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Ginza Chicken
Sake No Hana, a restaurant opened in December by Tao Group Hospitality on New York City’s Lower East Side, serves this dish developed by Jason Hall, the company’s vice president of culinary operations. It’s inspired by the chicken soup the team enjoyed during a research visit to Tokyo at a ramen shop in the Ginza district.
Half an Amish chicken, with the foot still attached, is marinated for three days with sake, ginger, yuzu kosho, and miso. Then it’s roasted and served with a sauce made with “super reduced” stock of chicken feet with ginger, garlic, scallions, and shiso. It’s garnished with chrysanthemum greens and lemon.
Price: $34
Hamachi Tacos
Chef and restaurateur Michael Mina has reopened StripSteak, his steak house at the Mandalay Bay Las Vegas, and is offering this take on a traditional Japanese hand roll, developed by chef Kyle Johnson.
He cooks sushi rice and mixes it with rice vinegar, salt, sugar, and kombu, along with minced scallion and ginger. He keeps that warm while dicing raw hamachi and mixing it with salmon roe.
He makes the taco shells by layering spring roll wrappers with sheets of nori seaweed and frying them in a taco mold.
He places the rice in the shell, tops it with the hamachi mix and tops it all in wasabi-spiked flying fish roe, or tobiko.
Price: $28
NY Bodega Sour
Marshall Minaya, beverage director of Madame George, a 4,400 square-foot subterranean cocktail lounge in Midtown Manhattan, drew inspiration from the Everything Bagel for this cocktail, which combines two ounces of bacon fat washed 77 Rye from Breuckelen Distilling with ¾ ounce each of lemon juice and grade B maple syrup, two dashes of Regans Orange Bitters and an egg white, which are all dry shaken and then shaken again with ice, double strained, poured into a chilled glass designed to resemble a bodega coffee cup, and garnished with black and white sesame seeds. Then its placed in a smoking chamber and, using a smoke gun, smoked with vaporized Everything bagel seasoning.
Price: $20
Cacio e Pepe Gyoza
PastaRamen started as an invite-only pop-up featuring what co-founder and chef-partner Robbie Felice calls Wafu-Italian, a cuisine that follows the traditions of Japanese and Italian kitchens. After two years of events across the country, Montclair Hospitality Group finally just opened the first brick-and-mortar PastaRamen in Montclair, N.J., where it serves this dish, for which Felice heats mozzarella, stracchino, and Parmigiano-Reggiano cheeses together to form a thick paste that he then cools and pipes into gyoza wrappers, which are steamed, fried and then topped with cracked black pepper and Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese.
Price: $22
Grilled Octopus over flageolet and fava beans
At Figlia, a recently opened restaurant in the Queens neighborhood of Astoria, N.Y., owner Riccardo Darhda and chef de cuisine Ariel Villegas developed this dish, for which Spanish octopus is poached for around two hours with white wine, shallots, thyme, and olive oil. It’s cooled, portioned and refrigerated.
Separately he cooks flageolet beans with Spanish onions and garlic until they’re al dente and then mixes them with boiled fava beans.
At service the octopus is brushed with olive oil and cooked on a hot charcoal grill for a minute or two until each side is charred. Then it’s cut into three pieces, seasoned with Aleppo pepper flavored salt and lemon olive oil and served over the beans which have been tossed with minced shallots, lemon olive oil, oregano, salt, and ground pepperoncino peppers. The dish is finished with coarsely ground Tellicherry or Zanzibar black pepper.
Price: $22
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