A Day With a Michelin-Starred Chef, Making Fresh Pasta & Running a Kitchen

What people don't realize in Italia

is that there's 20 different regions.

Each region has its own style of cuisine,

and we focus on the region of Emilia-Romagna.

The cuisine of Emilia-Romagna is based on pasta all'uovo,

pasta made from eggs.

Normally, it's made by a nonna, could be a rezdora,

whoever is the head of the household is, right,

rolled al mattarello, with a huge rolling pin.

We want the feeling of when you walk

into someone's house at the end of the day.

[upbeat music]

Hi everyone, welcome to Rezdora in New York City.

I'm Stefano Secchi, the chef here.

Come on in.

From 9:00 AM, we're about to get started.

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So the kitchen's divided into two areas.

This is kind of like where we expo

and where all the cooking gets done.

We have arrosto here on the left-hand side.

Right behind there is pasta.

We have two wells.

We have a combi oven.

Antipasto, Sam's cutting up fettunta for tonight.

Let me take you on down to the other part of it.

Perfect example of working in basements in New York City.

I mean, I've hit my head so many times,

but it doesn't matter anymore.

But yeah, it's the thing, this is a small space,

but it's the best, we get a lot done here.

And then on the right-hand side,

you're gonna see where all the pasta gets made.

They're there from 9:00 in the morning

until 6:00 at night, all day, seven days a week.

[upbeat music]

We'll start making pasta doughs at around 9:00, 9:30.

We have around nine different pasta doughs

that we use right now.

All of our pasta has been handmade

and that's what we specialize in at Rezdora, right?

Whether it be, you know, extruded, rolled, on mattarello.

Who are we if we're gonna borrow our cuisine to not like

have respect for the history and the tradition of it?

All right, so we're gonna make the spinach cappelletti dough

for Nonna Walking Through the Forest.

This is what built the restaurant.

Grandma Walking through the Forest,

that's based on antipasto and primi

that I used to eat with this nonna every Sunday

when I was off of work over there.

She served it to me once, for the first time,

and she put that down with little pieces of parmigiano

and just a little affetati as well, or prosciutto.

I cut into it.

I put in my mouth, and I was like, This is incredible.

I've got these really beautiful heirloom eggs

that we use for all of our fresh pasta.

And my father's from Sardinia and we have a farm there.

And all the vegetable scraps and the watermelon rinds

and everything, we feed to our chickens.

And then you get these really dark yolks.

You can't go to the supermarket and find yolks like that.

It gets me really excited.

Small little things in life

and this is one of them, definitely, right?

For that spinach that we just blanched,

we're gonna blend this with those beautiful eggs

that you saw, the dark orange yolks.

We're gonna pour all the spinaci in.

And this will give the cappelletti

the beautiful dark green color that we're looking for.

We extrude all the spaghettoni today

for the ricci di mare, the sea urchin pasta

'cause we're getting fresh sea urchin in

a little bit later this morning.

It's new.

It's gonna be sea urchin with salsa pomodoro.

And then we're gonna finish with more fresh sea urchin

on top, extra virgin olive oil, and mollica,

so you get like the texture as well.

So we get the color

from the inchiostro di calamaro, the squid ink.

Do you see these ridges that I think are so important?

I make my dough a little bit wetter than you're supposed to

just 'cause I want the ridges from the bronze dye

'cause all that, it's gonna attach

to the salsa ricci di mare,

which is pomodoro and blended up ricci.

Again, that pasta has like three ingredients tops,

but it's intense, you know, sea urchin flavors.

So that's what we're looking for.

It's gonna be amazing.

Now I'm also gonna work on doing strozzapreti dough,

which is gonna be the one pasta dough

that we do without any eggs.

It's just water, semolina and doppio zero.

Doppio zero flour, it's like highly refined.

It makes just a beautiful, soft wheat pasta.

And so strozzapreti means pre-stranglers

because the rumor is, is that like a priest used to come

invite themselves over to houses and like they would eat

all the food of the nonnas of the family.

So these nonnas started coming up with this pasta

that it would be called strozzapreti or pre-stranglers

'cause they were hoping they ate so much

that they would never come back again.

See how the spring back was so quick there?

That's what we're looking for, okay?

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Okay, so we're gonna hand-shape the cappelletti right now.

This is the Ferrari of pasta machines, Monferrina.

Why is it the Ferrari of pasta machines?

Because there's a rumor that

Fiat is made in Piedmont, in Turin, right?

And so like there's a rumor that engineers

from Fiat were like tired of making cars.

They're like, listen, we're gonna go

and make pasta machines.

So it's got some horsepower to it.

It's incredibly sturdy.

Rarely fails.

Accept no substitutes, yeah?

And one thing that we do at Rezdora that you don't see

at a lot of places is that we laminate our dough.

So you get like more of an al dente texture

when you have fresh pasta, right?

Like the heart of our food is

pasta all'uovo and handmade pasta.

We have so many different shapes that

it stays in rotation.

It stays really fresh, right?

So yeah, you can freeze it and you can

put some in the fridge and things of that nature.

But when you have so many shapes,

you're consistently making it all the time.

So there's a lot of turnover.

So and we just choose for that to be the case.

We'll start going through extruded pastas first,

put 'em on a sheet tray, and then let that rest

so they can dry a little bit before we bag those guys up.

We only have five hours 'til service, 'til service begins.

Pastry chef is working to set up her station,

Dominica, Dominique.

Anthony's upstairs.

He's gonna be doing costata.

We have like an amazing team upstairs,

and we gotta kick it into gear, yeah.

100%.

[upbeat jazz music]

We get most of our deliveries

around 12:30 to 1:00 PM window.

And we probably have, I think on our list,

25 to 30 different purveyors, so it's massive.

Some purveyors do way better job

on one or two ingredients than others do, right?

And the idea for us is

that we are very ingredient-driven.

So we wanna find the best of the best

that we can get our hands on, and then take it from there.

People wait for like a month,

month and a half to get a reservation here.

It's like, we're gonna get the best that we can.

We just got it.

The sea urchin in from Maine,

Tim from Regalis just brought 'em.

I mean, just look, they're still moving,

really beautiful.

Those super cold waters this time of year

lead to that really bright vibrant color

and that extremely sweet finish to it,

just pure essence of the ocean really.

These will be the base of the top

for the spaghettoni that we do a little bit later, yeah?

I mean, to be honest with you,

there's nothing that's better than that, yeah?

I mean, it's unbelievable.

What you guys are all gonna taste right now.

I mean, we're going,

we're breaking the fourth wall right now.

You have to taste it.

[Cameraman] Thank you so much.

Of course, when it's so cold in the water,

and they're just sweet like that, it's unbelievable, right?

You cannot describe that to someone unless they taste it.

It's impossible.

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2:00 PM, I encourage the staff to experiment

and really get behind doing, putting up dishes.

I mean, that's like the best part

is the experimentation side.

So Ottavio is a sous chef here,

and we've been talking about mozzarella for a long time.

He's got an amazing idea to do

a mozzarella affumicata, smoked mozzarella.

So what we're gonna do is we just got our mozzarella

in today so basically the hard part of the leek,

the outer part of the leek,

I use it to wrap around the mozzarella

so that when I put it in a smoker,

it's actually gonna start getting the flavors of leeks.

And after 20 minutes, we have a nice smoked mozzarella.

So we have leeks four different ways.

We have the leek puree.

There's also some apple vinegar inside

so it adds some acidity to the plate.

Mozzarella.

Here we're gonna have our braised leeks.

This has been braised for about an hour.

Some nice maldon salt.

The fried leeks on top,

which adds a nice crunch to the plate.

And we'll go through three or four renditions

of this plate to find something that we really like.

So mozzarella affumicata,

you have the sweetness of the saba,

you have the sweetness of the leeks,

and you have the beautiful green leek oil to finish it off.

And again, we're in the early stages and this is what we do.

We'll put three or four or five different dishes up

until we kinda like all of us talk, we taste

and we're like, this is what we're happy with, you know?

Definitely a group effort, a hundred percent.

[smooth jazz music]

We gotta get the costata cut right now.

We have to powder it.

We have to tie it.

We have to get all the pasta set up.

We gotta get all the arrosto set up.

I mean, we really gotta pick it up.

So we have one big steak on our menu,

which is like our large format dish

that people are meant to share, and we hand cut it,

so it's a different size every time,

and then we rub it with porchini.

In the middle of Modena,

they have all these porcini mushrooms

that are drying from the season, right?

We dry this out in the oven.

We blend them with 3% salt,

and it becomes the powder for the costata.

You get this really earthy incredible

delicious funk from the 68 dry-aged

plus the porcini as well and the brown butter.

[Anthony] And it's like- It's next level.

Yeah, it's really delicious.

Really, really delicious.

So Anthony's our executive sous.

He's a legend at breaking down lobster.

So we've already steamed it,

but we steam it around 10 to 15% of the way.

And then we're gonna break it down.

We're gonna use the shells for the stock

that we're gonna make.

And then we're gonna take the meat,

and that's gonna go in the strozzapreti

that you saw me rolling earlier

with lobster stock and pomodoro.

We have, you know, a couple hours left before service

so we really have to start hustling now.

We have to get going so we can be fully set

for the dining room at five.

[smooth jazz music]

We don't have too many changes,

but we reprint the menu daily based on the changes.

So like instead of finferli chanterelles,

we're gonna now move on to spugnole,

which are morels in Italiano.

We're gonna take off the sage

'cause we're gonna have brown butter and spugnole.

We're gonna do that ricotta, egg yolk,

spugnole, and black truffle.

Really, really delicious.

And that's really the only change

that we have for the menu today.

We have to put menus down in the covers.

We have to get everything prepped and set up over here.

And like we have what [speaking foreign language]

one hour and fifteen minutes

plus family meal to take down so.

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We have a pre-shift meeting every night.

So the chefs come with like all of our 86s,

what we're low on, what we'd like to try and push,

like what things are really delicious.

Food notes, we've changed the chanterelle,

the finferli, on the Uovo to spugnole.

We have these really beautiful morels

that come from the Himalayans.

They're so big, this size, so delicious, so beautiful.

Have a great service, guys, grazie.

[staff claps]

[upbeat music]

Okay, so 4:53, we open in seven minutes.

I'm just gonna show you,

lemme show you the spread of covers tonight.

So at five o'clock, we have a good hit.

This is where we list everyone coming in,

people that we know, or that are regulars

of the family, and any allergies at all.

7:00 to 7:30, we get a really big hit,

25, 30 people, more or less.

[indistinct] 9:30, 9:46 is always a good one

because you know a lot of people that live

in the neighborhood that like are like just finishing work

or like want to come and relax

and the ambiance is amazing.

[upbeat music]

It's like the calm before the storm.

We have three or four tables coming in.

The bar's gonna slowly get full up.

It's gonna get very crazy, very quick.

Sal is the one that makes it all happen.

He's a monster.

You'll see during service, like we, none of this would work.

None of that would work.

And none of this would work.

This is what it's all about. You learn from the best.

Easy, easy, easy.

So we've got three chits in already.

Our chits pretty much talk little bit about people

that are coming in to dine with us.

This a birthday here for Evan.

They have to be out by 7:00 PM for instance.

Okay, so first order gnocco fritto, cacio.

We split the course line, put the table in bold.

They have to do a cacio, which is a lettuce,

so that'll be about two or three minutes.

[speaking foreign language]

And so the gnocco, we're gonna fire

three or four minutes afterwards.

Our GM's parents are in too

so we're gonna like we're gonna spoil him.

It'll be great.

[Stefano speaks Italian]

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I think you always feel somewhat of the pressure, right?

But it's just because I love what I do.

I wouldn't do anything else.

The adrenaline you don't find anywhere, right?

You can't tell me, sitting in front of a computer

on a Excel sheet gives you that adrenaline, right?

So like, so for me to be able to get really excited

and start to ramp up,

that's something that I think is inherent

in a lot of cooks, to be honest.

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[man speaking Italian]

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Okay, guys, thank you.

We'll see you later.

I got three more hours.

We got four more hours of this.

So we're signing off right now, all right?

See you very soon [indistinct]