24 Hours at a Michelin-Rated Restaurant, From Ingredients To Dinner Service

Sometimes you're juggling,

do I really want this beautiful one thing

that I can maybe only really have for two or three weeks?

It's not really romantic,

cooking with all bunch of bruised stuff,

but I also wanna have a business

that is not just about an exchange of food for money.

Hey guys, I'm chef Greg Baxtrom,

owner of Olmsted and Maison Yaki across the street.

Why don't you head inside and follow me around for the day?

[timer beeps]

All right, so it's 9:00 am.

This is usually when I cover the farmer's market.

I like to come to see what's the best produce to work with

right now on the menu.

Sup chef?

We're at Norwich Meadows Farms,

their thing is that they are the largest organic farm

at the farmer's market.

So when I first get to Norwich,

I usually check in with Zaid and Haifa,

the owners of the farm.

Zaid and I approach shopping together

a couple of different ways.

One is just, what do we need for the menu

that we're currently running?

The other is what's on the farm that's not selling,

or what did he bring too much of to the market

that he's starting to feel like isn't gonna sell,

or that could just end up in the trash, or in the compost?

In sort of a way to mutually benefit

I try to purchase those things to sort of reduce food waste

and to still be putting a great organic product on the menu.

We've got a whole bunch of rutabaga

for the rutabaga pasta dish that we run.

We're gonna get kohlrabi,

and then bok choy for Maison Yaki.

So we're buying for both restaurants right now.

All right, so it's about 10:30,

it's time for me to get back to the restaurant.

I have everything I need from the farm

and we're gonna head back to Brooklyn.

[timer beeping]

[chill music]

Olmsted, we're about six years old.

We did not have a lot of money to open up this restaurant.

And my dad is a carpenter and I can clean pretty well,

so we just kind of together did whatever we could.

So like the bookshelf over the bar,

the whole chef's counter, everything,

the redoing the tables, he did it all.

There's a charm to Olmsted

and I feel like a lot of that has to do with sort of

this humble beginning thing that was started with my dad

and I just kind of doing all the work ourselves.

The chef's counter down and at the end

is literally framed out with barn wood,

from a barn that I used to play with my brother,

and we would jump out of the second floor

and like play tag and hide and seek out of it

and that's what the chef's counter is built out of.

And then the garden kinda has a lot of similar

components to that.

[timer beeping]

It's 11:00 am, it's time for me to check in with the cooks.

[door squeaking]

So we have two kitchens now.

This is the prep kitchen, this is the newer kitchen.

Because our other restaurant, Maison Yaki,

is just across the street what we do

is we basically prep everything

for both restaurants right here,

and then everyone kinda breaks off to their line.

So it's just sort of easier because there's more combies,

there's more firepower in these ones

than the other small service kitchens.

Usually the first two hours of the line cook's day

is here knocking out prep,

and then going over to the hotline.

When we first opened,

this was all we had was this small little thing.

This is the pass, this is where all the food gets plated.

We call this the meat station, the fish station,

and the garnishee station.

But it's just sort of for show,

it's just kind of like whatever can be made with a fryer

and the four burner stove gets made over here

or whatever can be made with a salamander and the flattop

is made here.

We've set up a grill,

whatever can be made with a grill

and an oven gets made there.

It's a small kitchen but it's efficient.

[timer beeps]

I love duck, which is why it's always on the menu.

The best thing that you can do for a duck

is not like some fancy recipe.

You can just have it be 14 days old.

And I know that that that kind of sounds weird

but what happens is there is a ton of water in this fat.

And by giving it some uncovered time in a refrigerator,

the water starts to evaporate and it forms a little skin

and that's how you get really crispy skin on the duck.

And so normally what you would do

is you would take the whole thing

and the whole thing would be 14 days.

But because we use so much duck in this restaurant

and we are fortunately busy,

we don't have storage space for these whole ducks.

So we break it down into all of its parts

and then just the breast gets aged for 14 days.

Everything else gets turned into liver mousse or duck fat

or whatever we wanna do with it.

You know, we have our whole ducks,

we need to break it down into like a million pieces.

They always come with their necks, which we use to stack.

They typically come with some awful livers and hearts,

sometimes gizzards.

So the livers get turned into a mousse that we use

the hearts a lot of the times,

I like to turn them into corn beef.

And then we skewer them

and then serve them as a skewer special across the street

at the French restaurant.

So it's no different than breaking down a chicken.

You break its legs,

you use its own weight to do the work for you.

So now there's just this guy here.

Sometimes you just kind of pinch it, right?

And now it's separated on both sides.

The trick that I was taught about butchering

but in general, but specifically bars this,

you count how many strokes

it takes you to get something off the carcass

and then you just kind of keep reducing that

as you get better.

And then you'll have less knife marks on there

and you'll have this sort of beautiful breast.

Sometimes we'll use the wings for a special

but if we're really in need of a lot of sauce,

we'll just use the wings to make a stock.

So we'll get a little bit more sauce out of it.

The fat comes off.

So these will just get roasted

and that's sort of it for the ducks.

So it turns out that we're actually making liver mousse,

duck liver mousse today.

Every ingredient for the liver mousse has been grammed out

from the spice blend, the salt, sugar,

and the pink salt to deliver themselves.

Bags, melted butter, it's a lot.

Take one of each and blend it and then strain it.

Our mousse is more like a custard.

We made a recipe that makes it really

like even if you're not a liver person,

you'll like this liver.

You can see that they're rendering duck over here.

They're making duck fat French fries for a family meal.

Chef Sherry is working on a new dish.

That's gonna have sort of like a beat crape

king crab and caviar

and we're gonna run it at a special night in Seattle.

People like it.

Sometimes we just get samples in

or we'll have something that's left over

from the menu change.

It'll be a small amount of something,

not enough to run a whole night worth

or really a full menu change,

but it's enough to kind of play around with.

So in this case,

we had a private event

and they requested caviar and king crab legs.

So we have a little bit of that leftover.

So we're playing around

with something that could just be run tonight as a special

or maybe we'll love it

and then it'll be on the menu next week.

But it's just sort of a creative outlet

for some of the stronger members of the team

to be able to play around with some ingredients basically.

[soft music]

It's really, really pretty out here especially at night.

The garden kale and crab Rangoon that we serve

a sweet and sour sauce.

We get that kale from the farmer's market

but also when we can,

we get it from right here in the garden.

All of this is in the brassica family

and all could be used sort of in the same recipe.

So this is sort of more like a Tuscan kale.

These are sort of wider cabbage leaves

in all of which can be incorporated into the recipe.

So the crab Rangoon filling is,

we didn't wanna use cream cheese,

so we make ricotta and we hang it

and then we blend it until it's really, really creamy.

And then we add the picked crab meat and chopped

so that it curl to it.

So we basically just pick an ice cream scooper

and we scoop it onto the lanterns,

fold into a little kind of purse and we fry it.

It's like four to an order.

We serve with chopsticks and sweet zip sauce.

The rutabaga pasta, it's a really simple one.

We have this like Japanese sheeter.

You can basically turn a rutabaga

into like sheets of pasta, like lasagna.

We cut them into like these long noodles.

We just kind of cook the pasta

just like you would in boiling water

and then we glaze it in that butter sauce.

We just make a really simple,

almost like a beurre blanc but less acidic.

And then we put a ton of truffles in it.

And then we finish with a ton of Parmesan cheese

to kind of have it seize up and get nice and salty.

And then we make these like brown butter bits

that we put over the top of it for sort of crunches.

It's also very classic to serve truffles

and brown butter together.

So it's heavy and noodley and tasty.

[timer beeps]

It's about two o'clock.

So the cooks are gonna start slowing up soon.

So all the sous chefs and chefs

they're wrapping up their projects

so that way they can make room including myself

so that way the cooks can kind of spread out

and do their work now.

Across in the prep kitchen they were rendering ducks,

which they brought some of them over here.

So like, you can see like these were 14 days old.

So they're like perfectly shiny and golden brown

and like not bouncy fat, like that's just,

there's nothing left.

There's just a little chip of fat on their crispy skin.

I have to grab some more duck that I butchered in cleanup

but like this is all the tenderloins

and this is pork butt.

It's the easiest way to make a sausage.

Every sausage recipe they're gonna say, you know,

lean meat and fat.

If you just use a pork butt, it's already that ratio.

And so you can just cut up a pork butt,

which is a pork shoulder and grind it

and make sausage out of it.

And so we'll just do that

while incorporating 50% duck into it.

And then a whole bunch of like spices and herbs and garlic

and all that stuff.

[mincer grinding]

I mean, we do duck like 10 ways

but when you get the duck entree at Olmsted,

it always comes in two forms.

So like right now it's duck confit in the form of recoragu.

But often it's also duck sausage

that we can press into a quarter tray

and you can steam it off.

And then you'll have basically like a brick of sausage

and you can cook it perfectly then, right?

What we'll do is then we'll like cut diamonds

or little butans or something

to then like put on a grill.

And so then we can have like a beautiful shape of a sausage

with a piece of duck breast

instead of just like always having

sausage and a casing, right?

It's like a little boring.

Anyways, that is a proper sausage.

And it's nice and crispy, you see?

[timer beeps]

Right around four is when like everyone's culminating here.

The person that works here tonight,

they'll start setting up this how they want it.

Three people will be doing the same for their station.

There'll be gathering a lot of stuff.

They'll start doing

the kind of cooking those last minute things.

Kind of like doing a lot of simple work too,

like knife work like chives and chop shallots and stuff.

And at that same time

is when like the dining room is being set up.

You see that Andrew, our head bartender for the restaurants

is setting up the bar right now.

Now is when people start to come.

[upbeat music]

So people typically start and finish a meal in the garden.

A lot of the snacks are like finger food

or only needs a spoon and same thing with the desserts.

We do s'mores and we introduced like a hot cocktail program.

So you can have like spiked hot cocoa

and you know, hot toddies and all this stuff.

The best compliment I ever received about Olmsted

was a guest said that Olmsted is like if Alinea

and Blue Hill At Stone Barns had a casual baby.

Casual fine dining you know, with the conscience.

Thanks for spending the day with me here at Olmsted.

I hope you enjoyed the watching while we cook.

And next time you're in the neighborhoods, swing by.