Behind the scenes in our test kitchen…

A new series on YouTube shows the processes of our R&D Team!

Hola my friends!

Lately, I have been sharing more about my team with you...to introduce to you the amazing people that help create the menus, cookbooks, recipes, tv shows, and concepts behind all of our restaurants. A few weeks ago, I introduced you to Charisse Grey, the head of the R&D kitchen, and now I am so excited to share with you a new YouTube series that we filmed in our R&D Kitchen in Washington DC. Think of this place like Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory, except our Oompa Loompas create things like cotton candy foie gras and deconstructed Philly Cheesesteak. 

In this new video series, you’ll meet the other super amazing chefs on the R&D team and the dishes they come up with. Last week we shared a video of R&D chef Jesús Serrano creating a golf ball cake in honor of The Masters. Jesús is from Puerto Rico and he volunteered for WCK after Hurricane María, then started off at Minibar as a pastry chef and then joined the R&D team. 

He is a very creative chef and has these wild ideas in his brain that he brings to life in our little laboratory, our R&D kitchen in DC. Here you can watch how he created this chocolate-filled golf ball with a cherry ganache center, served on a chocolate rice crispy wafer covered with freeze-dried sweet peas. Like every dish that we work on, this recipe is an experiment. Watch to see if it worked!  

Today, we are launching the second video in the series, this one shows R&D chef Hector Contreras who started at Somni in Los Angeles (our 2-Michelin Star restaurant in Los Angeles that closed during the pandemic). Here he is in the R&D kitchen developing a chawanmushi—a savory Japanese egg custard—with the vegetable called kohlrabi. He experimented with creating a puree from the greens and a custard with kombu water and an extraction of a red seaweed that creates a creamy flan-like texture…it’s a wild one. (Also, can you say kohlrabi chawanmushi ten times fast??)

What’s cool is you see that the dish takes a long, long time to perfect. We create, taste, give notes, then recreate, taste and talk even more, and go on and on until it’s just right. It’s a process, but it’s worth it. 

It’s very exciting to share these videos of the R&D team, giving you a way to see for yourselves how they work and the process of developing a dish from an idea to the final plating. These videos in our R&D kitchen help me to bring you all closer to our community of chefs. They deserve the spotlight because they really put their heart and soul into the food you will eventually eat at one of my restaurants! I think if you watch them you’ll also pick up some cool cooking techniques and tips, so that’s a good reason to tune in too. 

I hope you enjoy watching these behind the scenes videos from our kitchen!