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Celia Lee is the first pastry chef at Mifune, a fine-dining Japanese restaurant in New York City.
For this springtime item on the restaurant’s omakase menu, which always has at least eight courses, Lee simmers peas in heavy cream, blends them all together and then whisks in egg yolks and sugar. She strains it through a sieve, lets it cool and whips it.
She garnishes it with passionfruit curd — similar to lemon curd — pieces of sablé Breton and a sweetened pea sauce.
Price: Part of the $120 tasting menu
For this brunch item at Estiatorio Ornos, a Michael Mina restaurant in Aventura, Fla., chef Nikolaos Georgousis soaks inch-thick slices of brioche in a traditional French toast custard mixture of eggs, sugar and cinnamon. Then he crusts the toast in crumbled baklava crumbs and bakes it until the outside gets crispy, while the inside stays warm and soft. It’s served with roasted apples and caramel.
Price: $21
Michael Lewis, the chef and partner of four-unit izakaya concept Buya, likes the texture — soft but also with a good snap — and lightly nutty flavor of beech mushrooms. So at the restaurant’s Miami location he marinates them in a mixture of sake, ginger, soy sauce, garlic, chiles and thyme. Then he dusts them in tempura flour, dredges them in tempura batter and fries each one to order until it’s crunchy. He dusts it with onion ash and serves it with spiced ranch, and Lewis says it’s ordered by pretty much every table at the restaurant.
Price: $8
This new item at Beefsteak, the four-unit fast-casual vegetable bowl concept by José Andrés’s ThinkFoodGroup, based in Washington, D.C., seeks to honor the carrot.
“Carrots tend to take the backseat when it comes to most recipes,” head chef John White said. “We wanted to put the carrots in the driver seat and let them take you on a vegetable journey.”
The bowl features curried carrots along with cauliflower roasted with curry spices, pickled red onions, cilantro, coconut milk, extra virgin olive oil and pumpkin seeds served with white rice and lentils,.
“The warm spices and sweetness of the carrots create a perfect harmony of flavor, and with the acidity of the pickled onions this dish really comes alive,” White said.
Price: $10
At Camp, a new restaurant in Greenville, S.C., chef Drew Erickson and sous chef Diego Campos are offering this dish of dumplings, named for the Nahuatl word for chile.
For the dish they roast pork belly with garlic, red pepper flakes, cilantro, ponzu and soy sauce and combine that with shrimp and cilantro as the filling for the dumplings, which are served in a sauce of ponzu with minced ginger, chopped cashews, scallion and micro cilantro, finished with xilli oil.
Price: $11
