect to the fish. Chef Grace. Here's the next two, okay? Then to finish it, it's a little bit of oil. Thank you, chef. Thank you. So, this is the turbo garnish. So, this is a little ragout of turnips, garbanzo beans, which are fresh green chickpeas. The whole thing's been glazed in olive oil and a little bit of uh pepper oil, which is the green. And then our fish goes right on top.
Just like that. Pick up three turbo and one ravioli. Wait. Pick up two caviar. Wait. We got to go this form lobster next, right? Chef Nick, I need two more now, right? Wait. We're good. For anybody that has to give direction in the kitchen, the only way we know you've heard the message is by responding. So, we've unified the response. Instead of saying we yes, chef or got you, chef or just nothing, we all say we as in we, chef for any direction that's been given to the greater group of people. We all respond because it's respectful, but just to show that we actually hear the
direction and we're going to get the job done. Chef Grace. Yes, chef. Three turbo fired. Wait. Six. 10 on the board. Wait. Followed by another 15. Wait. All right. Watch the length on the rest. It can't over rest. Okay? So, the communication goes beyond just saying order in two tasting. I'm constantly giving the chefs a sneak peek into what's coming down the road so they can be prepared. Again, not just because I'm going to start cooking turbo for a guest who just got here, but if she doesn't know it's on the board or if she's not refreshed on her quantities, then when I actually want it, it could
not exist, which is going to be a pretty big deal. Order in four tasting. Wait. Rush table, KT. Wait. I just called the kitchen table's order in. We just say KT for short. Kitchen table is the table in the corner of our kitchen. When we redesigned the kitchen in 2016, we discovered that we had this obscure little space. And so, we decided to put a table in there. We uh we like to nail the timing on the kitchen table because we can it's only table we can see. So, when they start to finish up their course, we can start to get ready on the next one. So, I love that. So, we're slicing some beef for this course. When you slice the meat, you don't put pressure on the protein, whether it's beef or duck or anything, right?
Yeah. Cuz when you press down on the meat and then release, it flexes. So, your perfect straight slice all of a sudden bows out, which is why you see that concave right there. So, you want to have minimal contact with the protein. I'm not touching it. I'm just kind of containing it so it can't go anywhere, right? I'm just holding it in place so it can't go anywhere. Now, both of our slices are even. Right? Cool. That's the trim. Thank you. Put on the tray. A brush. That's it. Give it 5 seconds right there.
Get the board wiped down and pass it up there. Nice cook. Oh, it's all good. This is Wagyu strip cooked on Japanese charcoal. We make this with a sauce uh that we make with red cabbage juice instead of like a reduced chicken stock or a reduced meat sauce, we use vegetable juice. Potatoes and radicchio tardivo that's been compressed in a pickle liquid um for a little acidity. Meat's super rich, super highly marbled, really like just belly warming and delicious. Order in four tasting. Wait. Listen up. We're all in. Wait. So, that's the last order of the night.
70 guests tonight in the restaurant, which is about uh 75% capacity. On the bar room side, we finished at about 170. And we all talk We all know about the PDR, so overall, this is a genuine generally full night in the modern kitchen. As you can see, there's people everywhere. We are tapering off of our busy service. Uh we're going to get the whole kitchen broken down, polished, and looking shiny. We're going to come back tomorrow morning and restart the whole thing.
