I never know entirely what my menu’s gonna look like
when I wake up.
Chubby Fish is a dock-to-table seafood restaurant,
located in Charleston, South Carolina.
We change the menu every day.
It’s a reflection of what’s coming out of our local waters
and local farms. [upbeat music]
We have a unique situation with our suppliers,
where they can bring us whatever they catch,
we purchase it from ’em.
In turn, they agree that the fish was out of the water
that day or the day prior.
And to us, that’s entirely worth it.
[upbeat music]
I’m James London, this is Chubby Fish.
It is 9:00 AM, we are waiting on our first
fish delivery of the day.
So let’s go inside, we’ll wait together.
At Chubby Fish, we’re having to evolve
with what mother nature gives us,
in terms of seafood for the day.
So this is Crosby’s Seafood pulling up.
They’re gonna have our main fish delivery for the day.
[upbeat music]
Right now, we’re dealing with a full moon,
and whenever we have a full moon,
we’re dealing with major tidal changes,
which always kind of disrupts what’s happening
with the fishing.
It forces us to pivot a little bit.
We have some [plastic wrap crinkling]
American Red Snapper coming in.
But what I do is I check our fish,
and make sure those eyes are nice and pretty,
and make sure those gills are nice and blood red,
and those guys are sitting really, really pretty.
We got a beautiful Grouper right here.
We love Cobia.
So we do this either for Crudo or a Tataki.
We’ll do this for Ceviche.
These are Gray Tile fish.
These are generally bycatch.
Anything that’s kinda out of the norm,
are things that we really get excited about.
[upbeat music]
So this is John Fuss.
He’s just started bringing us some
of these beautiful Sheepshead that he’s been targeting.
So this would be our poach fish for this evening.
That keeps it really juicy
and it keeps it from too aggressive of a heat.
So we get a really succulent product at the end of the day.
This is from Sunburst Trout,
really some of the best trout that I’ve ever worked with.
A lot of times when it comes to farm trout,
you can kind of decipher a pond flavor to ’em.
These guys are raised in running water.
But these are Rainbow Trout.
You can see they’re still in rigor.
That’s how fresh they’re, it’s pretty wild.
You can see how ruby that flesh is.
It’s not pale white like you see with a lot
of farm-raised trout.
We generally put these on the menu once, maybe twice a week,
but this is 20 Trout and should be done with this tonight.
All right, so I’m gonna throw this in the walk-in.
[upbeat music]
It’s 11:45 AM, everybody’s on their stations
getting ready for the evening.
Lorenzo here is breaking down
this amazing Trout that came in.
This will be one of our two whole fish for the evening.
As much as possible, we like to present it
as in its natural element.
We like to it present it whole,
so people can really get accustomed to the fish.
Chubby Fish is 1,000 square feet.
We’ll do maybe 165 covers tonight.
This is how we operate.
We sell through everything that we bring in today.
All right, so Lorenzo’s cleaning Trout.
So I’m gonna jump in and clean up
a couple of these Flounders.
These Flounders are coming out of North Carolina.
We treat these pretty simply as well.
So I do a quick scale.
What we do is we take the head off.
So I just find this little belly cavity
right behind these fins, and I just cut around.
Moving that fin, I just take off these side fins,
or the engawa.
Flounder is a flat fish.
Whereas most round fish have two filets,
Flounder has four filets that we can pull off.
We’re gonna do this Fish Whole today.
We will hit ’em with salt on both sides,
and we’ll drop ’em into a ripping hot pan.
Throw ’em in the oven, peel off this skin,
and we’ll baste it through with a little bit
of salt and butter.
That leaves the fish really naked,
so you can kind of taste the uniqueness of Flounder.
We’re gonna be serving this with a little bit
of ginger scallion sauce.
That just stays out of the way
of the inherent flavor of the fish
and really just lets it shine.
Less is more when it comes to fish of this quality.
Flounder is a fish that we can catch year round.
Where Charleston’s located,
you have these two main fisheries
and they’re overlapping right at Charleston,
which means we get double the fun,
double the diversity of anywhere else in the country.
What we’ll do with the heads today,
is we’ll make a broth out of these,
and that’ll kind of serve as the base of our poach bath.
So when we get something that we’ve never worked with,
when we’re testing out a new fish,
we’re gonna try poaching it first.
We’re gonna try grilling it, curing it in salt, olive oil,
lime juice, jalapenos, cilantro stems.
We’re a big fan of slow cooking methods,
methods of cookery that are not gonna interfere
with the flavor of the fish
and are not gonna hammer the fish by overcooking
the part that we’re trying to sear.
[upbeat music]
[scissor cutting]
Flounder’s done, we’re going to roast off these heads.
I’ll lay these flounders out
so they can dry out a little bit
underneath the fan in the walk-in,
so that when we chuck it in our pan later on,
it’s gonna give us a nice clean release.
[upbeat music]
It’s 12:30, our shrimp arrived at the dock,
so we’re gonna go down there, pick it up.
The boat just came in.
It would be too late in the day for them
to catch a delivery to us.
So in order to get the best product possible,
we drive right across the bridge.
So I do the pickup,
A, because I like to keep fostering the relationships
with the purveyors,
but also I wanna take weight off of the kitchen.
Every day, they’re coming in
and they’re prepping from scratch.
They don’t have stuff left over from the night before.
We sell through everything.
So even with them getting there at 11:00 AM
every single day, it’s a scramble
to get that station [truck door slams]
up and running.
Sure we can simplify our menu,
we can simplify our concept,
but we’re really happy with having to go the extra mile
to put the best product on the plate.
You come for your shrimp?
[James] Absolutely.
All right.
[James] Cindy Tarvin is the woman who owns Tarvin Seafood,
and it’s completely a family operation.
Predominantly what we’ll be picking up today
will be our Carolina White Shrimp.
It’s for our Chili Garlic Shrimp.
With a little bit of aromatics,
we know how good her product is.
If she does not have shrimp,
then we don’t have shrimp on the menu at Chubby Fish.
That’s how important she is to our operation.
[Cindy] James has a standing order of 10 pounds a day,
[James] And then sometimes we gotta bump up to 15.
[Cameraman] How long will this shrimp last for you?
This’ll be gone tonight.
Thank you so much, Cindy.
Great seeing you. You’re welcome, James.
Have a good rest of day. All right, you as well.
[truck door slams] We got a new restaurant
under construction,
and we will jump next door and check it out.
So while we’re under construction,
we constantly have to pop over
and make sure everything’s kinda up to our standards.
So I spend a good bit of time over here.
This is kind of a speakeasy concept.
With Chubby Fish, we have a very long wait.
This gives us a place to have people come,
have some small bites if they’re hungry,
have some cocktails before they head over to Chubby Fish
for their table.
This light over here, it’s broken.
I know I need to get that replaced now.
Yesterday I had these temporary A/Cs installed
so that we could start papering wallpaper.
I’m not getting any cooling out of these.
So the humidity in Charleston is like taking a warm bath.
If we have humidity in here,
the wallpaper will fall right off the wall,
so we have to get it air conditioned.
You know, I told myself, after Chubby Fish,
I was never gonna open up a second restaurant.
But it’s also, you know, I really wanted to make sure
that my people have places to grow into,
places to manage as they work their way up.
So that was a big impetus.
Well, I have a really solid crew,
two sous-chefs, Will and Rod.
They’re both killing it over at Chubby Fish.
I’ll mainly focus on getting this kitchen up and running,
getting the private dining going, the bar menu going.
Then I’ll probably just turn it over to one of those guys
and let ’em run with it.
Let’s head back next door
and see what’s going on over there.
[upbeat music]
We’ve talked a lot about our fish
throughout the course of the day,
but we also have a lot of other items on the menu.
These are our Caviar Sammich.
Before we had Caviar service on the menu,
it was an incredible dish,
but it was also very time consuming.
Sometimes we would get hit with like four or five,
six of those at one time,
and it basically took all the steam out of the kitchen.
So we figured this would be a nice quick way
for people to eat their caviar.
We get to do caviar at a very approachable price point,
which is big for us.
I’ll make 75, 100 of these tonight.
People love ’em.
We had our whipped creme fraiche that went on top,
a little bit of lemon zest.
Throw ’em in the oven so they can get nice and toasty.
And then I’m gonna brush with a little bit of drawn butter,
and that’s our Caviar Sammich.
[upbeat music]
So it’s 4:35, we are now doing our
front of the house lineup,
and this is where we communicate all of our changes,
additions, any notes we wanna make on food, on service.
The poached fish for the day is gonna be Sheepshead.
New fishermen on the Sheepshead caught this morning,
I’m really excited about this guy, these Sheepshead,
were in rigor this morning, so sell away on that.
Definitely sell away at those Trout.
They have a shorter shelf life,
so let’s get ’em out of the building as quickly as possible.
[upbeat music]
So it’s five o’clock, we are ready for service.
We got a line of people who are ready to eat,
so now we’re gonna do it.
Let’s go on in.
[upbeat music]
When you come in,
you’re never getting an experience at Chubby Fish
that you’ve had prior.
And it’s constantly searching
for the best product out there,
the freshest product out there.
It’s a constant grind,
but I honestly wouldn’t have it any other way.
[upbeat music]
Source link : http://www.bing.com/news/apiclick.aspx?ref=FexRss&aid=&tid=66ec4f3d85c54b99af8a10a3ccb975ca&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.bonappetit.com%2Fvideo%2Fwatch%2Fon-the-line-the-dock-to-table-restaurant-taking-south-carolina-by-storm&c=8320692842883753590&mkt=en-us
Author :
Publish date : 2024-09-19 05:18:00
Copyright for syndicated content belongs to the linked Source.
