My Delta Force

My restaurant group's R&D team is the beating heart of the operation

Happy Monday, happy March. We’re in the final stretch of winter, Spring is around the corner (and peas, asparagus, strawberries, fava beans…I can’t wait!)

Today I wanted to tell you about a team who is central to everything I do in my restaurants and beyond. We call them R&D—research and development—but I think of them as our Delta Force, a team of superchefs who can do anything and everything.

I’ve introduced you to many of them before—there’s Charisse Grey, who’s been with me for more than a decade and was the brains behind sending paella to space. There’s Tammy Saunders, our pastry chef who created the super colorful vegetable cake. Remember this one?

Hector Contreras, who shared his recipe for Pozole Rojo (which got controversial in the comments on Instagram…”There is no debate. Red forever.” … “The green has more beta carotene and vitamin C" … “All posole is good posole!😍” … I agree!). You might also remember Patricia Blanco from Barcelona, who spent many years running the show at Mercado Little Spain—she’s working on a lot of new concepts right now. Jesus Serrano, who shared his mother’s Puerto Rican pasteles with us a few months ago, is our R&D chef who works closely with minibar, supporting the team there.

Tammy, Charisse, and Hector thinking very carefully about plating

On Wednesday I’m excited to share a recipe from Koji Terano, who you might remember once broke down a 244-pound Atlantic tuna in our kitchen. He grew up in Japan and knows everything there is to know about fish…but the recipe he shared with me, when I asked him for one that he grew up eating, is called Nikujaga, meat and potato stew. It’s an amazing, simple dish…I think you’re going to love it. Stay tuned.

We also have former R&D chefs who stay in the company to take on new roles: Rick Billings, who used to be our pastry chef, now oversees our entire company’s culinary operations. Claudio Foschi, a deeply thoughtful chef, used to run America Eats Tavern and is an expert on American historical foods, and he’s recently taken on the job of head chef at Oyamel…so you know he’s about to go deep on the regions of Mexico!

And others have left us and are doing some incredible things. Ruben Garcia, who was the head of R&D for years, now runs Casa Teresa in Washington DC, serving some amazing homestyle Catalan cooking. Aitor Zabala, who also worked at the very famous elBulli (like Ruben and me), is near to opening Somni in Los Angeles, a restaurant we created years ago which will be reopening in a new form with Aitor in charge.

Me and Ferran, when both of us were much younger (photo by Mark Von Holden/Getty)

If you know about the history of elBulli, you’ll know why R&D is so deep in me and the work we do. It was an incredible restaurant, run by the brilliant Ferran Adrià, who dedicated an entire half of every year to R&D. They closed the restaurant every winter and spring and spent those months thinking, testing, developing, learning. That’s how they were able to push every single boundary there was in cooking—and why so many techniques that were discovered and created there are still considered avant-garde, more than a decade after they closed.

So, what does R&D do? Their primary focus is to develop as much as they can. They are working to create new things as they explore ingredients and techniques. They work with the seasons—they might get in a single shipment of tiny, beautiful kishu mandarins, and hustle to do as much as they can with them, planning dishes for the next season’s harvest. They’re always working with the menu of minibar in mind—my two Michelin-starred avant-garde restaurant in Washington—but not every dish will end up there. The amazing thing about supporting a restaurant group of 30+ concepts—from minibar to The Bazaar to the Spanish sandwich food truck, Pepe—is that there will always be a home for everything. R&D feeds the entire company’s success, literally and figuratively.

The team hard at work

Every day for the team is different. Some days, they’re all in the kitchen working on the same thing—a big party that we might be hosting, or an event that we need our entire laser beam focused on. Other days, they’re all in the kitchen working on their own projects. The pastry team might be testing new petits fours for one of our restaurants, while Hector is developing a vegetable dish for Bazaar, and Koji is testing out a dozen new preparations for fish roe.

Koji’s test batches of karasumi, which is similar to bottarga—cured mullet roe

Some weeks, the entire team is scattered—one might be in Dubai, checking in on progress with our Jaleo there, while another might be in Vegas or Chicago. Often one of them travels with me, depending on what I’m doing—if I have a culinary event, I like to have a trusted friend on stage with me.

And they’re always learning. Their desk—they all share the same desk, the better to think together as a unit—is surrounded by books. They are always getting boxes of products—fish, vegetables, vinegars—and plateware to test out. They even have this white board that looks something like the screen from Minority Report—they use it as they sketch out menus and create new dishes. Sometimes they even go on R&D trips together…here’s a photo of the team at the Chef’s Garden in Ohio a few years ago, when we were doing research for my cookbook Vegetables Unleashed.

I love this team. They really are the beating heart of everything we do. I’ve loved to talk to each of them about the foods they made growing up, from Hector’s pozole to Jesus’ pasteles to Koji’s nikujaga. I’ll keep going with that series—I hope you love it too?