Miami's Best New Restaurant Serves a Peruvian Grandma’s Recipes

[upbeat music]

Ever since we started a year ago with Maty's,

the restaurant just blew up.

We entered the Michelin guide.

Over 10 publications have written about us.

I oversee the prep kitchen.

My team preps for the entire week,

not only for one day, we are ready for war,

we are ready to keep crushing.

And we use traditional Peruvian techniques,

but elevate it with influences from Miami.

Maty is actually chef Val's grandmother.

Most of the recipes have been passed down four generations.

Learning these recipes

from a family that I didn't come from is very special.

I will forever be grateful.

Oh my god.

[Giuliana laughs]

Hi, how are you?

Good morning, I'm Giuli, I'm the prep chef here at Maty's.

I just got 200 pounds of oxtail, let's get to work.

Come on in.

[jazz music]

I do this probably once a week, twice,

depending on how busy we are.

This is our dining room.

Follow me, I'm taking you through the kitchen

where magic happens every day.

This is the first thing we should do in the morning,

since it takes six hours to braise.

We're just gonna do 25 pounds this morning.

I'm gonna put this away, I'm gonna change.

No one has come yet, I'm the first one here.

[jazz music continues]

Oxtail is the tail of the ox.

This is the bone, and it is surrounded

by a lot of tendons and meat and fat,

so that's what we're gonna sear first

so we get all the caramelization from the fat and the meat.

We stir fry it during service,

with onions, scallions, tomatoes, and crispy potatoes

coming all the way from Peru.

This is a hot skillet.

Big quantities, this is where we do it.

We're gonna start putting some oil.

[metal clinking]

We're using oxtail just to make honor

of the Caribbean culture.

My boss is Valerie Mandel who grew up here in Miami,

eating Peruvian food.

But the braise and the sauce we're making

is from Maty's recipe.

[food sizzling]

See the color?

That's what we want.

Every single piece, every side, and this is very hot.

Everything is good when we cook it slow.

I am a very patient person, honestly.

I think you have to have a lot of patience to be a chef,

if you're gonna deal with people,

if you're gonna, you kind of act like a psychologist

also with working and leading the kitchen you know?

So this, all of that is left right here in the skillet

is the caramelization of the oxtail, all the fat,

and that's where we wanna cook all the vegetables,

so they get all the flavor from the meat.

200 pounds makes like 50 portions.

We just started doing like 300 covers a night,

and maybe before when we started

we started cooking only 25 pounds.

This is non stop, non stop, non stop, and it's pretty fun.

Not even in our wildest dreams

we thought we were gonna be where we at right now.

But like right around September

we just got three nominations like in the same week,

and it just popped.

These are scotch bonnet peppers.

[Giuliana coughs]

Can you feel that?

[Giuliana laughs]

We're just trying to sweat all the vegetables.

A little bit of soy sauce

so everything can come out from the bottom.

Oyster sauce, this is a very Asian ingredient,

there's a lot of Asian culture in the Peruvian cuisine.

Hoisin sauce.

Hey good morning.

[people talking indistinctly]

[Giuliana laughs]

Where's the Asian influence come from?

You see it right here you know?

[Valerie laughs] My grandmother and my grandparents.

My great grandparents immigrated from China to Peru

in the late 1800's, and then here we are.

I think our menu is a mix of all the Peruvian traditions,

but somebody who's already left for 20 years ago,

so we have to work with the products we have here.

My grandmother did write a lotta recipes,

but also we were just born in a house that cooks,

food was so important that we just grew up

eating really good food,

and watching our grandparents cook really good food,

and our great grandparents cook really good food.

We are very much.

[Valerie] We're besties!

We're besties. [Giuliana laughs]

This is sauce from the previous oxtail,

so that's why we're not adding salt,

we're not adding any chicken stock

since this has already a lot of flavor

from the six hours that cooked last time.

It's like a mother sauce.

[metal clinking]

Oh my god, hold up.

There you go.

There is a lot of heavy lifting,

and we are pretty much all women here.

Working with a lot of women feels very powerful.

It's a women dominated kitchen, so it feels great.

We're gonna add the water, oxtail, mushrooms,

and then that's it.

Now this is gonna go for about four to five hours.

So now it's 9:15,

I'm gonna go to the prep kitchen in the back.

Let's go check on the list

and see what we're gonna do for the day

and assign tasks to everyone.

[upbeat music]

Good morning. [Giuliana laughs]

This is Mama D.

Hola.

Hola. She's a mama from everyone.

This is our fish counts for the day.

This is what we have from the night before.

Normally I get the counts of what we did in the week

to have an idea of how much I can prep for the day.

We're missing three other people, they're late,

they're gonna make family meal,

when they're late they make family meal.

[Giuliana laughs]

So we're gonna do six cases of limes today.

Mama, leche.

The leche did it, we squeeze every lime

with the hand squeezer, so it's very painful.

If we over squeeze the limes

we get the oil from the limes,

the [Giuliana speaking foreign language] we don't want

the bitterness in our leche

[Giuliana speaking foreign language]

which is the main thing probably for every dish.

I'm responsible of overseeing the prep

and making sure everything is ready for service.

And I also think I'm very organized,

one of the most organized here.

[Giuliana laughs]

I am gonna work on geoduck.

This part is only for fish.

For today we're gonna do 30 mixtos.

I want 100 oysters pre shucked,

I want 60 portions of scallops,

25 tunas, and 25 campaches.

By three PM I want this ready, okay?

[Giuliana laughs]

I'm gonna put this where I want for everyone to see.

And then we have some geoduck that we're gonna clean.

[light music]

This is heavy [Giuliana groans] oh my god.

[Giuliana laughs]

Oh my god.

We just got these geoduck from Washington.

Geoduck is one of the largest clams

that we get from shellfish farms.

It is part of our ceviche mixto.

In our ceviche mixto right now

we are working with black grouper,

we have surf clams, shrimp, and octopus.

We make it with our [Giuliana speaking foreign language]

which is very spicy,

it's one of the hottest peppers in Peru.

I love ceviche, I can eat that every day.

Look at the reflexes of the geoduck.

They're still moving.

See that?

This means it's very fresh.

Water is ready,

so we're gonna put and cook the geoduck

to change the texture of the geoduck a little bit.

We're gonna put three first.

We're gonna count one minute.

Just to not to lower the temperature of the water,

and make sure that it's cooked properly.

We don't wanna overcook the geoduck

so that's why we put it right away into ice bath.

It helps to remove everything from the geoduck.

[Giuliana laughs]

It's like, I don't wanna get cooked, probably.

So Papa Chang, who is the dad of the family,

he's the master, immigrated to the US years and years ago

to provide for his family of course.

After he arrived, his first job here was as a sushi chef.

That's why we work with a lot of seafood here,

they pretty much,

that's what they did their entire lives so.

[metal clinking]

Oh wow.

It's crazy, 'cause out of this whole thing

we just get this part to actually use it for the ceviche.

The other part that we don't slice for ceviche,

we use it to make stocks.

I'm gonna take out the shell first.

I'm taking out the membrane, the first membrane.

Geoduck is probably the sweetest clam from all the clams.

This is the inside of the shell.

Look at that.

[Giuliana laughs]

I wonder who dig in the sand

and thought, Oh let's try this, let's eat this.

Who thought?

But here we are.

Okay, so we're gonna cut it in half.

[light music]

This is how it looks.

I'm gonna let it air dry in the walk in cooler.

It's already 10:30,

let's go make some huacatay oil for our scallop ceviche.

[Giuliani claps hands]

[people talking indistinctly]

[light music]

This is our service kitchen actually.

This is our huacatay, we get it frozen from our purveyor,

just because we want big quantities.

I wish you can smell this, but it is delicious.

[Giuliana speaking Spanish]

It tastes like licorice,

like basil, it's a mix of tarragon, limes, very powerful.

I know Peruvian's use it for a lot of dishes,

especially like stews and soups.

So we're just gonna pass it through boiling water,

just like shock the huacatay and sear that green color.

And then we're just gonna stop the cooking in ice.

Just a super fast procedure.

I do this to help oxidation,

so if we don't do this,

it will turn very dark super fast,

and it won't last for our last purpose you know?

So, for the shelf life.

This huacatay oil, mainly we use it for the scallop ceviche,

which is also one of our biggest sells here at Maty's.

The scallop ceviche has the hotate scallop

that we get from Japan.

We cover the scallop ceviche with some green grapes.

Normally the person in charge of that station

of the ceviche station

has to shave the grapes every day for that dish,

probably four to five cases on a busy Saturday.

The dish actually is very beautiful, it's green,

it's just a mix of sweet and spicy and limey, it's perfect.

This is ready.

I like being a prep chef,

I'm a morning person, I like my routines,

I like waking up early, get here,

like I need like to master things

and to know what we're doing during the day.

We're just gonna squeeze.

I like to do it in small parts.

I'm just taking out the water,

so we make sure we separate the water from the oil.

[upbeat music]

So what we're gonna do right now

is we're gonna weigh what we got

after squeezing the huacatay,

and adding double of the amount

of olive oil and canola oil.

We're gonna blend until the base is very hot.

It emulsifies better because of the heat.

It's very dense.

It's gonna take a day to actually get the oil from this.

We don't squeeze it by hand

because we don't want the sediments in our oil,

we want it as clean as green as possible.

Okay, so I'm gonna leave this here,

it will be ready tomorrow.

I have to go and break some dorade that just arrived,

so let's go, follow me for my next task.

[jazz music]

We're gonna start breaking down the fish.

The way we cook it,

normally we do like 60 dorade's a day.

On our busiest Saturday we've done 80.

It comes with a beurre blanc sauce,

which is a very French-y sauce

based off white wine, and shallots, and garlic,

and we make it Peruvian adding aji amarillo crema,

which is another pepper that Peruvian's use.

We over roast it with the skin side up

so we can protect the meat.

The skin gets crispy, crunchy, you can eat it.

It's probably one of the most delicious fish in Peru

due to their fat content, it's like very hearty and tasty.

So we're gonna open it through the head.

Slice it very tight to the bone, and very careful.

We go all the way down without making a hole

on the other side.

What I like to do here is to open with my scissors.

We use a lot of scissors for precision,

and you will see why.

[scissors clinking]

I'm just taking apart the spine from the meat.

I am butterflying this fish from the head.

We do the same on the other side, like a little bag.

You always have to wipe your knives

before doing another transition,

not to get the meat dirty with blood, you know?

Here comes the fun part.

Before taking the spine,

I like to open it through the mouth.

[light music]

So my dad used to be a shrimp farmer,

and I remember him waking us up at 4 AM in the morning

to go fish.

And I remember seeing all of these.

I never thought I would actually live by doing this,

not even in my wildest dreams, like I always said.

Definitely cooking is my lifestyle right now.

Now I think, oh what would I do if I'm not doing this?

Like, I have no idea.

I thought I wanted to be like a professional gymnast,

and I'm here breaking down a lot of fish.

[Giuliana laughs]

I moved from my house when I was 18,

and I started traveling.

I went to Argentina, I studied in Argentina,

and then I went to Colombia,

after that I ended up in Mexico,

and then I ended up here, six years ago.

I miss home, one day I'll be back.

We're just gonna cover it with our maguro,

this is bamboo paper,

which will preserve better the meat of the fish.

So now I have to finish 30 dorades for today,

so let's keep working before service starts at four.

[light music]

We're ready to go eat.

After we have family meal

we're gonna give the counts for today's service,

so let's do it.

As the morning sous chef

I have to make sure everything is ready for service,

and making sure that I'm giving all the counts

to my team that's gonna take on for the rest of the night,

so they cannot leave until they're done.

This is chef Luci.

Hello.

So basically we have two lists,

we have our opening list and our closing list.

At the end of the night I leave chef Julie our accounts

of what was our remaining inventory,

and then she tells me what the pars are

for the rest of the night.

And then I delegate that to my team over here.

For today, oysters, we have pink moon.

For the mixtos we're gonna do--

All the tartar's been cut? Everything has been cut.

So Luci, I'm out.

[upbeat music]

[Giuliana laughs] So, I am done now for the day.

So I hope you had a glimpse of my life here at Maty's.

I'm done, and I'm out, I'm going to the beach, peace out.

Bye.

[curtain clinking]

[Giuliani laughs]