After more than a decade of working in Michelin-starred kitchens — including helping Atomix earn two Michelin stars and, most recently, a stint at three-starred The French Laundry — chef Hasung Lee is opening his own restaurant in New York City. Oyatte features an eight-course tasting menu using farm-fresh produce from Crown Daisy Farm in upstate New York.
In this episode of Now Open, Lee walks through how to prepare some of the new restaurant’s signature dishes, starting with a smoked quail dish with an incredibly rich, egg-based sauce. The quail from Wolfe Ranch is brined, glazed, and finally smoked over the course of two days. For the accompaniments, a bearnaise sauce is whipped in a blender, an einkorn base is mixed together, and white asparagus is seared quickly. The fowl dish is plated with delicate greens on top and a bubbly, fermented butternut squash hot sauce.
Crown Daisy Farm owner Brett Ellis stops by with Oyatte’s produce delivery for the week, including tender, small kohlrabi that are served peeled and delicately covered in pickled lilac flower and Amagansett sea salt. The root vegetable is served with dipping sauces that utilize more preserved produce, like kumquats and cherry blossoms. The spring green porridge is another vegetable-filled dish that Lee famously cooked on Netflix’s Korean competition cooking show, Culinary Class Wars. The rice dish’s base is a sauce made with chrysanthemum and wild water parsley. After the rice is cooked in that green sauce, it’s plated with a pile of soy sauce-macerated truffle slices.
A large squid, the protein for a dish showcasing cucumber four ways, is carefully butchered before being aged overnight. The cucumber course uses Kirby, Persian, and English cucumbers that are used in a beer sauce, charred, sauteed, and turned into a relish. A bowl is layered with a smoked eel mousse panna cotta, thinly sliced charred cucumber, squid, caviar, and beer sauce.
During service, diners move across the two restaurant’s two floors, enjoying five to eight canapés downstairs before being led to the upstairs dining room by general manager and sommelier Cécile Chastanet, who Lee met at Per Se.
“I say it’s a contemporary cuisine, but to be honest… I have no idea what’s my cuisine yet. I think it’ll take a little more time,” Lee says. He hopes to develop the menu and the concept behind Oyatte over the next few years; for now, it’s definitely a restaurant to keep an eye on.
Watch chef Hasung Lee navigate all the hurdles of opening his first restaurant, from developing a brand new menu to calmly training his staff, in this episode of Now Open.