Latest / New Worlder / Episode #88: Nando Chang

Transcript

Episode #88: Nando Chang · New Worlder

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_02: This is the New Worlder podcast and I am one of your hosts, Nicholas Gill.
• 0:05
  SPEAKER_02: Co-host Juliana Duque will be joining shortly.
• 0:08
  SPEAKER_02: Today we are speaking with Nando Chang.
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_02: Born in Chiclayo, Peru, he is the chef of Itamai AO, a Nikkei restaurant in Miami, Florida.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_02: Itamai AO is the reincarnation of Itamai.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_02: The beloved Nikkei restaurant began as a family food hall stall in
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_02: and later restaurant in Miami's design district.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_02: Nando's sister,
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_02: Valerie Chang,
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_02: who I interviewed on this podcast earlier,
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_02: opened Matty's,
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_02: a Peruvian restaurant in midtown Miami in 2023,
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_02: and it has gone on to be nominated for pretty much every major media award for U.S.
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_02: restaurants since then.
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_02: The plan from the beginning,
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_02: however,
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_02: was to install a more intimate version of Itamai in an adjacent space.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_02: The new Itamai, now called Itamai AO, as I mentioned, is tasting menu only.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_02: Nando talks about why he won't call it an omakase.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_02: He talks about his thoughts on fish butchery and how he got into fish aging,
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_02: but also how he understands its limitations.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_02: We also discuss Nando's rap career,
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_02: which included an album called Ceviche,
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_02: with a track titled Sushi Chef,
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_02: and how rap is still very much a part of his life.
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_02: He talks about how he was influenced by other chefs cooking Nikkei food,
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_02: such as Llama N and Llama San's Eric Ramirez in New York,
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_02: and about getting to know
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_02: Maito's Mitsuharu Sumura in Lima and how it helped him confirm many of his views
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_02: about Nikkei food and where it is going.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_02: I've probably said this before but there's often this idea of Nikkei food when it
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_02: gets exported abroad that it's just ceviche and sushi on a menu together.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_02: That's a very limited view of this style of cooking,
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_02: which to me is much more about freedom than limitations.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_02: The Chang family,
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_02: who are Chinese-Peruvian by the way,
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_02: have understood this very well since they started opening restaurants in Miami.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_02: Nando talks a lot about not just doing what everyone else is doing,
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_02: but doing things that make sense to him.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_02: I think it's a good example to follow for other Peruvian chefs,
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_02: or any chef trying to find their voice in the kitchen.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_02: If you haven't subscribed to my newsletter,
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_02: just go to newworlder.com or search for New Worlder on Substack.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_02: It's free to subscribe,
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_02: though paid subscribers get access to all of the content,
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_02: including guides,
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_02: ecosystem reports,
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_02: essays,
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_02: recipes,
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_02: and the full archives.
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_02: Again, that's newworlder.com.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_02: Also, we now have a New Worlder YouTube channel.
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_02: This full episode will be there, in video.
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_02: You'll even get to see a glimpse of Nando's fish aging cabinets towards the end.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_02: Just go to youtube.com slash newworlder.
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_02: We'll also be posting video clips of older episodes there.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_02: Enjoy the show.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_02: What's up, Nando?
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_01: What's up, Nick?
• 3:47
  SPEAKER_01: How are you, Juliana?
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_01: Hi, Nando.
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you guys for having me on today.
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, it's good to talk to you.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_02: I've been meaning to have you on forever, and it's just like, for some reason, I forget.
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, you got Val.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_01: People get Val, people are like, oh, okay.
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_01: We got the coolest.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_02: She was like one of the first guests, I think, or pretty early on.
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_00: That's a great interview.
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, thank you.
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you, Juliana.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_02: So yeah, glad you're here.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_02: You just got married, right?
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_01: That's what I'm saying.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_01: I was like, isn't that crazy?
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_01: You know,
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_01: I'm out there trying to smile,
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_01: but not smile too much because I don't want people to see this gap in my mouth.
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, that sucks.
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_02: Off camera,
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_02: you were mentioning you had a little issue with a...
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_02: We'll leave it off record,
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_02: I think,
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_02: because it's...
• 4:35
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah,
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_01: I think so.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_01: It's better for now.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_01: What I can't tell you without naming anything is that surprisingly so,
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_01: this is from a,
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_01: what do you call it?
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_01: A smash burger concept where the patties are like,
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_01: I wanna say like a quarter of an inch thin and the screw that I've been into is
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_01: clearly like half,
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_01: three quarters of an inch.
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_01: So it's like, at what point does your cook not know, like, dude, you're not smashing anything.
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_02: No, like, yeah.
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_02: Like, you're smashing it.
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_02: Like, the screw, you have to, like, it has to make a sound hitting the, like, the griddle.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_01: We went over through this whole thing, and I was like, Chef, how do you guys miss this?
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_00: Like, how is that possible?
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_01: And then they were able to track...
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_01: the machine that it came out of.
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_01: But look,
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_01: this is,
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_01: it's,
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_01: it's a weird point,
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_01: but it's,
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_01: we're in hospitality,
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_01: these things happen.
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_01: And it's like, apparently they tracked it to the onion cutter.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_01: So basically by the prep station,
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_01: they have a guy who's just,
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_01: because they do so many caramelized onions,
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_01: who's just peeling onions,
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_01: putting them in some sort of cutter,
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_01: pushing them down,
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_01: and then they fall into a bucket.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_01: and that friction i mean you you must think this machine is just going and going
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_01: all day and you know friction will un you know unscrew something and it fell onto
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_01: the bucket from the bucket the prep guy goes
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_01: to the,
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_01: to the,
• 6:06
  SPEAKER_01: to the line cooks like here,
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_01: or he takes it to the prep of the prep goes,
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_01: go to the walk-in and refills his station.
• 6:14
  SPEAKER_01: And that's it.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_01: That's it.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_01: And so there's many hands at play here.
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_01: It's a wonderful weird accident,
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_02: I guess,
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_02: but yeah,
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_02: that sucks that you bit into a screw when eating a hamburger and right before a wedding.
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_02: So yeah, that's, that's unlucky and it sucks.
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_01: No, but it's okay.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_01: I had all my pictures taken from the left side.
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, there you go.
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_02: But you can't, I mean, you can't tell right now.
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_02: At least it wasn't like a front tooth or something.
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_00: No, not at all.
• 6:45
  SPEAKER_00: So specific instructions to the photographer?
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_00: Did you have to address that?
• 6:49
  SPEAKER_01: I definitely had a couple of earlier chats with the people taking photographs.
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_01: Shout out to Clarence.
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_02: All right, man.
• 6:59
  SPEAKER_02: One thing I want to talk about is I knew you had a rap career.
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_02: But I never actually heard any of it.
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_02: And like a few weeks ago on Instagram,
• 7:11
  SPEAKER_02: I was making like a reel or something,
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_02: and one of your songs came up.
• 7:15
  SPEAKER_02: Like it had nothing to do with anything I was making a reel about.
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_02: It was like in South Africa or something.
• 7:23
  SPEAKER_02: But your song came up as a recommendation, and it was Sushi Chef.
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_02: So –
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_02: Like, I didn't realize it was your some of your rapping was kind of about food.
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I'm like, I wanted to be Action Bronson so bad when I was younger.
• 7:45
  SPEAKER_02: All right.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_02: So like, most of the tracks have like some kind of like food reference.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 7:53
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 7:53
  SPEAKER_01: I mean,
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_01: um,
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_01: some of them,
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_01: not,
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_01: not,
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_01: not,
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_01: not as much as,
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_01: action,
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_01: but I definitely,
• 8:01
  SPEAKER_01: I always thought that rapping,
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_01: it's so funny.
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_01: So,
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_01: The record label that I signed on to,
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_01: after the recording of the album was done,
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_01: and here comes the logistics about marketing and launching this record,
• 8:19
  SPEAKER_01: everything that I had in my mind through the recording process,
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_01: they were against.
• 8:23
  SPEAKER_01: They were like, no, we don't want to see you in the kitchen.
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_01: We think you should have the typical cars, or maybe you're in some sort of...
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_01: you have the girls and you have like you know and I was like this that would have
• 8:38
  SPEAKER_01: nothing to do with the content of my life of the music so I wouldn't understand it
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_01: but
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_01: The more they suggested it to me,
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_01: the more I would want to make music about specific things that they were telling me
• 8:55
  SPEAKER_01: not to mention.
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_01: And that's how my music came about.
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_01: It was really more therapeutic than anything.
• 9:09
  SPEAKER_01: I didn't really like to speak about it, never liked to bother my friends on social media about it.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I was one of those people that always felt bad or something.
• 9:20
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know why.
• 9:20
  SPEAKER_01: That would be me.
• 9:21
  SPEAKER_01: But I felt like,
• 9:24
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 9:24
  SPEAKER_01: I did music for myself and those who liked kind of what I had been doing for a
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_01: while already.
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_01: But I wasn't trying to...
• 9:34
  SPEAKER_01: I wasn't trying to accept the fact that if you're trying to live off of this industry,
• 9:39
  SPEAKER_01: the music industry,
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_01: you have to apply yourself also.
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_01: The way I would apply myself in a kitchen by showing up.
• 9:47
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 9:49
  SPEAKER_01: I didn't do any of those prerequisites.
• 9:53
  SPEAKER_02: It's weird that you can't just like make the art.
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_02: You have to like.
• 9:59
  SPEAKER_02: there's nothing more uncomfortable to me than talking about myself and like talking
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_02: about like things I've created.
• 10:07
  SPEAKER_02: You know what I mean?
• 10:07
  SPEAKER_02: Like some things I've written or like a book or something.
• 10:10
  SPEAKER_02: It's,
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_02: it's weird to me,
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_02: but I think it's like we're in a world now where you like have to,
• 10:16
  SPEAKER_02: like if you want to,
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_02: very few people can like manage to just let the world take it and
• 10:26
  SPEAKER_02: I don't know, and run with it and build a career, career that way.
• 10:29
  SPEAKER_02: It's like you,
• 10:30
  SPEAKER_02: you have to just like constantly market yourself and it's,
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_02: it's soul killing for it,
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_02: you know,
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_02: but it's,
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_02: it's the world we live in.
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_02: And I, I read something the other day about like younger generations.
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_02: It's just like comes natural, you know, talking on social media about yourself and, and,
• 10:48
  SPEAKER_01: promoting well they've been streaming they're like teenagers I remember my younger
• 10:53
  SPEAKER_01: brother who's now 21 and I remember Junior when he was seven eight years old he
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_01: must have already been in an Xbox streaming him games and like with people from
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_01: across the world so yeah I could see it's so natural to them yeah it's fucking
• 11:11
  SPEAKER_02: weird man like to me to talk about myself on social media to random people it's
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_02: It's uncomfortable.
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_01: And you know, Nick, I get comments often about my lack of presence there.
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_01: And I always remind people like, I'm not absent.
• 11:31
  SPEAKER_01: I don't like posting and I don't like, I just don't like it.
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_01: It doesn't mean that I don't see what you guys are doing and I'm not supporting it,
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_01: that I don't,
• 11:40
  SPEAKER_01: it just,
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not,
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_01: I'm no longer driven.
• 11:44
  SPEAKER_01: Cause I was, I remember when I first got into social media and I thought,
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_01: Like this is a competition.
• 11:51
  SPEAKER_01: This is a competition about food and everything that was who plates the nicest or
• 11:56
  SPEAKER_01: who's getting the best product.
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_01: And in a way, I realized that was all wrong.
• 12:03
  SPEAKER_01: It was all wrong.
• 12:04
  SPEAKER_01: That all led me to that's all ego talk and unnecessary for me because I wanted to.
• 12:11
  SPEAKER_01: to strip the restaurant away from all that.
• 12:14
  SPEAKER_01: This should be about what we do every day,
• 12:17
  SPEAKER_01: whether the world sees it or not,
• 12:18
  SPEAKER_01: the guests that are coming here know it and they see it and they should feel it
• 12:24
  SPEAKER_01: more than see it on Instagram.
• 12:27
  SPEAKER_01: But it's a challenge, I'll tell you, because it's...
• 12:29
  SPEAKER_01: There's many ways to skin a cat,
• 12:31
  SPEAKER_01: and I don't mean to say any of this to talk down on anybody who's taking that
• 12:37
  SPEAKER_01: approach to filling up their restaurant,
• 12:40
  SPEAKER_01: right?
• 12:40
  SPEAKER_01: Because at the end of the day, if your restaurant seats are not full, you're going to struggle.
• 12:47
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, no, I don't blame anyone either, and it's just the way it is sometimes.
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_02: And, like, I mean...
• 12:54
  SPEAKER_02: as journalists, if we don't like post on social media, nobody fucking reads anything anymore.
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_02: You know, like nobody's like logging in.
• 13:01
  SPEAKER_02: Like thankfully I have a newsletter now where it goes direct to people's inboxes.
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_02: And I think, you know, thankfully people read it that way.
• 13:08
  SPEAKER_02: But if you just rely on people to randomly log in or,
• 13:14
  SPEAKER_02: you know,
• 13:14
  SPEAKER_02: just go to a website to check daily,
• 13:17
  SPEAKER_02: if anything's been written,
• 13:19
  SPEAKER_02: it's like,
• 13:19
  SPEAKER_02: they don't,
• 13:20
  SPEAKER_02: they don't care.
• 13:20
  SPEAKER_02: It's just whatever like appears in front of them.
• 13:23
  SPEAKER_02: but yeah, it's weird.
• 13:25
  SPEAKER_02: It's this weird world.
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_01: But it was on my music career, just to take it back to that point, that's kind of how it was.
• 13:33
  SPEAKER_01: It was, it was an outlet for me to, to, to speak on things that I was going through.
• 13:39
  SPEAKER_01: And when music became,
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_01: I mean,
• 13:41
  SPEAKER_01: when food became that thing in my life that I really cared about the most,
• 13:45
  SPEAKER_01: then it just naturally reflected on the music that I was recording,
• 13:50
  SPEAKER_01: you know?
• 13:51
  SPEAKER_01: Um,
• 13:52
  SPEAKER_01: So Sushi Chef was kind of that, I guess, subject that I really wanted to kind of,
• 14:05
  SPEAKER_01: build a character for myself in that universe that was the music.
• 14:09
  SPEAKER_01: And I was like,
• 14:10
  SPEAKER_01: well,
• 14:10
  SPEAKER_01: if I am going to be a character,
• 14:12
  SPEAKER_01: I'd rather...
• 14:13
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah,
• 14:14
  SPEAKER_01: because seeing like Maddie Matheson and Bronson,
• 14:16
  SPEAKER_01: who are people who I really looked up to,
• 14:20
  SPEAKER_01: that were doing kind of the stuff that I dreamt of,
• 14:22
  SPEAKER_01: like,
• 14:22
  SPEAKER_01: oh,
• 14:23
  SPEAKER_01: I really want to do this.
• 14:24
  SPEAKER_01: This is cool.
• 14:25
  SPEAKER_01: These guys live the best lives ever, you know?
• 14:29
  SPEAKER_01: I thought...
• 14:31
  SPEAKER_01: sushi chef would have been was a good representation of myself but it gave me like
• 14:37
  SPEAKER_01: like an image that didn't um step on other people's images and that was really
• 14:42
  SPEAKER_01: important because like growing up on like 90s east coast rap music it was like
• 14:48
  SPEAKER_01: writing your own bars or raps was just as important as anything else just the fact
• 14:53
  SPEAKER_01: that you could
• 14:54
  SPEAKER_01: feel proud that you are aware of what others do so you don't take from them was
• 14:59
  SPEAKER_01: something that I,
• 15:01
  SPEAKER_01: you know.
• 15:01
  SPEAKER_01: So that's how that came about.
• 15:03
  SPEAKER_01: And my dad, out of all people, had a blast while I was recording this song.
• 15:08
  SPEAKER_01: And he would play it for every single person that...
• 15:11
  SPEAKER_01: we came across and, you know, it was pretty good.
• 15:15
  SPEAKER_02: It's a very particular, like you talk about like ceviche in that song too, right?
• 15:19
  SPEAKER_02: Like, yeah.
• 15:20
  SPEAKER_01: So it's like, I think the album was called ceviche.
• 15:24
  SPEAKER_01: It's like a, it was a five song EP.
• 15:28
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 15:28
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 15:29
  SPEAKER_02: No, I like, I listened to it on Spotify.
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_02: No, it's really good.
• 15:33
  SPEAKER_02: I'm like, I liked it.
• 15:36
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you.
• 15:37
  SPEAKER_02: Do you still rap at all?
• 15:41
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 15:42
  SPEAKER_01: Amazingly so.
• 15:43
  SPEAKER_01: I've not recorded in a very long time, but do I rap?
• 15:48
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, every day.
• 15:49
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, yeah?
• 15:49
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I'm on expo sometimes, and I'm rapping inside of my head.
• 15:52
  SPEAKER_01: Whether it's something that's happening in front of me or just making a joke to myself,
• 15:59
  SPEAKER_01: I've never been able to pull that out of my brain.
• 16:02
  SPEAKER_01: I've always remained some sort of MC at heart.
• 16:05
  SPEAKER_02: Do you want to spit something right now?
• 16:07
  SPEAKER_03: Go on.
• 16:08
  SPEAKER_01: No.
• 16:10
  SPEAKER_01: Come on.
• 16:11
  SPEAKER_02: Just about like what we're doing right now.
• 16:14
  SPEAKER_01: No, no, no.
• 16:15
  SPEAKER_01: But maybe I'll leave you guys a surprise for the one or two minutes that we have to
• 16:20
  SPEAKER_01: wait before we leave the session.
• 16:22
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, okay.
• 16:24
  SPEAKER_01: All right.
• 16:25
  SPEAKER_00: You know, but I still think this, even with social media and that pressure,
• 16:32
  SPEAKER_00: you made this distinction between seeing what you're eating or food in general and
• 16:40
  SPEAKER_00: what you feel and I still think it's a very valid distinction and I wish more
• 16:45
  SPEAKER_00: people use social media and the visual side of it to get just through a door to get
• 16:52
  SPEAKER_00: there to feel the food because
• 16:55
  SPEAKER_00: you see more and more people we know this just like taking pictures and you know
• 17:00
  SPEAKER_00: and i wonder how much they are actually feeling and and i think it's uh very nice
• 17:07
  SPEAKER_00: i'm sure this is something you approach in your in the work you do and i just
• 17:12
  SPEAKER_00: wanted to highlight that like that distinction between seeing and feeling food oh
• 17:17
  SPEAKER_00: thank you given that there is so much focus on the visual part right
• 17:22
  SPEAKER_01: No, I completely agree.
• 17:25
  SPEAKER_01: I just, I think, candidly, I'm just not, I just couldn't handle that part.
• 17:32
  SPEAKER_01: Even to create the distinction is one thing.
• 17:35
  SPEAKER_01: The thing about social media that I don't do well with is how consistent you have to be at it.
• 17:40
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm just not very good at that.
• 17:43
  SPEAKER_01: I...
• 17:47
  SPEAKER_01: I am a workaholic by my trade is really what I love to do.
• 17:52
  SPEAKER_01: And I will be here at four o'clock in the morning and I'll leave at two o'clock in the morning.
• 17:58
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm not tired.
• 18:00
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not bothered.
• 18:02
  SPEAKER_01: But during those 18 hours or 20, 22 hours that I can be up, I am not concerned with social media.
• 18:11
  SPEAKER_01: And then I find out at the end of the day that because I didn't do something on it,
• 18:17
  SPEAKER_01: then I lost or you lose your momentum,
• 18:21
  SPEAKER_01: as my dad always likes to say.
• 18:23
  SPEAKER_01: And that's the part that I just realized a long time ago.
• 18:27
  SPEAKER_01: Because I cannot devote as much time to it,
• 18:32
  SPEAKER_01: What ends up happening is a lot of what I'm seeing,
• 18:34
  SPEAKER_01: even with my peers,
• 18:36
  SPEAKER_01: you eventually have somebody who handles your social media for you,
• 18:42
  SPEAKER_01: or two,
• 18:43
  SPEAKER_01: you dive in fully.
• 18:47
  SPEAKER_01: And that, I think it's a very dangerous place for me to want to explore because today,
• 18:57
  SPEAKER_01: No, I'm super in love with what I do on a day-to-day basis.
• 19:01
  SPEAKER_01: And I don't know how much longer this is going to last for me.
• 19:04
  SPEAKER_01: So I try to keep it very close to my chest.
• 19:08
  SPEAKER_01: I think I'm just trying to be honest.
• 19:12
  SPEAKER_01: It's just not one thing that I could handle very well.
• 19:15
  SPEAKER_01: It's not that I don't like it.
• 19:16
  SPEAKER_01: It's not that I don't like seeing my friends and my family, my peers.
• 19:19
  SPEAKER_01: I love it.
• 19:20
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I love even seeing something there that could inspire you.
• 19:24
  SPEAKER_01: But I also think anybody who's ever...
• 19:29
  SPEAKER_01: created anything of this sort of when you are looking at when you're constantly
• 19:36
  SPEAKER_01: looking at other people's stuff which social media can just be giving you
• 19:41
  SPEAKER_01: everybody's content then I it might mess with my subconsciousness and the way I
• 19:46
  SPEAKER_01: create things or how I like to think of something and that part
• 19:52
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 19:52
  SPEAKER_01: I'm just like,
• 19:53
  SPEAKER_01: if I've been able to recognize that that's a flaw in my brain,
• 19:56
  SPEAKER_01: then I'd rather,
• 19:57
  SPEAKER_01: yeah,
• 19:58
  SPEAKER_01: I gotta,
• 19:58
  SPEAKER_01: I have to know exactly the nutrients to give it.
• 20:02
  SPEAKER_01: Otherwise I'm feeding it so much from everybody that,
• 20:07
  SPEAKER_01: uh,
• 20:07
  SPEAKER_01: I could make a mistake that I don't want to,
• 20:09
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 20:09
  SPEAKER_01: and,
• 20:10
  SPEAKER_01: and,
• 20:10
  SPEAKER_01: and it could be as simple as not trusting your gut.
• 20:13
  SPEAKER_01: And when you get to making a decision for a dish,
• 20:15
  SPEAKER_01: because now you're seeing a trend and this trend is now in your head and now you're like,
• 20:19
  SPEAKER_01: Oh,
• 20:20
  SPEAKER_01: I should,
• 20:20
  SPEAKER_01: you know, actually you do this.
• 20:22
  SPEAKER_01: And six months ago,
• 20:24
  SPEAKER_01: maybe you would have decided something different only because you were maybe a
• 20:30
  SPEAKER_01: little more in tune with your own ideas instead of everything that's been shot at you.
• 20:36
  SPEAKER_01: And that's my whole thing.
• 20:39
  SPEAKER_01: I think some of us are able to like use it very well and you can deal with it.
• 20:44
  SPEAKER_01: I can't, you know, so.
• 20:50
  SPEAKER_02: So Itamai officially reopened when?
• 20:53
  SPEAKER_01: Itamai officially reopened.
• 20:59
  SPEAKER_01: I want to say this is our fourth week.
• 21:02
  SPEAKER_01: So three Thursdays ago.
• 21:05
  SPEAKER_01: I want to say May 18th.
• 21:07
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 21:08
  SPEAKER_02: That sounds about right.
• 21:10
  SPEAKER_01: May 16th.
• 21:11
  SPEAKER_02: May 16th.
• 21:12
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 21:12
  SPEAKER_02: So the new Itamai, which is located next to Mati's,
• 21:17
  SPEAKER_02: It's like, do you enter through Mati's or is there another?
• 21:20
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 21:21
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 21:21
  SPEAKER_01: So you enter through Mati's like you're going to a,
• 21:24
  SPEAKER_01: to an omakase,
• 21:26
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 21:26
  SPEAKER_01: through,
• 21:27
  SPEAKER_01: we do have a,
• 21:28
  SPEAKER_01: a door,
• 21:29
  SPEAKER_01: but it's an exit door only.
• 21:30
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 21:31
  SPEAKER_02: All right.
• 21:33
  SPEAKER_02: So it's a very different experience than the original, original Itamai.
• 21:40
  SPEAKER_02: So it's, it's much more intimate and it's only omakase, right?
• 21:47
  SPEAKER_01: It's a tasting menu.
• 21:51
  SPEAKER_01: It's really not an omakase.
• 21:52
  SPEAKER_01: But, you know, I think I like to make that differentiation only because I understand omakases very well.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_01: And we did not really think of many omakases to come up with this menu.
• 22:08
  SPEAKER_01: We really looked at a lot of tasting menus and said, okay, this is where we want to be at.
• 22:15
  SPEAKER_02: Regardless, it's still a very different format than the original.
• 22:22
  SPEAKER_02: Like, why did you decide to go tasting menu?
• 22:25
  SPEAKER_02: Like in this case, instead of like how it used to be.
• 22:32
  SPEAKER_01: Because I think I've had it.
• 22:35
  SPEAKER_01: Look, Nick, I have in 2000.
• 22:42
  SPEAKER_01: 17, we started doing pop-ups, Eric Saltzman and myself, who are two of the five partners here at Itamai.
• 22:49
  SPEAKER_01: We actually, I met David Morales around the same time, same time, who's our other partner.
• 22:55
  SPEAKER_01: And then we did a Peruvian Japanese tasting menu that was like six courses.
• 23:03
  SPEAKER_01: And that's what we shopped around as a concept.
• 23:07
  SPEAKER_01: In 2017,
• 23:10
  SPEAKER_01: 18,
• 23:10
  SPEAKER_01: my dad was like,
• 23:13
  SPEAKER_01: well,
• 23:13
  SPEAKER_01: if you're not going to decide on any of these locations,
• 23:16
  SPEAKER_01: I'm going to enter this food hall and I'm going to open Itamai.
• 23:20
  SPEAKER_01: Itamai in the food hall was fast casual,
• 23:26
  SPEAKER_01: as you know,
• 23:27
  SPEAKER_01: rolls,
• 23:28
  SPEAKER_01: bowls,
• 23:30
  SPEAKER_01: and some cold apps like your cani salad,
• 23:33
  SPEAKER_01: tuna tataki,
• 23:34
  SPEAKER_01: and then I think we had some like
• 23:40
  SPEAKER_01: maybe one tiarito, one ceviche.
• 23:43
  SPEAKER_01: Well, it was always fish and rice, really, always.
• 23:49
  SPEAKER_01: Whether it was a tasty menu in its,
• 23:54
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 23:54
  SPEAKER_01: inception,
• 23:55
  SPEAKER_01: and then going into like first phase,
• 23:56
  SPEAKER_01: it'll be a fast casual.
• 23:58
  SPEAKER_01: I think we had 2018, 2019,
• 24:07
  SPEAKER_01: which were great years in a food hall, but we capped out.
• 24:10
  SPEAKER_01: We capped out at everything we had wanted was at our reach.
• 24:20
  SPEAKER_01: Meaning when it came to food halls and food stalls,
• 24:26
  SPEAKER_01: our concept was hitting on everything that we wanted to do well,
• 24:31
  SPEAKER_01: we were doing.
• 24:32
  SPEAKER_01: We standardized...
• 24:35
  SPEAKER_01: not only flavors,
• 24:37
  SPEAKER_01: but standardized really just recipes that worked for the,
• 24:41
  SPEAKER_01: for the,
• 24:42
  SPEAKER_01: for the,
• 24:43
  SPEAKER_01: for the price average that we needed to hit,
• 24:45
  SPEAKER_01: which was,
• 24:46
  SPEAKER_01: I believe at that point,
• 24:47
  SPEAKER_01: 16,
• 24:47
  SPEAKER_01: $17 per item,
• 24:50
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 24:53
  SPEAKER_01: no more than $18 per roll,
• 24:54
  SPEAKER_01: $18 per ceviche.
• 24:56
  SPEAKER_01: This was, so this was like us not really cooking nothing,
• 25:03
  SPEAKER_01: extravagant, but just learning how to be business owners.
• 25:06
  SPEAKER_01: And my dad had given us like real tasks of like,
• 25:08
  SPEAKER_01: Hey,
• 25:09
  SPEAKER_01: if you guys want to open this restaurant,
• 25:11
  SPEAKER_01: you guys keep talking about here's your base.
• 25:13
  SPEAKER_01: Now let's sell these at this rate.
• 25:16
  SPEAKER_01: Now I, uh, and then obviously
• 25:21
  SPEAKER_01: it's a collaboration between all of us making these decisions,
• 25:24
  SPEAKER_01: but that's really what,
• 25:25
  SPEAKER_01: how we kept our goals in mind during those first two years.
• 25:29
  SPEAKER_01: Then the pandemic happens.
• 25:32
  SPEAKER_01: My dad had reopened B-side and I was like,
• 25:35
  SPEAKER_01: Hey,
• 25:36
  SPEAKER_01: I really want to open Itamai downstairs,
• 25:38
  SPEAKER_01: but a different version,
• 25:39
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 25:40
  SPEAKER_01: I saw it as like an opportunity.
• 25:42
  SPEAKER_01: So at this point,
• 25:47
  SPEAKER_01: I went to Itamae and really I started operating by myself,
• 25:51
  SPEAKER_01: meaning for the first time I stopped cooking with Val and I stopped cooking with my dad.
• 25:56
  SPEAKER_01: And I had really taken the reins of Itamae, which what we consider 2.0, which was downstairs.
• 26:04
  SPEAKER_01: 2.0 is my favorite version of Itamae because I believe Itamae needs an a la carte
• 26:10
  SPEAKER_01: menu the way we had an a la carte menu because it's very unique.
• 26:16
  SPEAKER_01: And it worked really well for the kind of rent that we were paying in Design District.
• 26:24
  SPEAKER_01: But Design District would not let their foot off my neck with the fact that they
• 26:29
  SPEAKER_01: wanted us to operate from 11.45 in the morning till they were like,
• 26:37
  SPEAKER_01: we don't care if you open from 12 to 8.
• 26:39
  SPEAKER_01: That's the times the mall has to open.
• 26:41
  SPEAKER_01: You're required to open.
• 26:42
  SPEAKER_01: If you don't open these hours, you're fine.
• 26:46
  SPEAKER_00: You mean the local administration?
• 26:49
  SPEAKER_00: Local administration was demanding that from you or who?
• 26:53
  SPEAKER_01: Well, it was my landlord.
• 26:57
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, the design district.
• 27:00
  SPEAKER_01: So the landlord,
• 27:03
  SPEAKER_01: as much as we wanted to change is what I was saying for version one to 2.0,
• 27:08
  SPEAKER_01: our requirements were such that even what we really wanted to be,
• 27:12
  SPEAKER_01: we couldn't be.
• 27:13
  SPEAKER_01: So we've always made these changes
• 27:16
  SPEAKER_01: with like gradually, I'm saying.
• 27:19
  SPEAKER_01: At 2.0, with the great a la carte menu that we had, we had a bar that took care of six guests inside.
• 27:27
  SPEAKER_01: At some point in year three, we started doing a tasting menu just for the six seats inside.
• 27:34
  SPEAKER_01: It was not printed.
• 27:36
  SPEAKER_01: Both beverage and dinner menu were not printed.
• 27:39
  SPEAKER_01: It was literally you would come in, and if you asked about it, we would give it to you.
• 27:44
  SPEAKER_01: If you didn't ask about it, we'd say you get the regular –
• 27:49
  SPEAKER_01: a la carte menu.
• 27:51
  SPEAKER_01: This menu,
• 27:53
  SPEAKER_01: uh,
• 27:54
  SPEAKER_01: 2.0 was different than in 1.0 where we went to a more nigiri,
• 27:59
  SPEAKER_01: which by then I really felt like a couple of years of training and doing nigiri.
• 28:03
  SPEAKER_01: I was at a place in my life where I would say,
• 28:05
  SPEAKER_01: okay,
• 28:05
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 28:06
  SPEAKER_01: uh,
• 28:06
  SPEAKER_01: I've never had a sushi master,
• 28:08
  SPEAKER_01: but I feel comfortable enough now where I know enough and I've studied this enough where,
• 28:12
  SPEAKER_01: uh,
• 28:13
  SPEAKER_01: I'm going to make this change.
• 28:14
  SPEAKER_01: We're going to go from giving you eight pieces of a roll to one piece for probably
• 28:19
  SPEAKER_01: half the price of the roll.
• 28:21
  SPEAKER_01: So that was a big thing for me.
• 28:23
  SPEAKER_01: You know, that's a big challenge for you to tell somebody who's been coming to eat at your restaurant.
• 28:27
  SPEAKER_01: Hey, I used to have a cevichado roll, which eight pieces of a roll with sauce and extra this.
• 28:32
  SPEAKER_01: Now you for 18 bucks.
• 28:33
  SPEAKER_01: Now you get one piece of quimeday.
• 28:37
  SPEAKER_01: But the beauty of sushi is that,
• 28:39
  SPEAKER_01: that you may bite into one piece of fish that makes you go,
• 28:43
  SPEAKER_01: oh,
• 28:43
  SPEAKER_01: my God,
• 28:44
  SPEAKER_01: that was so much worth than eating all this sauce and all these other things that
• 28:49
  SPEAKER_01: we did,
• 28:51
  SPEAKER_01: which was also great.
• 28:52
  SPEAKER_01: But that was a challenge, you know.
• 28:54
  SPEAKER_01: And in the same vein, the challenge with 3.0 was the same, was now we don't have this landlord who's
• 29:04
  SPEAKER_01: basically demanding our hours of operation,
• 29:07
  SPEAKER_01: which means we have the morning time to prepare ourselves for dinner,
• 29:11
  SPEAKER_01: which is,
• 29:11
  SPEAKER_01: I was looking forward to this for so long,
• 29:14
  SPEAKER_01: for so long.
• 29:17
  SPEAKER_01: Because for so many years, my life was hectic between 10 a.m.
• 29:21
  SPEAKER_01: and like noon.
• 29:23
  SPEAKER_01: Because as much as...
• 29:26
  SPEAKER_01: my fish purveyors are nice to me and they really try to send me fish as early as possible.
• 29:32
  SPEAKER_01: It's impossible.
• 29:33
  SPEAKER_01: Miami is a very small town with very small roads.
• 29:36
  SPEAKER_01: And all of a sudden in season,
• 29:38
  SPEAKER_01: your fish is coming in at 10 30,
• 29:39
  SPEAKER_01: 11 through your doors and you have to open by noon,
• 29:43
  SPEAKER_01: not just because you're open outside because your counter is open because your
• 29:47
  SPEAKER_01: counter is an open kitchen.
• 29:49
  SPEAKER_01: People are watching you.
• 29:50
  SPEAKER_01: And so I think what happened was during those two and a half years downstairs, uh,
• 29:59
  SPEAKER_01: We didn't know,
• 30:00
  SPEAKER_01: but what we were actually doing was we were preparing ourselves to be in an open
• 30:05
  SPEAKER_01: kitchen where we could do a counter service.
• 30:09
  SPEAKER_01: So I think why are we doing this is because this was always meant to be this way.
• 30:17
  SPEAKER_01: Even if you look at it, like I said, the pop-up that we were doing before 1.0 was already a tasty menu.
• 30:25
  SPEAKER_01: And because...
• 30:27
  SPEAKER_01: This is the challenge.
• 30:27
  SPEAKER_01: The challenge is, look, Nick, I have not had the luxury of working for a lot of chefs.
• 30:34
  SPEAKER_01: Majority of my life I've worked for my father, and that's limited me in a lot of ways.
• 30:40
  SPEAKER_01: Once I got to this
• 30:43
  SPEAKER_01: tier of like where I know who my peers are,
• 30:47
  SPEAKER_01: when I really feel confident to what I'm cooking and I see what everybody else is
• 30:51
  SPEAKER_01: cooking around me,
• 30:52
  SPEAKER_01: I realized that a lot of my flaws are in my foundation and where a lot of people
• 30:58
  SPEAKER_01: that can start with stronger mentors and stronger restaurants have just a little
• 31:06
  SPEAKER_01: stronger foundation on the basics.
• 31:08
  SPEAKER_01: And when you have to relearn these things, it takes you a little bit longer, like it's taken me.
• 31:13
  SPEAKER_01: But what I really started leaning on the most was the fact that,
• 31:23
  SPEAKER_01: okay,
• 31:24
  SPEAKER_01: even though I've learned this way,
• 31:25
  SPEAKER_01: I'm 100% confident that I go to other Nikkei restaurants and I know that we're very unique.
• 31:32
  SPEAKER_01: I know that the way we think things through are very unique.
• 31:35
  SPEAKER_01: And last year I spent some time in Lima and I got to spend some time personally with Micha.
• 31:44
  SPEAKER_01: and man what uh i don't know it was what an amazing experience for me to be able to
• 31:51
  SPEAKER_01: ask some questions that i really wanted to ask directly uh about about nikkei food
• 31:57
  SPEAKER_01: overall and how he feels and how does he see it and and and and you know what i had
• 32:03
  SPEAKER_01: great confirmation on a lot of things that i felt already and it just felt really
• 32:08
  SPEAKER_01: empowering to say good that means
• 32:11
  SPEAKER_01: Good.
• 32:12
  SPEAKER_01: I heard what I needed to hear,
• 32:13
  SPEAKER_01: which was,
• 32:14
  SPEAKER_01: yeah,
• 32:15
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 32:15
  SPEAKER_01: there's a lot of mutual respect and I would have never imagined that.
• 32:19
  SPEAKER_01: I mean,
• 32:19
  SPEAKER_01: this is somebody who was like,
• 32:21
  SPEAKER_01: I tell him like,
• 32:21
  SPEAKER_01: dude,
• 32:23
  SPEAKER_01: uh,
• 32:23
  SPEAKER_01: that Nikkei is Peru was a Bible for me for so many years.
• 32:27
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, every single thing I wanted to do, we wanted to learn from this book.
• 32:32
  SPEAKER_01: And I mean, what have they not done that we could even do?
• 32:35
  SPEAKER_01: Um,
• 32:38
  SPEAKER_01: But I needed to take on that attitude first and then live my life with that attitude.
• 32:43
  SPEAKER_01: And then eventually it manifested itself in like what we do now,
• 32:47
  SPEAKER_01: which I think Itamai now is a very unique version of Nikkei food.
• 32:54
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that we have...
• 33:00
  SPEAKER_01: try to be as authentic as possible in our approach.
• 33:03
  SPEAKER_01: The only other place that ever made me feel that Nikkei food wise was the first
• 33:08
  SPEAKER_01: time I went to Lama San where I I realized I had I had.
• 33:16
  SPEAKER_01: I had not thought much of Lama San until I went to eat.
• 33:20
  SPEAKER_01: And obviously, I mean this from reading the menu, from seeing it when they first opened.
• 33:26
  SPEAKER_01: I was like, oh, okay.
• 33:28
  SPEAKER_01: Not sure if it interests me then until I went to eat.
• 33:33
  SPEAKER_01: And then it shut my mouth.
• 33:35
  SPEAKER_01: It was like,
• 33:36
  SPEAKER_01: wow,
• 33:37
  SPEAKER_01: this is the first time that I'm connecting with like a Peruvian American chef who's
• 33:43
  SPEAKER_01: very much American more than Peruvian.
• 33:46
  SPEAKER_01: Just like and I are like, we're Peruvian kids at heart, but really are American.
• 33:50
  SPEAKER_01: You understand?
• 33:52
  SPEAKER_01: We are.
• 33:53
  SPEAKER_01: And to see Eric's take on Peruvian Japanese food without having to follow
• 34:03
  SPEAKER_01: any blueprint that had already been set gave me an idea that I could eventually
• 34:10
  SPEAKER_01: find myself doing the same,
• 34:12
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 34:12
  SPEAKER_01: that we didn't need to do the,
• 34:17
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 34:18
  SPEAKER_01: the copy and paste of Mido that has happened in so many parts of,
• 34:24
  SPEAKER_01: especially the U.S.,
• 34:25
  SPEAKER_01: where people,
• 34:26
  SPEAKER_01: I think,
• 34:28
  SPEAKER_01: people think that,
• 34:31
  SPEAKER_01: if you copy and paste, but you cross continents, it's okay.
• 34:34
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 34:35
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 34:36
  SPEAKER_02: First I want to say like, yeah, Lama San is, is amazing.
• 34:39
  SPEAKER_02: Especially like I went there not that long ago, a few months ago, a couple of months ago.
• 34:44
  SPEAKER_02: And like Francisco Castillo is a chef there now with Eric.
• 34:48
  SPEAKER_02: And it's like, man, the food they're putting out is, it's incredible.
• 34:52
  SPEAKER_02: It's the best I've seen it since they opened.
• 34:54
  SPEAKER_02: And it's, it's really fucking good right now.
• 34:57
  SPEAKER_02: But yeah, like,
• 34:59
  SPEAKER_02: To me,
• 34:59
  SPEAKER_02: Nikkei,
• 35:00
  SPEAKER_02: like when you really like,
• 35:01
  SPEAKER_02: and I'm glad you talked to Miche because I think Miche is the guy that like really
• 35:05
  SPEAKER_02: understands it in a,
• 35:08
  SPEAKER_02: you know,
• 35:08
  SPEAKER_02: like a really profound way.
• 35:09
  SPEAKER_02: It's not just like putting sushi and ceviche on a menu together.
• 35:15
  SPEAKER_02: Like to me, that's what like, usually when Nikkei gets exported, that's like, that's just what happens.
• 35:20
  SPEAKER_02: And which is fine sometimes, you know, it's, it's fine.
• 35:25
  SPEAKER_02: But like,
• 35:26
  SPEAKER_02: I think it's,
• 35:27
  SPEAKER_02: it's also,
• 35:28
  SPEAKER_02: there's this like possibility surrounding it to do kind of anything just with those
• 35:33
  SPEAKER_02: two inspirations and just like run with it and do whatever the fuck you want to do
• 35:39
  SPEAKER_02: with it.
• 35:39
  SPEAKER_02: And it, it's really like freeing.
• 35:42
  SPEAKER_02: Like there's not that many limitations around that.
• 35:45
  SPEAKER_02: And like, I think it works great in a tasting menu.
• 35:48
  SPEAKER_02: Like it's, it's, it's a way you can really experiment with these two cuisines in a way that
• 35:55
  SPEAKER_02: It's hard to do, I think, a la carte, even though, like, at Itamai 2.0, you guys did it really well.
• 36:03
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, that's it.
• 36:05
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I... No, yeah, I... So, look, to your point, I had... I really contemplated...
• 36:17
  SPEAKER_01: What Maito had done before,
• 36:20
  SPEAKER_01: only because I was heading into a direction that we had not touched before,
• 36:25
  SPEAKER_01: which was a tasty menu.
• 36:26
  SPEAKER_01: I'd worked plenty of omakases in my career before, and I didn't want to do an omakase.
• 36:34
  SPEAKER_01: I understand why it's worded this when I get it.
• 36:39
  SPEAKER_01: I don't even like the vibe.
• 36:41
  SPEAKER_01: You understand?
• 36:41
  SPEAKER_01: I am.
• 36:43
  SPEAKER_01: I am.
• 36:44
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not a. I'm not Japanese.
• 36:50
  SPEAKER_01: I'm just one of.
• 36:51
  SPEAKER_01: No, I get it.
• 36:52
  SPEAKER_02: Like that very like quiet, still, you know, almost silent preparation.
• 36:59
  SPEAKER_02: Like I don't see you doing that.
• 37:00
  SPEAKER_02: No, you're fucking rapping about, you know, sushi shop and.
• 37:05
  SPEAKER_02: ceviche like can you imagine like you just standing there like uh in solitude and
• 37:10
  SPEAKER_02: like stillness all around it'd be weird like it'd be weird you're peruvian american
• 37:15
  SPEAKER_02: like that exudes through you like i think you're doing it in the way that makes
• 37:20
  SPEAKER_02: sense to you and i think that's that's a beautiful thing
• 37:23
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 37:27
  SPEAKER_01: This is what I came to realization of like,
• 37:30
  SPEAKER_01: no,
• 37:30
  SPEAKER_01: it has to mirror what Val and I really are like in the kitchen.
• 37:35
  SPEAKER_01: And especially in the room,
• 37:37
  SPEAKER_01: it has to mirror what I like because over time I've had affirmations of people who
• 37:42
  SPEAKER_01: have come here and to be like,
• 37:43
  SPEAKER_01: look,
• 37:43
  SPEAKER_01: the restaurant is great,
• 37:44
  SPEAKER_01: but I come here because you're cooking and the vibe.
• 37:47
  SPEAKER_01: And then it's like, oh, no, like I want to reject that.
• 37:51
  SPEAKER_01: And I want to say,
• 37:52
  SPEAKER_01: No, no, no, no, no.
• 37:53
  SPEAKER_01: Come here for the food.
• 37:55
  SPEAKER_01: But people are telling me, hey, I'm not coming here just for the food.
• 38:01
  SPEAKER_01: Food is great.
• 38:02
  SPEAKER_01: But I'm coming here because I like the way you cook and I like the way you make me
• 38:08
  SPEAKER_01: feel when I sit at your counter.
• 38:09
  SPEAKER_01: And then it feels good.
• 38:11
  SPEAKER_01: I had to kind of like, OK, there's nothing wrong with that.
• 38:14
  SPEAKER_01: Why am I rejecting this?
• 38:15
  SPEAKER_01: Like there's not it's not.
• 38:18
  SPEAKER_01: There's nothing wrong with that.
• 38:19
  SPEAKER_01: If anything, now I want to do this for 10 people instead of six, which is what we're able to do now.
• 38:26
  SPEAKER_01: But speaking on food, Nick, you hit the nail on the head.
• 38:30
  SPEAKER_01: Me explaining to Micha, for example, some of the things that make Itamai what it is, it's
• 38:38
  SPEAKER_01: in getting an approval, like, yeah, I've never done that before.
• 38:42
  SPEAKER_01: So, so good for you.
• 38:43
  SPEAKER_01: Like, good.
• 38:43
  SPEAKER_01: That means good.
• 38:45
  SPEAKER_01: That means I,
• 38:45
  SPEAKER_01: I am doing this paying homage and being respectful,
• 38:49
  SPEAKER_01: which is just as important as everything else that you can put into a space that
• 38:53
  SPEAKER_01: makes it feel quiet and respectful.
• 38:55
  SPEAKER_01: If you're really taken away from people, you're not being respectful.
• 38:57
  SPEAKER_01: It's nothing.
• 38:59
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 38:59
  SPEAKER_01: Being respectful really means also realizing what others have done before you.
• 39:03
  SPEAKER_01: And like,
• 39:06
  SPEAKER_01: Not saying that we won't look, we're all going to use leche de tigre somehow.
• 39:10
  SPEAKER_01: We might bump into each other at some point.
• 39:12
  SPEAKER_01: Like, hey, I've made a leche with this before or I've made a leche with that.
• 39:16
  SPEAKER_01: Look, one of the greatest leche de tigres I've ever had was a freaking Heart of Palms in Pujol.
• 39:21
  SPEAKER_01: None of these guys had worked in Peruvian restaurants or nothing, but that is how...
• 39:26
  SPEAKER_01: That is how common a leche tigre is now in a great kitchen.
• 39:31
  SPEAKER_01: So expect others who have not been to your country to start imitating because it's the same.
• 39:37
  SPEAKER_01: Like, you know, I don't know.
• 39:40
  SPEAKER_01: Like we have a beurre blanc at Mati's that's a killer that does really well.
• 39:44
  SPEAKER_01: What do what do you have to do with beurre blancs?
• 39:47
  SPEAKER_01: not much, but Val is an American girl who, who went to work for Thomas Keller at some point in her life.
• 39:55
  SPEAKER_01: So she wanted to like,
• 39:57
  SPEAKER_01: if there was one thing that they're teaching you in that group is to make sure that
• 40:01
  SPEAKER_01: your sauces are the best sauces in the world,
• 40:03
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 40:04
  SPEAKER_01: and,
• 40:04
  SPEAKER_01: and that's outside of her also that maybe the Peruvian side of things just has
• 40:11
  SPEAKER_01: nothing to do with it,
• 40:12
  SPEAKER_01: but it's still us.
• 40:13
  SPEAKER_01: It's still, you know, um,
• 40:17
  SPEAKER_01: And like itamais, nigiri, for example, courses, we have like a scallop.
• 40:23
  SPEAKER_01: It's like a scallop that we cure in kombu salt.
• 40:28
  SPEAKER_01: Then it gets banana and charapita.
• 40:31
  SPEAKER_01: It's like apple banana, which is...
• 40:35
  SPEAKER_01: Platano manzano, which you know, a little like stubby one.
• 40:38
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 40:39
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 40:40
  SPEAKER_01: And it grows also here.
• 40:41
  SPEAKER_01: So we, we pair both of those things.
• 40:45
  SPEAKER_01: Uh,
• 40:45
  SPEAKER_01: and charapita is a pepper that,
• 40:47
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 40:48
  SPEAKER_01: if you've had charapita,
• 40:49
  SPEAKER_01: you would know this is one of the most flavorful peppers world.
• 40:54
  SPEAKER_01: And it's, and it's incredibly, um, um,
• 40:58
  SPEAKER_01: aromatic and fruity also,
• 40:59
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 41:00
  SPEAKER_01: and it comes from Homestead because somebody is growing it now for us.
• 41:04
  SPEAKER_01: And this woman who's from Iquitos,
• 41:09
  SPEAKER_01: started growing it during the pandemic.
• 41:11
  SPEAKER_01: And then she had like,
• 41:13
  SPEAKER_01: I ended up giving this down pepper to a couple of my friends who have bigger
• 41:17
  SPEAKER_01: kitchens and they ended up really liking it.
• 41:20
  SPEAKER_01: And now she's not selling it by the ounce anymore.
• 41:23
  SPEAKER_01: It's like, she sells it by like a quarter pound or like a half pound.
• 41:26
  SPEAKER_01: And these are expensive peppers.
• 41:28
  SPEAKER_01: I was like, that's a real Itamai thing.
• 41:32
  SPEAKER_01: Itamai can stand on that and say, no, that happens organically because,
• 41:39
  SPEAKER_01: because of us knowing who we really are.
• 41:42
  SPEAKER_01: You can't get to that result unless you go through these things.
• 41:46
  SPEAKER_01: You have to know what grows here, what really grows here.
• 41:49
  SPEAKER_01: But then also I'm Peruvian enough to know,
• 41:52
  SPEAKER_01: like the first time I had a plain taint,
• 41:55
  SPEAKER_01: like not plain taint chips,
• 41:57
  SPEAKER_01: but like banana on a ceviche was a ceviche,
• 42:00
  SPEAKER_01: I think Amas or Amas,
• 42:03
  SPEAKER_01: which is like an Amazonian,
• 42:05
  SPEAKER_01: you remember this concept,
• 42:07
  SPEAKER_01: And it was like, oh, wow, I've never had like boiled.
• 42:12
  SPEAKER_01: It was like a boiled plantain chunks inside the ceviche.
• 42:16
  SPEAKER_01: And so banana, leche, heat, like it made sense to me.
• 42:21
  SPEAKER_01: And I was like,
• 42:22
  SPEAKER_01: why would I do a scallop that's just scallop and some sort of salt and just keep it
• 42:28
  SPEAKER_01: that way?
• 42:29
  SPEAKER_01: Cause it's so good.
• 42:30
  SPEAKER_01: I mean a great scallop when it's fresh and just a little bit of salt and maybe a little bit of lime.
• 42:35
  SPEAKER_01: It's like, it's what everybody loves.
• 42:39
  SPEAKER_01: But no,
• 42:39
  SPEAKER_01: this is a true representation of what we see as Peruvian Japanese food because,
• 42:45
  SPEAKER_01: like I said,
• 42:47
  SPEAKER_01: we know where it comes from,
• 42:49
  SPEAKER_01: the idea,
• 42:50
  SPEAKER_01: but we also know that it wouldn't be possible if we wouldn't be in Miami because
• 42:53
  SPEAKER_01: we're not getting frozen charapita peppers.
• 42:56
  SPEAKER_01: There's a Peruvian woman who lives in Miami that grows them.
• 43:00
  SPEAKER_01: Same with the platano manzano.
• 43:02
  SPEAKER_01: Scallops, obviously, we try to source the best products that we can from Japan and
• 43:07
  SPEAKER_01: That's part of the concept.
• 43:09
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that's what Itamai really is like in a nutshell.
• 43:12
  SPEAKER_01: Itamai is,
• 43:15
  SPEAKER_01: Itamai AO right now is very much Miami,
• 43:19
  SPEAKER_01: very much Caribbean,
• 43:20
  SPEAKER_01: very much tropical,
• 43:21
  SPEAKER_01: just like parts of Matiz.
• 43:23
  SPEAKER_01: You know,
• 43:23
  SPEAKER_01: you can't have the Noxtail Saltado if you didn't grow up in Miami eating rabo
• 43:28
  SPEAKER_01: encendido and every oxtail from every Haitian and Jamaican restaurant around here,
• 43:33
  SPEAKER_01: you know?
• 43:34
  SPEAKER_01: So yeah, that's kind of how we view things.
• 43:41
  SPEAKER_00: And how is it going after three weeks, right?
• 43:45
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so last week was a little bit different because we were only open Thursday, Fridays and Saturdays.
• 43:50
  SPEAKER_01: Last week,
• 43:51
  SPEAKER_01: we only operated Wednesday,
• 43:53
  SPEAKER_01: Thursday to give the kitchen the weekend off because a lot of our kitchen helped us
• 43:59
  SPEAKER_01: prep actually all the food for the wedding through the weekend.
• 44:02
  SPEAKER_01: And then they came to party on Saturday because we wanted nobody to work on Saturday from our staff.
• 44:08
  SPEAKER_01: So we kind of gave them, you know, a couple of days off to rest.
• 44:12
  SPEAKER_01: Also still come in and help us prep.
• 44:15
  SPEAKER_01: This week was is week four.
• 44:17
  SPEAKER_01: And we're now finally operating five days a week.
• 44:21
  SPEAKER_01: So this week for the first time, we'll be doing Tuesday through Saturday.
• 44:24
  SPEAKER_01: So.
• 44:26
  SPEAKER_01: you know, right under a month, but we feel good.
• 44:28
  SPEAKER_01: We feel good.
• 44:29
  SPEAKER_01: You know,
• 44:29
  SPEAKER_01: services have been decent,
• 44:33
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 44:35
  SPEAKER_01: for where our standard is and what we want to do,
• 44:38
  SPEAKER_01: we're there,
• 44:38
  SPEAKER_01: but what we want to do,
• 44:39
  SPEAKER_01: we're not there yet.
• 44:41
  SPEAKER_01: There's still a lot of growth and it's good.
• 44:43
  SPEAKER_01: I'm really excited for for how gradually we've been making changes.
• 44:47
  SPEAKER_01: It's almost like when you do these kind of services,
• 44:50
  SPEAKER_01: it allows you really to sit down at the end of a service.
• 44:54
  SPEAKER_01: There's so many notes from three,
• 44:56
  SPEAKER_01: four people that are constantly just watching service instead of what we're cooking
• 45:01
  SPEAKER_01: at 100 miles an hour.
• 45:02
  SPEAKER_01: And you just don't always have a chance to recap
• 45:06
  SPEAKER_01: This is this,
• 45:07
  SPEAKER_01: we have even time to recap beef in between services,
• 45:12
  SPEAKER_01: which is like the greatest thing where it's like for,
• 45:15
  SPEAKER_01: for 15 or 20 minutes,
• 45:16
  SPEAKER_01: the restaurant's empty and you know that you're about to be full again.
• 45:19
  SPEAKER_01: And it's like, yeah, what, what other service allows you to go through this?
• 45:23
  SPEAKER_01: It's not a lot,
• 45:24
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 45:24
  SPEAKER_01: unless you're closing,
• 45:25
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 45:26
  SPEAKER_01: we weren't,
• 45:27
  SPEAKER_01: we're just like clearing out the counter,
• 45:29
  SPEAKER_01: putting,
• 45:30
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 45:30
  SPEAKER_01: resetting.
• 45:31
  SPEAKER_01: And it was great.
• 45:31
  SPEAKER_01: I think I'm, I'm really excited for that.
• 45:34
  SPEAKER_01: It's really, really nice.
• 45:35
  SPEAKER_01: So.
• 45:37
  SPEAKER_01: And my wife, Lauren, who's handling service right now, it's great.
• 45:41
  SPEAKER_01: It's been like another, we had never done this prior to Itamai.
• 45:46
  SPEAKER_01: So it's been like unlocking a different side of our communication and our friendship, which is great.
• 45:54
  SPEAKER_01: It's been pretty awesome.
• 45:56
  SPEAKER_02: Is there any relation in how you write music and how you write the menu now?
• 46:04
  SPEAKER_02: For me, a tasting menu is almost like a set list of a music performance.
• 46:12
  SPEAKER_02: How it goes up and down, it ebbs and flows, it gets stronger and more subtle.
• 46:17
  SPEAKER_02: Do you think of that at all?
• 46:20
  SPEAKER_02: Just because you...
• 46:22
  SPEAKER_02: Well,
• 46:24
  SPEAKER_01: we thought of this one,
• 46:25
  SPEAKER_01: if I can draw parallels to music,
• 46:27
  SPEAKER_01: it'll be like kind of when we wrote like Ceviche,
• 46:30
  SPEAKER_01: which had various things that had elements of growing up in Chiclayo.
• 46:37
  SPEAKER_01: But...
• 46:39
  SPEAKER_01: This menu, too, we want it to be as the first taste.
• 46:43
  SPEAKER_01: So we wrote two menus.
• 46:44
  SPEAKER_01: One, that's the one that we open with.
• 46:46
  SPEAKER_01: And the next one, it'll be the one that we change to after the summer.
• 46:50
  SPEAKER_01: The first one is kind of as close as possible to the old Itamai, to 2.0.
• 46:58
  SPEAKER_01: But obviously, we've elevated every single thing we could elevated.
• 47:06
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and it kind of follows the journey.
• 47:11
  SPEAKER_01: Uh,
• 47:12
  SPEAKER_01: if I,
• 47:12
  SPEAKER_01: if,
• 47:12
  SPEAKER_01: if I may,
• 47:14
  SPEAKER_01: like we,
• 47:15
  SPEAKER_01: we want your taste buds to go through a journey of like Chiclayo cevicherias,
• 47:22
  SPEAKER_01: if they had like any Japanese influence,
• 47:25
  SPEAKER_01: which I,
• 47:26
  SPEAKER_01: when I was growing up in Chiclayo,
• 47:28
  SPEAKER_01: I,
• 47:28
  SPEAKER_01: I don't remember,
• 47:29
  SPEAKER_01: uh,
• 47:30
  SPEAKER_01: any proven Japanese place.
• 47:32
  SPEAKER_01: I know
• 47:33
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe by now there should be some.
• 47:38
  SPEAKER_01: But you start like a melon shooter, which is like a compressed melon and a little bit of soy and leche.
• 47:46
  SPEAKER_01: And it's like a very noble thing that I really enjoyed, like compressed melon.
• 47:51
  SPEAKER_01: Usually they serve you with soy or whatnot.
• 47:54
  SPEAKER_01: And then you go like muchame, which is, you know, a fisherman's food, you know.
• 48:02
  SPEAKER_01: And here we're treating a swordfish belly that we're treating as bacon and aging
• 48:09
  SPEAKER_01: over like 45 days just so we can slice it really,
• 48:12
  SPEAKER_01: really thin.
• 48:14
  SPEAKER_01: Then we throw it into an oregano oil before service, like 30 minutes before.
• 48:18
  SPEAKER_01: like rehydrating that oil and then we serve it.
• 48:22
  SPEAKER_01: Then you go to like a potato croquette that's really like a play on a causa frenafana with Bahamian cong.
• 48:30
  SPEAKER_01: Then you have like pulpo al olivo, which is like something that people really enjoy at Itamai.
• 48:37
  SPEAKER_01: What we've done now is instead of serving it with rice and nori,
• 48:39
  SPEAKER_01: we've made like a rice cracker out of rice and nori dough and are able to serve it
• 48:44
  SPEAKER_01: like a crispy rice.
• 48:47
  SPEAKER_01: Then you have like
• 48:48
  SPEAKER_01: Your sashimi course, which is like a really cool play on fermentation.
• 48:54
  SPEAKER_01: So I think right now we're serving Florida grouper with percebes, with gooseneck barnacles.
• 49:01
  SPEAKER_01: They're coming from Japan.
• 49:03
  SPEAKER_01: These are called caminotes or turtle fingers.
• 49:07
  SPEAKER_01: Love these percebes.
• 49:07
  SPEAKER_01: They're a little bit wider than the Spanish ones we get.
• 49:13
  SPEAKER_01: So we can cut them into nice pieces.
• 49:15
  SPEAKER_01: slices and they're really really nice then you have like a big fin reef squid which
• 49:22
  SPEAKER_01: is you know the most prized squid in all over japan and any sushi bar you go to if
• 49:29
  SPEAKER_01: if they love showing off product when big fin reef squid is in season that's the
• 49:34
  SPEAKER_01: squid you're gonna get i mean the
• 49:36
  SPEAKER_01: There's a peculiar texture with this squid.
• 49:41
  SPEAKER_01: And as the Japanese like to say,
• 49:42
  SPEAKER_01: if you salt it properly,
• 49:44
  SPEAKER_01: once you start chewing on it,
• 49:46
  SPEAKER_01: you get this sweetness that comes out of it.
• 49:48
  SPEAKER_01: It's a pretty weird thing.
• 49:50
  SPEAKER_01: But as you keep chewing the squid,
• 49:52
  SPEAKER_01: it gets sweeter,
• 49:54
  SPEAKER_01: which I think it's something that we don't do well in Peru.
• 49:56
  SPEAKER_01: It's like raw squid.
• 49:58
  SPEAKER_01: We usually cook all calamari.
• 50:01
  SPEAKER_01: It's always fried.
• 50:05
  SPEAKER_01: I had to learn this by working with Japanese chefs.
• 50:12
  SPEAKER_01: And then on the Leche de Tegre is the fermentation place.
• 50:15
  SPEAKER_01: So the same ajilimo that we use to make our classic leche,
• 50:19
  SPEAKER_01: we'll strain,
• 50:20
  SPEAKER_01: we'll ferment with yuzu peel,
• 50:22
  SPEAKER_01: salt,
• 50:23
  SPEAKER_01: and kokuto,
• 50:24
  SPEAKER_01: which is like brown sugar.
• 50:27
  SPEAKER_01: then we'll do a good 30,
• 50:29
  SPEAKER_01: 45 days,
• 50:31
  SPEAKER_01: make that a kosho and grab the kosho with strained leche and remake a leche again,
• 50:39
  SPEAKER_01: which is like one of my favorite things to do was trying to find recipes to not
• 50:47
  SPEAKER_01: waste anything.
• 50:50
  SPEAKER_01: So our sashimi course embodies all that, you know?
• 50:55
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, like- Then you get-
• 50:57
  SPEAKER_02: Sorry, go ahead.
• 50:58
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 50:59
  SPEAKER_01: All right.
• 50:59
  SPEAKER_02: I was just going to say,
• 51:00
  SPEAKER_02: like,
• 51:01
  SPEAKER_02: the butchery,
• 51:03
  SPEAKER_02: the fish butchery you've been doing,
• 51:05
  SPEAKER_02: like,
• 51:06
  SPEAKER_02: since Eat to My Started,
• 51:08
  SPEAKER_02: has it always been breaking down the whole fish?
• 51:12
  SPEAKER_01: In the food hall,
• 51:13
  SPEAKER_01: when I could,
• 51:14
  SPEAKER_01: I would definitely,
• 51:17
  SPEAKER_01: like,
• 51:18
  SPEAKER_01: in BC season,
• 51:19
  SPEAKER_01: I would definitely use fresh fish all day.
• 51:25
  SPEAKER_01: My dad would want to kill me every time he saw a big old grouper.
• 51:29
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah,
• 51:29
  SPEAKER_01: because he was like,
• 51:30
  SPEAKER_01: man,
• 51:30
  SPEAKER_01: though,
• 51:31
  SPEAKER_01: like the only fish that we found,
• 51:34
  SPEAKER_01: funny enough,
• 51:34
  SPEAKER_01: so the only fish that we found that could fit,
• 51:37
  SPEAKER_01: I think what we were trying to do for a ceviche that was priced at $18 was not go
• 51:41
  SPEAKER_01: over $7.
• 51:42
  SPEAKER_01: And this was...
• 51:48
  SPEAKER_01: Corvina.
• 51:49
  SPEAKER_01: Corvina was the only fish that was being frozen.
• 51:53
  SPEAKER_01: And the integrity of the product was good enough for us to use.
• 52:02
  SPEAKER_01: That was a frozen fish.
• 52:03
  SPEAKER_01: As you know, Sway took over the market in Miami.
• 52:07
  SPEAKER_01: Every Peruvian restaurant that you could think of has been selling basa and Sway.
• 52:13
  SPEAKER_01: And from day one, we were like, well, we can't serve that.
• 52:17
  SPEAKER_01: So we went to Corvina and we would get this Peruvian and Ecuadorian Corvina, like gold Corvina.
• 52:23
  SPEAKER_01: I think a lot of it came from Mexico.
• 52:25
  SPEAKER_01: So that was a really good product.
• 52:29
  SPEAKER_01: And then on season, I definitely use grouper, lots of grouper and lots of doormats.
• 52:33
  SPEAKER_01: Cause we do have like a lot of flounders all over the East coast.
• 52:38
  SPEAKER_01: For whatever reason, Miami just, we just don't, we don't use a lot of this fish.
• 52:42
  SPEAKER_01: So it doesn't come South.
• 52:43
  SPEAKER_01: It usually goes, you know, East up North.
• 52:48
  SPEAKER_02: But you've been breaking it down, wasting very little.
• 52:52
  SPEAKER_02: I remember just the carving and everything you guys were doing and the dry aging.
• 52:58
  SPEAKER_02: We have to talk about that.
• 53:00
  SPEAKER_02: When did that kind of begin?
• 53:03
  SPEAKER_02: And what inspired you to start the dry aging?
• 53:07
  SPEAKER_00: Because it's a focus on the new version of Itamai, too, right?
• 53:13
  SPEAKER_01: So,
• 53:14
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 53:14
  SPEAKER_01: butchery has always been very important to me because when I started,
• 53:19
  SPEAKER_01: so I actually started working in Japanese restaurants first.
• 53:23
  SPEAKER_01: So I understood the importance of and
• 53:28
  SPEAKER_01: not even the importance,
• 53:29
  SPEAKER_01: I'm looking for a word like,
• 53:31
  SPEAKER_01: uh,
• 53:31
  SPEAKER_01: the privilege that it was that a chef would let you break down a fish.
• 53:35
  SPEAKER_01: And it was not a joke.
• 53:37
  SPEAKER_01: There's nothing to laugh at here.
• 53:38
  SPEAKER_01: You weren't understanding the privilege that you were receiving by your sushi chef,
• 53:43
  SPEAKER_01: allowing you to,
• 53:44
  SPEAKER_01: it was almost like they would not give you a chance again.
• 53:47
  SPEAKER_01: So I like understood quickly, like I better take this very damn serious.
• 53:53
  SPEAKER_01: Um,
• 53:54
  SPEAKER_01: And then when I transitioned on to the Peruvian kitchens,
• 53:58
  SPEAKER_01: I realized I was like,
• 54:00
  SPEAKER_01: oh,
• 54:01
  SPEAKER_01: we love ceviches and we don't know how to treat fish.
• 54:04
  SPEAKER_01: So if you haven't actually worked in a Japanese restaurant,
• 54:08
  SPEAKER_01: I ended up realizing that a lot of the restaurants that were very popular here in Miami,
• 54:13
  SPEAKER_01: that I ended up working short anyways,
• 54:17
  SPEAKER_01: short stages everywhere.
• 54:18
  SPEAKER_01: But what I realized was that we did not care.
• 54:23
  SPEAKER_01: Nowhere near how Japanese cooks care about fish before they even put any sauce on it.
• 54:29
  SPEAKER_01: This is just so product can be served properly
• 54:34
  SPEAKER_01: But before you even break down an animal, you have to clean it.
• 54:38
  SPEAKER_01: And if you don't even know how to clean a dead fish, then it's like, I mean, what am I?
• 54:44
  SPEAKER_01: Don't waste your time telling me that your fish is great.
• 54:48
  SPEAKER_01: Because Japanese people,
• 54:50
  SPEAKER_01: that's when cultural things,
• 54:51
  SPEAKER_01: the cultural differences really arise when you go somewhere and you think,
• 54:55
  SPEAKER_01: like,
• 54:56
  SPEAKER_01: your ceviche is hot shit.
• 54:57
  SPEAKER_01: And a Japanese guy will tell you, like, I can tell you it's just shit.
• 55:02
  SPEAKER_01: It's not hot shit.
• 55:02
  SPEAKER_01: It's just shit.
• 55:03
  SPEAKER_01: Look at your fish.
• 55:05
  SPEAKER_01: Look how you've treated your product.
• 55:09
  SPEAKER_01: When I learned about those nuances,
• 55:12
  SPEAKER_01: I wanted to be more like the Japanese guys who would talk their shit than the
• 55:15
  SPEAKER_01: Peruvian guy who was like,
• 55:17
  SPEAKER_01: oh,
• 55:17
  SPEAKER_01: man,
• 55:17
  SPEAKER_01: he's right.
• 55:19
  SPEAKER_01: He's right.
• 55:19
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know anything about this other than did you pat it dry and wrap it in saran wrap?
• 55:25
  SPEAKER_01: That's about all you do, guy.
• 55:26
  SPEAKER_01: What are you talking about?
• 55:30
  SPEAKER_01: And then came butchery,
• 55:32
  SPEAKER_01: which only through Josh Nyland's books and getting them as a gift the first time
• 55:40
  SPEAKER_01: the whole fish came out,
• 55:42
  SPEAKER_01: I've just been infatuated by the idea that there's so much to do with just precise butchery.
• 55:53
  SPEAKER_01: Like, you know, not that...
• 55:57
  SPEAKER_01: Not that I think our food is alike at all,
• 55:59
  SPEAKER_01: because I think his is obviously hyper-focused on butchering what you can do when
• 56:05
  SPEAKER_01: you butcher something.
• 56:06
  SPEAKER_01: Like, for example, I don't think we'll ever do, like, a tuna chili here, you know?
• 56:11
  SPEAKER_01: But it makes sense that with all this ground meat that you can get out of,
• 56:16
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 56:17
  SPEAKER_01: tuna bones,
• 56:17
  SPEAKER_01: like,
• 56:18
  SPEAKER_01: what are you going to do with it?
• 56:19
  SPEAKER_01: Like, a sloppy dough, like, great, you know?
• 56:21
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 56:24
  SPEAKER_01: But it's the inspiration that came from that of realizing that someone was out
• 56:27
  SPEAKER_01: there really,
• 56:29
  SPEAKER_01: really pushing the limits on these things.
• 56:31
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm like nowhere near that.
• 56:33
  SPEAKER_01: So it's like, OK, how do I how do I get on that train?
• 56:37
  SPEAKER_01: You know, and I think butchery has just been that it's how do we.
• 56:42
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, yeah.
• 56:42
  SPEAKER_01: You know, part of my.
• 56:46
  SPEAKER_01: way of cooking is also now being extremely precise.
• 56:48
  SPEAKER_01: I love to see very, very precise cuts.
• 56:54
  SPEAKER_01: So yeah, just coming from that.
• 56:57
  SPEAKER_01: But Julian, I wanted to tell you, Julian, the biggest reason why we got agers was because at 2.0,
• 57:06
  SPEAKER_01: We didn't have a walk-in cooler or walk-in freezer.
• 57:10
  SPEAKER_01: And at some point,
• 57:11
  SPEAKER_01: our volume was so high that I needed,
• 57:14
  SPEAKER_01: we started aging fishes in a storage unit where we had like reachings downstairs in
• 57:20
  SPEAKER_01: the garage.
• 57:21
  SPEAKER_01: In the garage is where we had our reachings.
• 57:24
  SPEAKER_01: Imagine that.
• 57:25
  SPEAKER_01: And we would transfer fishes in buckets of ice on top of ice, towels, bring fish, go up the staircase.
• 57:35
  SPEAKER_01: It was nuts.
• 57:35
  SPEAKER_01: But we started doing that.
• 57:38
  SPEAKER_01: And then over time, we...
• 57:42
  SPEAKER_01: We saved up enough to say, you know what, we might as well put a fish cabinet here.
• 57:46
  SPEAKER_01: And it's the same one that would actually help us improve the product as we go.
• 57:51
  SPEAKER_01: And it allows the opening cooks to not have to wait for a delivery because you have
• 57:57
  SPEAKER_01: a 40 pound grouper that's been hanging three days.
• 58:01
  SPEAKER_01: So now all you have to do is take the top loin off today.
• 58:04
  SPEAKER_01: That's enough for us all day.
• 58:07
  SPEAKER_01: And that's kind of how we stumbled upon the dry aging.
• 58:10
  SPEAKER_01: I didn't really learn it from anybody else.
• 58:12
  SPEAKER_01: We were just like, well, we need another fridge.
• 58:17
  SPEAKER_01: So it's either you spend it on another one and you keep rigging it so you can like somehow age something.
• 58:24
  SPEAKER_01: But with the amount of humidity that a regular fridge throws out or handles,
• 58:29
  SPEAKER_01: we can never get it right because by the third or fourth day,
• 58:33
  SPEAKER_01: fish starting to smell you know where in a dry when you're really controlling just
• 58:37
  SPEAKER_01: the humidity alone uh yeah you just don't get those same smells you know so how
• 58:44
  SPEAKER_02: many dry age do you call them chambers fridges what are they the cabinets how many
• 58:51
  SPEAKER_02: do you have now
• 58:53
  SPEAKER_01: We have three tall ones and two short ones that we do for charcuterie or for
• 59:00
  SPEAKER_01: specifically like the small ones we'll use for our bacon.
• 59:06
  SPEAKER_01: We do two kinds of...
• 59:09
  SPEAKER_01: Botarga,
• 59:10
  SPEAKER_01: we do like gray mullet,
• 59:11
  SPEAKER_01: which we make the whole row that the sack will cure it and make botarga.
• 59:17
  SPEAKER_01: And then we make our sea urchin botarga also,
• 59:20
  SPEAKER_01: where we'll grab like all the scraps of uni,
• 59:23
  SPEAKER_01: form like little donuts.
• 59:24
  SPEAKER_01: And then yeah, it's a whole process, but we'll age them also.
• 59:27
  SPEAKER_01: And then we're able to grate the uni on top of things.
• 59:33
  SPEAKER_02: So like, so now you're not using it out of necessity.
• 59:38
  SPEAKER_02: Like,
• 59:38
  SPEAKER_02: when did you start realizing that,
• 59:41
  SPEAKER_02: you know,
• 59:42
  SPEAKER_02: dry aging could be,
• 59:45
  SPEAKER_02: like,
• 59:45
  SPEAKER_02: kind of take you in a new direction and not just as a way to,
• 59:50
  SPEAKER_02: you know,
• 59:50
  SPEAKER_02: maintain the quality of the fish?
• 59:54
  SPEAKER_01: You know,
• 59:55
  SPEAKER_01: God,
• 59:55
  SPEAKER_01: this has been a topic of conversation for me for a good two,
• 59:59
  SPEAKER_01: three years,
• 1:00:00
  SPEAKER_01: and I want to be completely candid.
• 1:00:02
  SPEAKER_01: So...
• 1:00:06
  SPEAKER_01: Bacon that we age over 35, 40 days.
• 1:00:12
  SPEAKER_01: Sure.
• 1:00:12
  SPEAKER_01: I think there's a great necessity for a cabin like this.
• 1:00:18
  SPEAKER_01: Groupers that we've pushed over 20, 22, 23 days.
• 1:00:26
  SPEAKER_01: I can tell you that we've,
• 1:00:28
  SPEAKER_01: we,
• 1:00:28
  SPEAKER_01: and when I say we,
• 1:00:29
  SPEAKER_01: I mean all of us here at the space have agreed like,
• 1:00:33
  SPEAKER_01: oh yeah,
• 1:00:33
  SPEAKER_01: that's a significant change.
• 1:00:35
  SPEAKER_01: Not just,
• 1:00:37
  SPEAKER_01: in flavor, but in texture, which is really hard to achieve, you know, if you're meaning
• 1:00:47
  SPEAKER_01: Let's say I can grab a five pound snapper, a two pound snapper, okay?
• 1:00:52
  SPEAKER_01: I can hang this snapper and in a week, the snapper is gonna lose 30, 35% of its weight.
• 1:01:00
  SPEAKER_01: And sure, if I fry it for you, you're gonna go, yeah, it's a significant difference.
• 1:01:06
  SPEAKER_01: But if I wanted to serve that same dry aged snapper,
• 1:01:09
  SPEAKER_01: but just use the fresh fillets out of it,
• 1:01:14
  SPEAKER_01: is it really worth it?
• 1:01:16
  SPEAKER_01: Because there's only so much you're going to be able to use, I mean, those dry bits and pieces for now.
• 1:01:23
  SPEAKER_01: You know,
• 1:01:24
  SPEAKER_01: like I always wonder when people are pushing tuna,
• 1:01:28
  SPEAKER_01: which is something that we love aging here,
• 1:01:30
  SPEAKER_01: but we do not go over at the moment.
• 1:01:33
  SPEAKER_01: We don't go over two weeks.
• 1:01:34
  SPEAKER_01: We're not – we think –
• 1:01:37
  SPEAKER_01: Right under two weeks, it's great where, like, tuna loses a little bit of, let's say, its minerality.
• 1:01:48
  SPEAKER_01: But it's clearly that it's not to the point where I could say, oh, God, this doesn't taste like tuna.
• 1:01:58
  SPEAKER_01: If anything, it's – I've never had a piece of tuna that I could say this was –
• 1:02:07
  SPEAKER_01: worth losing all the other pieces that we had to cut out for.
• 1:02:12
  SPEAKER_01: And what we do is we found different ways.
• 1:02:17
  SPEAKER_01: For example, we make XO sauce.
• 1:02:19
  SPEAKER_01: I read the mind.
• 1:02:21
  SPEAKER_01: And what we do is we grab all the true daughter trimmings and we'll treat them like it's pork jowl.
• 1:02:27
  SPEAKER_01: So we'll cut them into small pieces.
• 1:02:29
  SPEAKER_01: We'll render it.
• 1:02:30
  SPEAKER_01: And then we'll start cooking our XO sauce with these beats and pieces.
• 1:02:35
  SPEAKER_01: I can tell you it was the first time we did it was like, oh, this is great.
• 1:02:38
  SPEAKER_01: This is awesome.
• 1:02:40
  SPEAKER_01: But then we made a really big batch of XO.
• 1:02:43
  SPEAKER_01: And it's not like you can continue at the rate that we use tuna and that we have
• 1:02:50
  SPEAKER_01: like so many leftover trimmings.
• 1:02:54
  SPEAKER_01: We haven't been able to make XO the same way.
• 1:02:57
  SPEAKER_01: And XO sauce was like one of the few things that we did with the trimmings where
• 1:03:02
  SPEAKER_01: As we ate the final product, we were like, oh, this is great.
• 1:03:06
  SPEAKER_01: Every other product that we tried,
• 1:03:09
  SPEAKER_01: if you do get a piece of that tuna,
• 1:03:13
  SPEAKER_01: it may not be as pleasant as the idea of it,
• 1:03:16
  SPEAKER_01: is what I'm saying.
• 1:03:18
  SPEAKER_01: And we found that a lot with dry aging.
• 1:03:20
  SPEAKER_01: For example, the...
• 1:03:24
  SPEAKER_01: The eels, eels are great.
• 1:03:26
  SPEAKER_01: Eels work great because the skin,
• 1:03:31
  SPEAKER_01: which is really the toughest membrane of an eel that you have to really work on or
• 1:03:35
  SPEAKER_01: know how to handle so you can taste a nice piece of eel,
• 1:03:41
  SPEAKER_01: just by cleaning it properly and letting an eel hang in there for five,
• 1:03:45
  SPEAKER_01: six days,
• 1:03:48
  SPEAKER_01: Once you grill that piece of eel, oh my God.
• 1:03:53
  SPEAKER_01: People love the way we treat eel here.
• 1:03:58
  SPEAKER_01: And you get a very small piece of eel with strawberry, Florida strawberry and ticucera.
• 1:04:04
  SPEAKER_01: And it's great.
• 1:04:05
  SPEAKER_01: Eel does wonders.
• 1:04:06
  SPEAKER_01: We've left eel.
• 1:04:08
  SPEAKER_01: up to 40 days also.
• 1:04:10
  SPEAKER_01: The problem with eels is they lose too much volume once you start pushing over five, six days.
• 1:04:17
  SPEAKER_01: They just shrink way, way, way too much.
• 1:04:20
  SPEAKER_01: Um, then for everything else after that, that has to do like sashimi, I gotta be honest with you.
• 1:04:27
  SPEAKER_01: I,
• 1:04:27
  SPEAKER_01: I don't,
• 1:04:28
  SPEAKER_01: I don't,
• 1:04:28
  SPEAKER_01: I just don't want to refer to it as like,
• 1:04:30
  SPEAKER_01: we dry age this stuff because,
• 1:04:33
  SPEAKER_01: because I don't think we're making a significant change on it.
• 1:04:36
  SPEAKER_01: I think it helps us, um,
• 1:04:40
  SPEAKER_01: operational wise i think it helps us not waste the product i think it helps us with
• 1:04:45
  SPEAKER_01: not worry about deliveries that they're supposed to come in super early so we can
• 1:04:48
  SPEAKER_01: start getting ahead on the prep day but we did like uh four services last week four
• 1:04:54
  SPEAKER_01: seatings and let's say we broke down a half a kimidai for those two days there's no
• 1:05:00
  SPEAKER_01: difference nick between the kimidai that we broke down on wednesday and the one on
• 1:05:04
  SPEAKER_01: thursday and they both came in the same day
• 1:05:06
  SPEAKER_01: So I started to see a trend where restaurants wanted to update you so bad on,
• 1:05:13
  SPEAKER_01: oh,
• 1:05:13
  SPEAKER_01: this is six days age or this is seven days age.
• 1:05:16
  SPEAKER_01: And then we were like,
• 1:05:18
  SPEAKER_01: yeah,
• 1:05:18
  SPEAKER_01: but are you just telling me that or there's actually a difference on these things?
• 1:05:22
  SPEAKER_01: So we realized that maybe we're dumb.
• 1:05:26
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe we just can't achieve this.
• 1:05:29
  SPEAKER_02: a significant difference.
• 1:05:31
  SPEAKER_02: I agree.
• 1:05:31
  SPEAKER_02: There probably isn't really a difference.
• 1:05:34
  SPEAKER_02: I mean,
• 1:05:34
  SPEAKER_02: I think everyone wants to push the extreme,
• 1:05:38
  SPEAKER_02: at least in the numbers,
• 1:05:40
  SPEAKER_02: even if it doesn't really make a difference.
• 1:05:44
  SPEAKER_02: But, I mean, you're the guy working with it every day.
• 1:05:46
  SPEAKER_01: The luxury of,
• 1:05:48
  SPEAKER_01: like,
• 1:05:48
  SPEAKER_01: serving,
• 1:05:50
  SPEAKER_01: like,
• 1:05:51
  SPEAKER_01: and,
• 1:05:51
  SPEAKER_01: God,
• 1:05:52
  SPEAKER_01: look,
• 1:05:52
  SPEAKER_01: I have to be careful because I'm not talking down on the old format of omakase.
• 1:05:57
  SPEAKER_01: But if I can sit in front of you,
• 1:06:00
  SPEAKER_01: Nick,
• 1:06:00
  SPEAKER_01: and charge you $185,
• 1:06:02
  SPEAKER_01: okay,
• 1:06:04
  SPEAKER_01: for 16 or 17 pieces of fish,
• 1:06:07
  SPEAKER_01: like,
• 1:06:07
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 1:06:08
  SPEAKER_01: a neta,
• 1:06:09
  SPEAKER_01: a nigiri,
• 1:06:10
  SPEAKER_01: is more often less than one ounce of fish.
• 1:06:14
  SPEAKER_01: If you're getting some nice skin on it, sure, maybe a little bit more.
• 1:06:19
  SPEAKER_01: Rarely have I ever sat across a chef where I know by the size of net that they're
• 1:06:23
  SPEAKER_01: cutting that that's an ounce of fish.
• 1:06:26
  SPEAKER_01: So sure, you can have a lot of waste like that when I'm only looking for one piece of sashimi per guest.
• 1:06:33
  SPEAKER_01: Where here, our tuna has to become sashimi.
• 1:06:36
  SPEAKER_01: It has to become a tartar that goes in your aguadito.
• 1:06:41
  SPEAKER_01: And we use the trimmings for XO.
• 1:06:43
  SPEAKER_01: So it's like, I don't know.
• 1:06:46
  SPEAKER_01: I feel like someone's lying here.
• 1:06:48
  SPEAKER_01: It's taken us tremendous amount of work just so we can dry age for maybe one course,
• 1:06:56
  SPEAKER_01: but we're having to end up also spending time researching how are we not going to
• 1:07:01
  SPEAKER_01: waste what we've now cut out for this one other course.
• 1:07:07
  SPEAKER_01: And we found that, no, like this isn't helpful in every way.
• 1:07:10
  SPEAKER_01: So I think some things, like I said, like the swordfish, the belly bacon.
• 1:07:15
  SPEAKER_01: Sure.
• 1:07:15
  SPEAKER_01: That's that's great.
• 1:07:17
  SPEAKER_01: That works because, as you know, muchami does need to age muchami for a long time.
• 1:07:23
  SPEAKER_01: And then if you leave it in your ager, it hangs even better than anywhere else, you know.
• 1:07:30
  SPEAKER_01: but I can't, we're not looking for a muchame texture on every piece of fish.
• 1:07:36
  SPEAKER_01: So it's like, it's one particular fish.
• 1:07:42
  SPEAKER_01: I really enjoy groupers when they come in and we really have worked three,
• 1:07:51
  SPEAKER_01: four years,
• 1:07:52
  SPEAKER_01: just dry aging groupers
• 1:07:56
  SPEAKER_01: but sometimes they come in fresh, we cut them, we use them.
• 1:07:58
  SPEAKER_01: And it's like,
• 1:08:00
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know,
• 1:08:00
  SPEAKER_01: is there anything better than just curing a little bit of grouper sashimi before
• 1:08:05
  SPEAKER_01: you serve it?
• 1:08:06
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know.
• 1:08:07
  SPEAKER_01: Like that's already a great product in itself.
• 1:08:11
  SPEAKER_01: It didn't need me to, you know, and that's what I, I know it sounds like a lot of blah, blah, blah.
• 1:08:19
  SPEAKER_02: I think it's an interesting debate.
• 1:08:21
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, like, I think the value of dry aging is,
• 1:08:24
  SPEAKER_02: and the price you're passing on to customers by doing it, it's something to think about.
• 1:08:31
  SPEAKER_02: And I think if you're just thinking about,
• 1:08:34
  SPEAKER_02: let's just extreme dry age as much as we can to push the button and it just ends up
• 1:08:41
  SPEAKER_02: not really making anything taste better,
• 1:08:43
  SPEAKER_02: but just makes things more expensive and makes more waste.
• 1:08:48
  SPEAKER_02: It's something that should be thought about and debated.
• 1:08:53
  SPEAKER_02: I like that you're thinking about this because I don't think that many people are thinking about that.
• 1:08:59
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah,
• 1:08:59
  SPEAKER_01: I mean,
• 1:09:00
  SPEAKER_01: definitely when I went to Madrid this year and I tried a piece of aleta azul that
• 1:09:09
  SPEAKER_01: they had like the belly treated like a piece of jamón.
• 1:09:17
  SPEAKER_01: No, give me one second.
• 1:09:19
  SPEAKER_00: It's fine.
• 1:09:25
  SPEAKER_00: That's a nice setting there.
• 1:09:28
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, we're inside of Itamai right now.
• 1:09:30
  SPEAKER_02: You can see it if you're watching the YouTube channel.
• 1:09:33
  SPEAKER_00: Oh yeah, that's the counter.
• 1:09:35
  SPEAKER_02: So yeah, that's the counter and a lot of books behind it.
• 1:09:39
  SPEAKER_00: So the fridges are exposed.
• 1:09:42
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, so from the way he kept looking to his right, I'm assuming they were over there.
• 1:09:49
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, he showed to me before recording and you were setting up the, and they are right there.
• 1:09:55
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm guessing this is, yeah, I mean, we should ask him.
• 1:10:00
  SPEAKER_00: He's back.
• 1:10:02
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know, you know, I keep thinking, and he already knows this.
• 1:10:09
  SPEAKER_00: I see this nice balance between,
• 1:10:11
  SPEAKER_00: and this is probably coming from his understanding of music too and rhythm.
• 1:10:16
  SPEAKER_00: It's this nice balance between technique and learning from experts and,
• 1:10:24
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 1:10:24
  SPEAKER_00: the Japanese side,
• 1:10:27
  SPEAKER_00: the Peruvian side,
• 1:10:28
  SPEAKER_00: his own mix of all these.
• 1:10:31
  SPEAKER_00: And feeling that it's right, if it feels right or not every day.
• 1:10:35
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 1:10:36
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 1:10:36
  SPEAKER_02: Nanda, we're just narrating while you were... Yeah.
• 1:10:41
  SPEAKER_02: I see my neighbor.
• 1:10:42
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, yeah.
• 1:10:43
  SPEAKER_01: I can't get through the hall.
• 1:10:45
  SPEAKER_01: And I was like, I don't know.
• 1:10:47
  SPEAKER_01: It's not my pallet.
• 1:10:48
  SPEAKER_01: Somebody left a wooden pallet in the hall.
• 1:10:53
  SPEAKER_00: We were wondering, so the counter, the fridges are exposed, right?
• 1:10:58
  SPEAKER_01: So I have these sliding door panels here that we did.
• 1:11:02
  SPEAKER_01: And you can kind of slide it like this.
• 1:11:07
  SPEAKER_01: And then for dinner, we'll expose it.
• 1:11:14
  SPEAKER_00: Nice.
• 1:11:15
  SPEAKER_02: All right.
• 1:11:16
  SPEAKER_02: That's cool.
• 1:11:16
  SPEAKER_01: I love this way for you to come in here.
• 1:11:19
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 1:11:20
  SPEAKER_02: So,
• 1:11:20
  SPEAKER_02: so I was actually there like before Mati's opened,
• 1:11:23
  SPEAKER_02: like I had a layover and Valerie was at the,
• 1:11:28
  SPEAKER_02: was there and like showed me around,
• 1:11:29
  SPEAKER_02: but it was still like construction site.
• 1:11:31
  SPEAKER_02: Like, and there was nothing where you are now.
• 1:11:33
  SPEAKER_02: It was just like an empty space.
• 1:11:36
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, but yeah, I need to come back.
• 1:11:37
  SPEAKER_01: I also wanted to tell you guys,
• 1:11:39
  SPEAKER_01: if I may touch on this,
• 1:11:42
  SPEAKER_01: I have been getting ready to do like another,
• 1:11:46
  SPEAKER_01: like a restaurant,
• 1:11:46
  SPEAKER_01: like a signature restaurant that I really would like to do,
• 1:11:51
  SPEAKER_01: which is some years away from now,
• 1:11:53
  SPEAKER_01: maybe a year and a half,
• 1:11:54
  SPEAKER_01: two still.
• 1:11:56
  SPEAKER_01: But Val and I really thought that
• 1:12:01
  SPEAKER_01: it would compliment Mati so much to have this concept in particular.
• 1:12:06
  SPEAKER_01: The idea didn't just come from my necessity to do this food or my need or my want.
• 1:12:12
  SPEAKER_01: I do desire it.
• 1:12:14
  SPEAKER_01: I do love it.
• 1:12:16
  SPEAKER_01: But I've also gotten comfortable with my identity.
• 1:12:21
  SPEAKER_01: And so that has led me to believe that at some point I will be
• 1:12:26
  SPEAKER_01: exploring more of that instead of exploring a Peruvian Japanese food that,
• 1:12:30
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 1:12:31
  SPEAKER_01: in today's world seems like even a little bit overexposed,
• 1:12:35
  SPEAKER_01: you know?
• 1:12:37
  SPEAKER_01: So we thought that because Mati's was,
• 1:12:41
  SPEAKER_01: is really like a progressive Peruvian restaurant,
• 1:12:47
  SPEAKER_01: kind of like,
• 1:12:50
  SPEAKER_01: uh,
• 1:12:51
  SPEAKER_01: Like in La Masana, I guess, going back to Eric for reference, where Val's take has been like that.
• 1:12:59
  SPEAKER_01: We thought without putting crazy money into the space,
• 1:13:04
  SPEAKER_01: because you were talking about the build-out,
• 1:13:06
  SPEAKER_01: Nick.
• 1:13:06
  SPEAKER_01: So if you notice in the beginning, what you'll notice now is
• 1:13:10
  SPEAKER_01: it's all cosmetic.
• 1:13:11
  SPEAKER_01: The counter that was here before,
• 1:13:14
  SPEAKER_01: which was an actual display counter,
• 1:13:17
  SPEAKER_01: is the same structure that we kept for counter bar.
• 1:13:20
  SPEAKER_01: Because what Val and I,
• 1:13:22
  SPEAKER_01: what we were facing really was we needed to open a concept without breaking the
• 1:13:27
  SPEAKER_01: bank or asking for more money because we had already exhausted those options with Matisse.
• 1:13:34
  SPEAKER_01: And this did seem like
• 1:13:37
  SPEAKER_01: the best spot for us to open.
• 1:13:40
  SPEAKER_01: I had asked Val for months that I wanted to, to do a tasting menu.
• 1:13:45
  SPEAKER_01: That was kind of like a reflection of Mati's like more of like a proven tasting menu.
• 1:13:52
  SPEAKER_01: Um,
• 1:13:53
  SPEAKER_01: seemed like she wants to do this on her own at some point.
• 1:13:56
  SPEAKER_01: So,
• 1:13:57
  SPEAKER_01: uh,
• 1:13:58
  SPEAKER_01: I ended up thinking,
• 1:13:59
  SPEAKER_01: okay,
• 1:13:59
  SPEAKER_01: so I guess we'll be happy with,
• 1:14:00
  SPEAKER_01: we'll do,
• 1:14:01
  SPEAKER_01: uh,
• 1:14:02
  SPEAKER_01: proving Japanese,
• 1:14:04
  SPEAKER_01: you know?
• 1:14:04
  SPEAKER_01: Um,
• 1:14:05
  SPEAKER_01: but it was,
• 1:14:06
  SPEAKER_01: it was really the space that lend itself to,
• 1:14:10
  SPEAKER_01: for us to think,
• 1:14:10
  SPEAKER_01: okay,
• 1:14:11
  SPEAKER_01: we think,
• 1:14:12
  SPEAKER_01: because as we were talking about not doing this with out of necessity anymore,
• 1:14:18
  SPEAKER_01: like the,
• 1:14:18
  SPEAKER_01: the dry agers,
• 1:14:21
  SPEAKER_01: In a way, this space operates solely with what we have in this space.
• 1:14:27
  SPEAKER_01: So when you come into the property, Juliana, you'll notice that the property is very big.
• 1:14:32
  SPEAKER_01: Mati's has not only their kitchen,
• 1:14:34
  SPEAKER_01: but a prep kitchen behind Mati's,
• 1:14:37
  SPEAKER_01: which is twice the size of this room itself.
• 1:14:41
  SPEAKER_01: We don't use any of that stuff today.
• 1:14:44
  SPEAKER_01: And so...
• 1:14:46
  SPEAKER_01: I guess in a way,
• 1:14:47
  SPEAKER_01: Itamae was already used to functioning out of a small space and dealing with all
• 1:14:54
  SPEAKER_01: this stuff.
• 1:14:55
  SPEAKER_01: And so we felt like it was really the right concept to do here, you know?
• 1:15:04
  SPEAKER_01: Phase two of AO is Val coming here and me spending more time with Matis,
• 1:15:11
  SPEAKER_01: which is going to start happening soon.
• 1:15:14
  SPEAKER_01: What we don't want to do,
• 1:15:16
  SPEAKER_01: which we inadvertently did for last year as we understood what growing up meant in
• 1:15:25
  SPEAKER_01: the pub and really each one of us having an identity,
• 1:15:29
  SPEAKER_01: which are things that we've gone over
• 1:15:32
  SPEAKER_01: and learned throughout the last year of our career,
• 1:15:34
  SPEAKER_01: so once we hire PR and whatnot,
• 1:15:39
  SPEAKER_01: is that we separate a little too much from each other and that we always function
• 1:15:43
  SPEAKER_01: better when we're not too distant from each other.
• 1:15:46
  SPEAKER_01: Not separate as in physically, because the spaces are next to each other.
• 1:15:52
  SPEAKER_01: But I've definitely took on Itamai for years now, and Val has been on Mat for years now.
• 1:16:01
  SPEAKER_01: We should be at a place where we're able to do it like we always have,
• 1:16:07
  SPEAKER_01: which is as brothers and sisters first before business partners.
• 1:16:13
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm pretty excited.
• 1:16:14
  SPEAKER_01: I also spent a good amount of my time last year at Mati's with the same,
• 1:16:20
  SPEAKER_01: with butchery,
• 1:16:21
  SPEAKER_01: with dry aging,
• 1:16:22
  SPEAKER_01: which we didn't have the dry age in the front,
• 1:16:24
  SPEAKER_01: but my dry ager was always in Mati's kitchen.
• 1:16:28
  SPEAKER_01: We were aging all the product for them and
• 1:16:31
  SPEAKER_01: We just didn't find that necessity to market the restaurant,
• 1:16:38
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 1:16:39
  SPEAKER_01: in that sense,
• 1:16:39
  SPEAKER_01: or market ourselves.
• 1:16:43
  SPEAKER_01: Because,
• 1:16:43
  SPEAKER_01: like I said,
• 1:16:44
  SPEAKER_01: we were learning throughout this curve that some of the answers we were getting
• 1:16:49
  SPEAKER_01: through dry aging weren't as cool as people were making them out to be.
• 1:16:56
  SPEAKER_01: And then we kind of realized, hey, back off of that a little bit.
• 1:17:00
  SPEAKER_01: If you're really doing the work, you kind of have to learn what this is about first and then, you know.
• 1:17:08
  SPEAKER_01: But yeah, I think this is the right concept for it, Nick.
• 1:17:12
  SPEAKER_01: Also because as people have known Val and I to be brother and sister,
• 1:17:17
  SPEAKER_01: what other place do you go to that has like a proven restaurant that's led by the
• 1:17:22
  SPEAKER_01: sister next door?
• 1:17:24
  SPEAKER_01: and then a peruvian japanese kind of concept which is a little more intimate which
• 1:17:28
  SPEAKER_01: you have to still go through the big house so you still have to go through mati's
• 1:17:32
  SPEAKER_01: get there also when our guests go to the restroom they have to go to the to mati's
• 1:17:37
  SPEAKER_01: restrooms and when we walk people over people come back and the first thing they
• 1:17:41
  SPEAKER_01: say is like man it's like stepping into different worlds it's like the music is
• 1:17:46
  SPEAKER_01: always very different the lighting is always going to be very different the
• 1:17:51
  SPEAKER_01: The volume of both spaces is totally different.
• 1:17:54
  SPEAKER_01: And we thought that people would really enjoy these places being next to each other for a while.
• 1:17:59
  SPEAKER_01: And,
• 1:18:00
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 1:18:00
  SPEAKER_01: I definitely want to reiterate how much Val and really all of us have thought about
• 1:18:08
  SPEAKER_01: doing this,
• 1:18:09
  SPEAKER_01: you know.
• 1:18:09
  SPEAKER_01: As we opened Mati's, this was the goal.
• 1:18:11
  SPEAKER_01: The goal was we opened Mati's and then we get into that space, you know.
• 1:18:17
  SPEAKER_02: Is your dad involved at these two restaurants now?
• 1:18:21
  SPEAKER_01: He is now because he closed B-Side on Friday.
• 1:18:26
  SPEAKER_01: Like B-Side District was, yeah, it ran all the way to last Friday.
• 1:18:32
  SPEAKER_01: And the goal was, look, my dad, man.
• 1:18:40
  SPEAKER_01: My dad, my dad decided to keep B-Side open for a year to maintain everybody employed, you know.
• 1:18:47
  SPEAKER_01: Not that he needed to, not that he wanted to.
• 1:18:50
  SPEAKER_01: I hated the mall.
• 1:18:51
  SPEAKER_01: I definitely did not want to be there anymore.
• 1:18:53
  SPEAKER_01: I thought it ate away at me for so long.
• 1:18:58
  SPEAKER_01: But my dad was like, no, I have like three employees.
• 1:19:00
  SPEAKER_01: And what are these guys going to do if you leave?
• 1:19:03
  SPEAKER_01: You know, and so he did.
• 1:19:05
  SPEAKER_01: He kept them there for a year.
• 1:19:08
  SPEAKER_01: And over the last couple of weeks, they all transitioned here.
• 1:19:11
  SPEAKER_01: So they're all still employed.
• 1:19:13
  SPEAKER_01: And sometimes it's about that.
• 1:19:15
  SPEAKER_01: And sometimes it's just that there is no reason.
• 1:19:18
  SPEAKER_01: Why do we keep B-side?
• 1:19:19
  SPEAKER_01: People wouldn't believe me if I told you it had nothing to do with that place and not make money at all.
• 1:19:24
  SPEAKER_01: It's just.
• 1:19:25
  SPEAKER_01: some things are more important and you know and in a way we still operate like a
• 1:19:29
  SPEAKER_01: mom and pop shop meaning the dad still makes the decisions and you know then you
• 1:19:34
  SPEAKER_01: have val and i who are constantly looking at the businesses but that is the beauty
• 1:19:39
  SPEAKER_01: of all this you know still so you're all three there now like yeah so now we're all
• 1:19:45
  SPEAKER_01: three here that's again that back man like full circle man like
• 1:19:53
  SPEAKER_01: But I think at some point my dad was like,
• 1:19:54
  SPEAKER_01: man,
• 1:19:55
  SPEAKER_01: I want to continue to do this,
• 1:19:56
  SPEAKER_01: but I need a bigger place.
• 1:19:58
  SPEAKER_01: I need my kids in separate rooms.
• 1:19:59
  SPEAKER_01: These two came.
• 1:20:00
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, what is his role right now?
• 1:20:04
  SPEAKER_01: My dad's role is the everyday operations where he will help us.
• 1:20:08
  SPEAKER_01: He'll come in the mornings.
• 1:20:09
  SPEAKER_01: He'll check in.
• 1:20:11
  SPEAKER_01: Bring the mail.
• 1:20:12
  SPEAKER_01: Then let's say if we need waters and Cisco was out of stock and Primeline was out
• 1:20:18
  SPEAKER_01: of stock,
• 1:20:18
  SPEAKER_01: we'll go to Restaurant Depot and Jethro.
• 1:20:21
  SPEAKER_01: So my dad will say, okay, how many waters you need?
• 1:20:23
  SPEAKER_01: He will also call the other location, which is the food hall location in 1-800-LUCKY in Wynwood.
• 1:20:28
  SPEAKER_01: He'll ask them what they need and if they need waters.
• 1:20:31
  SPEAKER_01: Or my dad loves to get green avocados from there because it's the only place in
• 1:20:35
  SPEAKER_01: Miami where the green cases are perfect.
• 1:20:38
  SPEAKER_01: So you can buy cases ahead if you want to ripen them yourself and they're perfect.
• 1:20:43
  SPEAKER_01: Because every other place that sells you ripe avocados in Miami is terrible.
• 1:20:48
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 1:20:49
  SPEAKER_01: I think it's the constant change of temperatures,
• 1:20:52
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 1:20:52
  SPEAKER_01: where trucks are delivering really,
• 1:20:54
  SPEAKER_01: like,
• 1:20:54
  SPEAKER_01: cold stuff.
• 1:20:55
  SPEAKER_01: And then they go into a warm room.
• 1:20:56
  SPEAKER_01: Then they go into another store that has them cold.
• 1:20:59
  SPEAKER_01: Then they go into warm.
• 1:21:00
  SPEAKER_01: And it's, like, where Jethro just keeps them from the moment they arrive in their warehouse.
• 1:21:05
  SPEAKER_01: And you can really ripen them.
• 1:21:07
  SPEAKER_01: It's important things for a menu that has as much avocado as my dad's.
• 1:21:14
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, shout out to Restaurant Depot.
• 1:21:16
  SPEAKER_01: Restaurant Depot, man.
• 1:21:19
  SPEAKER_01: Also, like cleaning supplies, my dad will do that.
• 1:21:21
  SPEAKER_01: My dad will call.
• 1:21:23
  SPEAKER_01: For example,
• 1:21:23
  SPEAKER_01: the food hall doesn't usually need to meet minimums on cleaning supply deliveries
• 1:21:29
  SPEAKER_01: like Cisco or whatnot because you don't need $700 worth of that stuff or $500.
• 1:21:35
  SPEAKER_01: You go and get a couple of gallons of each thing.
• 1:21:38
  SPEAKER_01: So that's like his role now.
• 1:21:39
  SPEAKER_01: And then he'll also check in on Val emotionally and mentally and same thing with me
• 1:21:44
  SPEAKER_01: just to see if we're okay.
• 1:21:47
  SPEAKER_01: And we usually are.
• 1:21:49
  SPEAKER_01: I'll tell you, I've never seen my dad dance so much, but he definitely danced all weddings.
• 1:21:55
  SPEAKER_01: He danced the whole wedding.
• 1:21:57
  SPEAKER_01: They were kicking this man out.
• 1:21:58
  SPEAKER_01: What kind of music did you have at your wedding?
• 1:22:02
  SPEAKER_01: It was hip-hop,
• 1:22:05
  SPEAKER_01: some Peruvian folk music for the Peruvians that came and visited us,
• 1:22:11
  SPEAKER_01: and then lots of 90s,
• 1:22:14
  SPEAKER_01: 2000s R&B,
• 1:22:15
  SPEAKER_01: the stuff that we loved.
• 1:22:19
  SPEAKER_02: that a great thing did you ever go to that restaurant in like downtown lima central
• 1:22:24
  SPEAKER_02: that's like it's like in a monastery or something and it's like all these french
• 1:22:30
  SPEAKER_02: nuns and at the like end of the meal they like all like clap and like saying like
• 1:22:35
  SPEAKER_02: ave maria or something no really no yeah it's i'm sure it's still there but yeah
• 1:22:42
  SPEAKER_02: it's all these like nuns like french nuns that uh
• 1:22:46
  SPEAKER_00: What kind of restaurant?
• 1:22:47
  SPEAKER_02: It's just like a kind of international restaurant run by the nuns.
• 1:22:53
  SPEAKER_02: But it's in the center of Lima.
• 1:22:54
  SPEAKER_02: It's very famous.
• 1:22:55
  SPEAKER_02: I can't remember the name.
• 1:22:56
  SPEAKER_02: But yeah, they sing.
• 1:22:58
  SPEAKER_02: But maybe you could do something like that.
• 1:23:00
  SPEAKER_02: You could rap at the end of the meal or weave that into the tasting menu.
• 1:23:08
  SPEAKER_01: I think it's happened to me a couple of times over the last couple of weeks where people have
• 1:23:16
  SPEAKER_01: The design of the menu actually gives in,
• 1:23:20
  SPEAKER_01: it's like,
• 1:23:21
  SPEAKER_01: it says,
• 1:23:27
  SPEAKER_01: so it says,
• 1:23:28
  SPEAKER_01: actually it reads the Nikkei experience and it's an eight track.
• 1:23:32
  SPEAKER_02: See, there you go, man.
• 1:23:33
  SPEAKER_02: It's just like an album.
• 1:23:35
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that was your question.
• 1:23:38
  SPEAKER_01: Every course has like two, three bites.
• 1:23:42
  SPEAKER_01: But, and then we did like these drawings that we did.
• 1:23:47
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 1:23:47
  SPEAKER_02: What are those?
• 1:23:50
  SPEAKER_01: where these are actually abstract ideas of the dishes dimensions,
• 1:23:58
  SPEAKER_01: of every dishes dimensions,
• 1:24:00
  SPEAKER_01: but we spray painted.
• 1:24:01
  SPEAKER_01: So it's like, we wanted to add the five elements of hip hop as much as we could onto the menu.
• 1:24:08
  SPEAKER_01: Graffiti was one of them.
• 1:24:11
  SPEAKER_01: Making some of these things look like they're break dancing was like one of them.
• 1:24:17
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so I think also like,
• 1:24:20
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, keep my name, the restaurant's name away.
• 1:24:24
  SPEAKER_01: We made it really about like music and then you kind of have like all the courses
• 1:24:31
  SPEAKER_01: or the bites per course.
• 1:24:35
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so, and then it opens like this.
• 1:24:37
  SPEAKER_01: Cool.
• 1:24:38
  SPEAKER_01: So the logo itself may seem,
• 1:24:43
  SPEAKER_01: just like letters.
• 1:24:44
  SPEAKER_01: They're really like two sushi chef hands.
• 1:24:49
  SPEAKER_01: One of them has like a nigiri, like a neta in the palm.
• 1:24:54
  SPEAKER_01: The other one has like a piece of fish.
• 1:24:56
  SPEAKER_01: And it's just like two palms.
• 1:24:57
  SPEAKER_03: All right, that's cool.
• 1:24:59
  SPEAKER_01: It has like a lot of hidden elements.
• 1:25:01
  SPEAKER_01: And I like telling this story with people, but only if they ask.
• 1:25:05
  SPEAKER_01: And then otherwise, it's just there.
• 1:25:07
  SPEAKER_01: It's a representation of us.
• 1:25:08
  SPEAKER_01: Some people find it cool.
• 1:25:10
  SPEAKER_01: Some people kind of leave it there on the counter.
• 1:25:13
  SPEAKER_02: Maybe they find it cool and they're just not vocal about it.
• 1:25:16
  SPEAKER_02: Just like social media, they don't have to talk about it.
• 1:25:23
  SPEAKER_01: So far, good response.
• 1:25:26
  SPEAKER_01: We've been very lucky, to be honest with you, because it seemed like people really missed Itamai.
• 1:25:36
  SPEAKER_01: which was weirdly unexpected.
• 1:25:40
  SPEAKER_01: People to tell you that, it's one thing.
• 1:25:42
  SPEAKER_01: People to show you that a year after you've been closed, it's another.
• 1:25:45
  SPEAKER_01: So it's cool.
• 1:25:48
  SPEAKER_01: It's been a cool process.
• 1:25:50
  SPEAKER_00: Well,
• 1:25:50
  SPEAKER_00: I was thinking for the things that I have read about you,
• 1:25:53
  SPEAKER_00: interviews and descriptions,
• 1:25:56
  SPEAKER_00: I guess it should be precise that it's not an omakase because I think it's kind of
• 1:26:02
  SPEAKER_00: out there.
• 1:26:03
  SPEAKER_00: So for what you're telling us, it's more.
• 1:26:07
  SPEAKER_00: And then the other thing,
• 1:26:07
  SPEAKER_00: like you didn't give up to music at all,
• 1:26:10
  SPEAKER_00: which is the other thing that I have read around.
• 1:26:12
  SPEAKER_00: No.
• 1:26:13
  SPEAKER_00: No, it's very present.
• 1:26:15
  SPEAKER_01: It very much is.
• 1:26:16
  SPEAKER_01: I just don't play my own music.
• 1:26:19
  SPEAKER_01: In this space.
• 1:26:20
  SPEAKER_01: Exactly.
• 1:26:20
  SPEAKER_02: What kind of music do you play during the meal?
• 1:26:24
  SPEAKER_01: It's straight hip hop.
• 1:26:25
  SPEAKER_02: OK, OK, cool.
• 1:26:26
  SPEAKER_01: It's not like it's not like stop playing this.
• 1:26:31
  SPEAKER_01: You can't do fine dining like this.
• 1:26:33
  SPEAKER_01: And it's like, shut up.
• 1:26:35
  SPEAKER_01: Just just relax and vibe out.
• 1:26:37
  SPEAKER_01: You'll be OK, you know.
• 1:26:39
  SPEAKER_00: And then the other thing it's if you have noticed different comments from depending
• 1:26:47
  SPEAKER_00: on groups,
• 1:26:47
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 1:26:47
  SPEAKER_00: Peruvian-Americans,
• 1:26:49
  SPEAKER_00: Peruvians visiting,
• 1:26:51
  SPEAKER_00: just random tourists or people from Europe or Americans that are not Peruvian,
• 1:26:56
  SPEAKER_00: have you noticed that they have a different experience or highlight something from
• 1:27:03
  SPEAKER_00: the menu or the flavors or not really?
• 1:27:07
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I mean, you know, and I don't know, I'm...
• 1:27:16
  SPEAKER_01: I notice these things pretty quick.
• 1:27:18
  SPEAKER_01: On every version of Itamai that we've had,
• 1:27:21
  SPEAKER_01: you know that different demographics just react different to your food.
• 1:27:28
  SPEAKER_01: With this version of Itamai,
• 1:27:31
  SPEAKER_01: I feel like we've had...
• 1:27:35
  SPEAKER_01: So if we split our demographic right now into people who have been to old Itamai
• 1:27:39
  SPEAKER_01: and people who are just coming into new space...
• 1:27:44
  SPEAKER_01: People who are coming to a new space love it.
• 1:27:49
  SPEAKER_01: And people who have been to the oldie that might love it,
• 1:27:59
  SPEAKER_01: but tell you how many times they wish that you could open the other one.
• 1:28:03
  SPEAKER_01: meaning it's like, it's like, I love this.
• 1:28:06
  SPEAKER_01: Like I love this Nando, but I hate that it's only 10 seats.
• 1:28:10
  SPEAKER_01: I hate that.
• 1:28:11
  SPEAKER_01: I hate that.
• 1:28:11
  SPEAKER_01: I used to think I can go to eat twice a week and people really could come to them
• 1:28:16
  SPEAKER_01: twice a week and have a ceviche tiradito and that's it.
• 1:28:20
  SPEAKER_01: And then the next time you go,
• 1:28:21
  SPEAKER_01: you're having like,
• 1:28:22
  SPEAKER_01: like you're going out with friends and you have in every ceviche,
• 1:28:25
  SPEAKER_01: every tiradito,
• 1:28:25
  SPEAKER_01: every,
• 1:28:26
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 1:28:27
  SPEAKER_01: a grill collar,
• 1:28:27
  SPEAKER_01: a rice,
• 1:28:28
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know,
• 1:28:29
  SPEAKER_01: nigiris,
• 1:28:30
  SPEAKER_01: uh,
• 1:28:31
  SPEAKER_01: Where this version of itamai,
• 1:28:33
  SPEAKER_01: because it's a tasty menu like this or nomakase,
• 1:28:36
  SPEAKER_01: you're going to eat what we've chosen for you.
• 1:28:39
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that's a clear distinction in how you used to experience itamai and
• 1:28:46
  SPEAKER_01: what it is now,
• 1:28:47
  SPEAKER_01: which is a chef's choice,
• 1:28:48
  SPEAKER_01: like a nomakase.
• 1:28:50
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that's okay.
• 1:28:52
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, is there ever a thought to open a regular itamai again?
• 1:28:56
  SPEAKER_02: Like a bigger one where not in the design district, but...
• 1:29:02
  SPEAKER_02: you know, your own space.
• 1:29:05
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know.
• 1:29:06
  SPEAKER_01: I think I think where I'm headed, I think I know what I kind of want.
• 1:29:12
  SPEAKER_01: I,
• 1:29:12
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 1:29:13
  SPEAKER_01: originally before Mati's,
• 1:29:15
  SPEAKER_01: we dabbled the idea of like,
• 1:29:17
  SPEAKER_01: should this just should this whole property just be Anita mine?
• 1:29:21
  SPEAKER_01: And that's like the a la carte menu.
• 1:29:24
  SPEAKER_01: This is the tasting.
• 1:29:27
  SPEAKER_01: But I don't know.
• 1:29:30
  SPEAKER_01: I think, I don't know his answer.
• 1:29:32
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not sure.
• 1:29:34
  SPEAKER_01: I know that we have plans to do lunch, which will also not be a la carte, but it will be a prefix.
• 1:29:41
  SPEAKER_03: Okay.
• 1:29:43
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:29:43
  SPEAKER_01: With the prefix menu, it's like, uh, sashimi, uh, soup, salad, nigiri, and dessert.
• 1:29:50
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 1:29:50
  SPEAKER_01: And it's very simple.
• 1:29:51
  SPEAKER_01: Like you come in, let's say I give you two choices.
• 1:29:54
  SPEAKER_01: You can either today,
• 1:29:55
  SPEAKER_01: you can have your,
• 1:29:56
  SPEAKER_01: your grouper ceviche,
• 1:29:57
  SPEAKER_01: which is your like domestic fish,
• 1:29:59
  SPEAKER_01: or let's say you wanna try something Japanese.
• 1:30:00
  SPEAKER_01: We can do a kinmedai tierdito with a seasonal leche kind of like how the old
• 1:30:04
  SPEAKER_01: itemized used to be,
• 1:30:05
  SPEAKER_01: but you can only have either,
• 1:30:07
  SPEAKER_01: or,
• 1:30:07
  SPEAKER_01: but if you come in as a couple,
• 1:30:09
  SPEAKER_01: if you,
• 1:30:09
  SPEAKER_01: if,
• 1:30:09
  SPEAKER_01: if it's you and a friend,
• 1:30:11
  SPEAKER_01: you can have the grouper.
• 1:30:12
  SPEAKER_01: They can have the tirito and then you guys can share.
• 1:30:14
  SPEAKER_01: And the nigiris will have like a three-piece nigiri set or like a two-piece tamaki, like a hand roll set.
• 1:30:22
  SPEAKER_01: Then you will have a choice of soup or salad.
• 1:30:26
  SPEAKER_01: And at the end, a choice of two small desserts.
• 1:30:31
  SPEAKER_01: I want to say like somewhere around 45, 55 is the number that we wanted to reach.
• 1:30:36
  SPEAKER_01: And then a bunch of add-ons, you know, because people always are asking for add-ons.
• 1:30:40
  SPEAKER_01: Even for dinner, right now I'm like, no, I'm not doing any add-ons.
• 1:30:43
  SPEAKER_02: What kind of add-ons do they want?
• 1:30:44
  SPEAKER_02: Like uni and stuff?
• 1:30:47
  SPEAKER_01: People always want, not just caviar, people always want uni.
• 1:30:51
  SPEAKER_01: You know, if you serve like uni botarga, they're like, oh, do you have fresh uni?
• 1:30:54
  SPEAKER_01: And it's like, no, I don't want to serve fresh uni.
• 1:30:56
  SPEAKER_01: That's why I'm going all the way out here to try to make it a botarga.
• 1:31:00
  SPEAKER_01: So you're like, oh, this is cool.
• 1:31:01
  SPEAKER_01: It just should be the same marine intensity, just not served the same way too, you know?
• 1:31:09
  SPEAKER_01: But I also understand like,
• 1:31:12
  SPEAKER_01: these add-ons are cool in an experience like i like going to to add a boy and every
• 1:31:17
  SPEAKER_01: time i've gone to add a boy which i actually think i've been yeah yeah we went
• 1:31:20
  SPEAKER_02: that's the first time i met you did we not do every i think we ordered the whole
• 1:31:26
  SPEAKER_02: menu like yeah pretty much no i think it was the whole menu there was like a group
• 1:31:32
  SPEAKER_01: of us and then we actually met each other in uh
• 1:31:36
  SPEAKER_01: in Madrid we met with Jeff JP and it was, it was pretty cool, man.
• 1:31:40
  SPEAKER_01: What an awesome guy, bro.
• 1:31:42
  SPEAKER_01: Pretty cool.
• 1:31:42
  SPEAKER_01: Pretty cool.
• 1:31:43
  SPEAKER_01: Um, so yeah, like there, we have a plan for that at the end of the summer.
• 1:31:49
  SPEAKER_01: Um,
• 1:31:49
  SPEAKER_01: but it,
• 1:31:50
  SPEAKER_01: I,
• 1:31:50
  SPEAKER_01: I know it's still gonna,
• 1:31:52
  SPEAKER_01: it's still not going to satisfy that one guest who used to come to eat a mile,
• 1:31:58
  SPEAKER_01: eat a roll for 18 bucks.
• 1:32:01
  SPEAKER_01: And then maybe had a, uh,
• 1:32:05
  SPEAKER_01: a crema ladders.
• 1:32:06
  SPEAKER_03: I don't know.
• 1:32:07
  SPEAKER_01: Like I, there's not much I can do.
• 1:32:09
  SPEAKER_01: If you want it,
• 1:32:10
  SPEAKER_01: that version of Vita Maya,
• 1:32:11
  SPEAKER_01: where you could come in and have a bowl,
• 1:32:13
  SPEAKER_01: which was the best deal in town where you're coming in here,
• 1:32:15
  SPEAKER_01: you have like a Shirashi bowl or a ceviche bowl for 18 bucks.
• 1:32:22
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I'm like, we're not there anymore.
• 1:32:24
  SPEAKER_01: We're not in a food hall.
• 1:32:26
  SPEAKER_01: Some of these things,
• 1:32:28
  SPEAKER_01: some of these changes come because the business demands it,
• 1:32:31
  SPEAKER_01: not because it was a chef's choice.
• 1:32:34
  SPEAKER_01: It just happens here that the people making those decisions for the business are
• 1:32:40
  SPEAKER_01: also the people making the decisions for your food.
• 1:32:44
  SPEAKER_01: In a lot of restaurants, that is not the case.
• 1:32:47
  SPEAKER_01: So we don't have to answer a lot of these questions.
• 1:32:50
  SPEAKER_01: But here we do.
• 1:32:50
  SPEAKER_01: Like, I'm aware, but I don't think so.
• 1:32:52
  SPEAKER_01: I think what's going to happen, if I can...
• 1:32:57
  SPEAKER_01: Think of the future.
• 1:32:58
  SPEAKER_01: I think once Mati's lunch opens, then we'll sprinkle a lot of that stuff in there.
• 1:33:04
  SPEAKER_03: Okay.
• 1:33:05
  SPEAKER_01: You know,
• 1:33:05
  SPEAKER_01: it'll have like,
• 1:33:07
  SPEAKER_01: like if Mati's could be a place where you can come in for lunch and have very
• 1:33:10
  SPEAKER_01: different ceviches,
• 1:33:11
  SPEAKER_01: tiritos,
• 1:33:13
  SPEAKER_01: things like that,
• 1:33:13
  SPEAKER_01: then great,
• 1:33:14
  SPEAKER_01: you know?
• 1:33:15
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 1:33:18
  SPEAKER_01: That's where maybe I could see it one day.
• 1:33:20
  SPEAKER_01: Because look, Matisse has so much more to give.
• 1:33:24
  SPEAKER_01: The last five, six months also, I haven't been able to help Val.
• 1:33:30
  SPEAKER_01: It's been Val doing it alone.
• 1:33:32
  SPEAKER_01: And I also know what that means.
• 1:33:34
  SPEAKER_01: And this space is huge.
• 1:33:37
  SPEAKER_01: It's huge.
• 1:33:39
  SPEAKER_01: No one can do it alone.
• 1:33:41
  SPEAKER_01: And I think we're all asking a lot out of her right now.
• 1:33:44
  SPEAKER_01: And as soon as it's felt over the last week,
• 1:33:47
  SPEAKER_01: especially from the first three weeks of opening that we were like getting the hang
• 1:33:51
  SPEAKER_01: of things and,
• 1:33:52
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 1:33:53
  SPEAKER_01: it felt good.
• 1:33:54
  SPEAKER_01: Like, OK, they can handle the mornings where they prep on their own and I can go back, you know, to the
• 1:34:02
  SPEAKER_01: The idea that Val have is from the,
• 1:34:04
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know if you ever visited the prep kitchen of Mati's,
• 1:34:08
  SPEAKER_01: the one that's behind the prep kitchen.
• 1:34:11
  SPEAKER_01: When I saw it,
• 1:34:12
  SPEAKER_01: there was,
• 1:34:12
  SPEAKER_02: I don't think there was any,
• 1:34:13
  SPEAKER_02: I did see it,
• 1:34:14
  SPEAKER_02: but there was just like a couple of tables or something there.
• 1:34:17
  SPEAKER_01: So Val and I, from that part of the restaurant, we're going to feed Mati's.
• 1:34:23
  SPEAKER_01: both restaurants prep-wise.
• 1:34:24
  SPEAKER_01: This is gonna become like our lab.
• 1:34:26
  SPEAKER_01: What we wanna do is like, Val and I wanna have a lab there.
• 1:34:29
  SPEAKER_01: So there may be a time where I take all these agers to the back,
• 1:34:34
  SPEAKER_01: Juliana,
• 1:34:34
  SPEAKER_01: to just say like,
• 1:34:37
  SPEAKER_01: sorry,
• 1:34:37
  SPEAKER_01: like,
• 1:34:37
  SPEAKER_01: yeah,
• 1:34:38
  SPEAKER_01: they don't need to be part of service.
• 1:34:40
  SPEAKER_01: It's whatever.
• 1:34:40
  SPEAKER_01: It's not, you know, as long as we're
• 1:34:44
  SPEAKER_01: you know, getting them to work properly and they work for us.
• 1:34:47
  SPEAKER_01: And that's where, that's where we're leaning.
• 1:34:50
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm pretty excited.
• 1:34:51
  SPEAKER_01: You know, this was like phase two, like opening the mind.
• 1:34:54
  SPEAKER_01: Now phase three for the property is how Val and I are going to integrate both
• 1:34:59
  SPEAKER_01: restaurants to our daily lives and check in on both things that we need to.
• 1:35:04
  SPEAKER_02: All right, man.
• 1:35:06
  SPEAKER_02: Well, I think we've talked for like an hour and a half.
• 1:35:09
  SPEAKER_00: Sounds like a plan.
• 1:35:11
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you guys so much for having me.
• 1:35:13
  SPEAKER_02: No, thanks for talking, man.
• 1:35:14
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you so much, Nando.
• 1:35:15
  SPEAKER_00: It was a pleasure.
• 1:35:16
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, well, I'll be down there soon, I'm sure.
• 1:35:18
  SPEAKER_01: Hopefully.
• 1:35:19
  SPEAKER_00: I can't wait.
• 1:35:20
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you guys so much.
• 1:35:22
  SPEAKER_01: Juliana, it was really nice to meet you.
• 1:35:25
  SPEAKER_01: I'm going to run now.
• 1:35:25
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, don't want to miss that.
• 1:35:26
  SPEAKER_01: Look, hold on.
• 1:35:27
  SPEAKER_01: Good luck with that.
• 1:35:27
  SPEAKER_00: Just look at this.
• 1:35:28
  SPEAKER_01: You may think I'm exaggerating.
• 1:35:30
  SPEAKER_01: Look at this crap.
• 1:35:40
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, you have it there?
• 1:35:43
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, shit.
• 1:35:44
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, my God.
• 1:35:47
  SPEAKER_00: Wow.
• 1:35:48
  SPEAKER_02: Wow, that's a big screw.
• 1:35:54
  SPEAKER_01: Well, with that, I'm signing off.
• 1:35:56
  SPEAKER_01: I won't, you know, but I will see you guys later.
• 1:35:59
  SPEAKER_01: Really nice to meet you, Juliana.
• 1:36:01
  SPEAKER_01: Nick, thank you so much for everything.
• 1:36:03
  SPEAKER_01: Very nice to meet you, too.
• 1:36:04
  SPEAKER_01: Can't wait to see you guys.
• 1:36:05
  SPEAKER_01: Hopefully, I'll see you guys shortly.
• 1:36:07
  SPEAKER_01: Bye-bye.
• 1:36:08
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you, everyone, for listening.
• 1:36:11
  SPEAKER_02: Please go ahead, check out Mati's and Eat My AO in Miami.
• 1:36:17
  SPEAKER_02: And hang out with Valerie and Nando.
• 1:36:21
  SPEAKER_02: And thank you all for listening.
• 1:36:22
  SPEAKER_02: If you haven't subscribed to the newsletter,
• 1:36:25
  SPEAKER_02: please go to www.newworlder.com or search for New Worlder on Substack.
• 1:36:30
  SPEAKER_02: And a big thank you to my friend Pat Buzzard for providing the music for the show.
• 1:36:35
  SPEAKER_02: Find out more about Pat at patbuzzard.com.