Hellbender.
It’s my first time opening a restaurant
as one of the owners and being the executive chef.
I want to highlight the things
that are important to my culture.
It’s scary to create something and then close your eyes,
and hope that everybody likes it.
It’s very easy as a chef to wanna do everything yourself.
Once you open an establishment, it takes an army
and you need to be able to find the trust
in your team and yourself.
This is what I’ve worked for.
It’s a dream come true and proud of myself.
[upbeat rhythmic music]
Hello, I’m Yara Herrera, chef and owner of Hellbender.
We got a big prep day ahead of us, so let’s get inside.
[bright lively music]
It is 9:00 a.m. and the first thing I do when I get in
is go through the closing checklist from the night before.
[bright lively music]
Let’s see what our sous chef did last night.
Anything that happens is my fault, whether I did it or not,
because I put my name on it.
So for me, it’s really important
that things don’t go unseen.
Some of the team has already started setting up.
Appliances on the shelves, organized.
Just wanna make sure that there’s no food in here.
Everything is nice and dry,
and we’re not breaking any DOH violations.
There is no, like, puddles of water down here
that might be creating mosquitoes or fruit flies.
Everything is looking okay.
Could be a little tighter always.
We’re gonna head over to our spice shelf, which is here.
I see one thing that’s not labeled,
so we’re gonna ask one of our prep cooks
to help us label that so that someone doesn’t think
that that’s sugar and it’s salt.
When the Department of Health comes,
if you’re doing your job,
you shouldn’t have anything to worry about.
Show me a cleaner ice machine. [laughs]
This is our tiny hotline.
We’re making sure that all of our surfaces got cleaned.
Replacement of foil on anything that might have foil.
Make sure that nothing was left in the oven overnight.
I made a quiche one time and [laughs] never took it out.
Everything seems good to go.
We’re gonna start making some salsa.
[gentle upbeat music]
So we’re gonna start making salsa macha.
Salsa macha can be easily compared to a chili crisp.
We right now are serving an heirloom tomato tostada
covered in lime crema, finished with salsa macha.
We have about 10 salsas we make daily.
This is one that we can make a big batch of and hold
so that it’s not a daily salsa.
It is a little tedious and time consuming.
We’re gonna start with our canola oil.
We’re gonna let it come up to temperature a little bit.
The garlic, it’s really delicate.
They’re really thin sliced pieces.
So, it’s really important to get ’em the same size
so that as you’re stirring, they’re all cooking evenly
and you’re not left with some chewy garlic pieces
and some burnt and toasty ones.
This is one of the harder salsas to make.
So, you have different ingredients
that all cook at different times
and you gotta hit it right,
especially if it’s the one pot method.
So, I usually take on.
Cooking should be natural and it should make you happy.
Some days I wake up and I’m like, Is this my real life?
Sometimes I feel guilty about it.
I wish everyone else was as happy as I am. [laughs]
All right, so the pepitas puffed up a little bit.
They’re nice and bright and green.
And we’re gonna finish by throwing in
the chilies Guajillo.
It’s a really floral and almost sweet chili
and it’s very easy to find here.
We’re not cooking the chilies,
we’re rehydrating them in this oil
and making them soft enough to be able to get crushed.
We’re gonna leave this to chill
so that when we start to buzz it,
it doesn’t splash all over us and burn our faces off.
Also, when you start blending this, you wanna make sure
that you don’t throw all the oil on the first blend,
and then you’re only stuck with chunkies.
You wanna make sure that you have an equal amount
of oil and solids when you start to blend.
[blender whirring]
You want the pieces to be bite size.
This is way too big for us right now.
We’re looking for something more like that size.
To my right, Ami is fully in guacamole mode.
We make guacamole every single day.
The best way to break down avocados
is through a cooling rack.
It’s just easy, less messy, and it’s quick.
[steel scraping]
[blender whirring]
Nice.
Because we’ve been blending this for a while,
the oil has this dark look.
It’s gonna settle. It’s gonna really concentrate.
It’s gonna turn a really bright red.
It’s gonna look really pretty.
[gentle bright music]
And this is my favorite delivery.
It only comes on Wednesdays from Hog Farm up in New Haven.
I met Sean who runs the farm
one of the first years living in New York.
We have been friends with the family for almost five years.
I go over and hang out with them,
stay at their mom’s house, jump in the pool.
But they have some of the best vegetables I have ever seen.
Can’t find them at Union Square
where most chefs are getting their farm veggies from.
They have these really cool varietals
of silver slicer cucumbers.
And the skin is really nice because you can eat it
and it doesn’t have a weird mouth feel.
[cucumber crunching]
I’m gonna start putting away this order.
The faster you put them away,
the fresher they’re gonna stay.
We’re gonna make churros next.
We have our mise en place ready to make churros.
We got water, a little bit of neutral oil, coconut milk.
We’ve added the apple cider vinegar
same time as the liquids.
Apple cider vinegar is also gonna help activate the gluten.
Sugar is the only dry ingredient that goes into the water.
Because this is granulated,
we wanna make sure that it fully melts,
turns into almost like a simple syrup.
Liquids in here are going to come to a full boil.
We’re going to start adding
all of our dry ingredients into here.
Because we’re working with really small portions
of baking powder, even one point over
will cause the churros to either puff up too much
or not inflate at all.
I hate baking.
I hate baking. I have no patience.
I ask someone that likes to measure things out
to do it for me.
You have a team. Use it.
We’re gonna get our sheet trays ready.
This is what we’re gonna pipe our churros onto.
This is a piece of parchment paper.
I folded this in half, and this is gonna mark
how long we pipe our churro out to.
Consistency is super important in a restaurant.
When a guest returns and they order something
that they’ve had before and it’s different,
it could be a little disappointing to find out
that the reason why you came back is no longer there.
This lip here, when you try to pipe out,
it doesn’t let you come all the way to the edge.
We’re gonna flip it over.
And then, there won’t be anything stopping us
from that hand movement.
So, this is coming together.
If it is not fully boiled for at least 30 seconds,
the dough will not come together.
We’re all done here.
It’s about noon right now
and we need to start breaking down some fish.
[bright airy music]
So, fluke just came in.
This guy no longer has scales.
It smells nice and fresh.
There’s no discoloration anywhere, no weird piercings.
You can always order the fish to already be cut for you.
I like to have it whole
just in case we don’t get to it over the weekend.
It doesn’t dry out.
I start off by removing this wing
and I’ll show you why in a second.
So, we are gonna be serving this as an aguachile.
Aguachile translates to spicy water.
So, this is gonna be served like sashimi
with a nice spicy broth.
Right now we’re serving it with honeydew and cantaloupe.
Because the fish is flat,
we’re gonna find ourselves angling our knife a lot more.
As I’ve taken the head off,
I can also identify where the spine is going.
This line starts to kind of curb
and that helps me find my end point there.
Really all I’m doing is pressing down
and trying to come in contact with the bones here.
I like to turn it around on this side too.
If you haven’t cut a fish before,
it’s one of those things
that you’re just going to have to practice.
You’re gonna mess up a lot of fish,
but I don’t think that there’s really
any other way to learn.
This is a prep task that I usually take on
because these proteins are gonna be a lot more expensive
than a vegetable per se.
You have a little more to lose.
My first job was at a sushi restaurant,
so I am pretty familiar with filleting most fishes,
but it wasn’t until I moved to New York
that I got to see a fluke.
So it’s really popular in areas of Montauk.
We’re gonna need to take the skin off,
get a nice grip on it without being too wasteful.
So, I’m tugging the skin as opposed to slicing my knife.
So, here at the tail you’ll see kind of where like,
all the sinew starts to come together.
This is holding the meat.
And we want the least amount of this.
The smaller the fish,
the more sinew you are getting to flesh ratio.
We are gonna do a classic sashimi style.
I like to angle my knife.
I like to start to twist it in.
We want it to have some volume
to see that you are eating a fish.
You don’t wanna look at it and be like,
I don’t know what that was.
But you want it to be small enough
and tender enough that you can chew it with ease.
I always like to taste test.
We’re gonna get into empanadas.
Masa was made earlier this morning.
Once dough has been refrigerated, starts to get hard.
So what we need to do is rehydrate this.
Masa is a corn dough
that has been made from corn that was dried,
and then nixtamalized.
You can choose what grade of ground you wanna do.
This one is pretty fine.
This is what we would use for tortillas.
And in this case, empanadas.
Adding too much water will make it stick.
Once it goes in the deep fryer,
it might also just fall apart
because there’s so much water in it.
But it already looks so much softer and pliable
than this that’s kind of breaking apart.
All right, so this is our press.
I like to use blue bags.
Let’s say a little piece of the plastic
ends up in your empanada.
It’s very easy to catch it before it makes it to the table.
So, we try to measure these out before pressing them.
And I’m going to make these little logs
build that long shape that we want from an empanada.
It’s going to press a lot thinner here,
so we always wanna kind of rotate it around
and make sure that we are getting an even press
on all the sides.
This is ricotta cheese.
It’s not Mexican. [laughs]
It’s Italian.
I thought it would be a really fun play on an empanada.
That American culture of three cheeses.
This is quesillo or Oaxacan cheese.
It’s very similar to mozzarella
but it doesn’t have as much moisture in it,
which is what we want because it’s gonna go in a deep fryer.
Get some basil in here.
Squash blossoms are very popular in Mexico,
very popular in quesadillas.
So, we still wanted to have this dish tied into that.
This is a very hands-on dish.
It takes a lot of physical labor,
manual labor to make it happen.
And that’s something that we are counting for
when we’re pricing food.
So, there she is.
As a chef owner, there is so much more thought
that goes into planning a dish.
You have to think about sourcing.
Are you killing the planet with your idea?
Is it feeling like too much work?
Is everyone bored? Is it too hard?
Just wanna stay true to my culture
and make sure we’re being nice to each other
and having fun along the way.
I’m here every day, 12 hours a day.
It’s a big responsibility
and it really is like having a whole baby.
[Colleague] Are you ready for family meal?
We are not.
Are you ready for family meal?
[gentle lively music]
What do you have today, Efren?
Eggplant, roasted broccoli, chicken, salad?
We have option.
We try to make sure that there’s at least
a protein, a salad.
We’ll usually delegate the bigger task.
Usually the person on salad finishes a salad.
The prep team starts off the protein
and the line cooks finish it.
But we try to make it a team effort.
Service is about to start,
so we’re just gonna do a little taste test.
Make sure that all our ingredients are fresh and tasty.
All the salsas look good and I need to start expediting.
[bright upbeat music]
Doors are open.
It’s five o’clock and tickets are starting to come in.
We are fired on a tomato tostada and an aguachile.
The expediter lets the kitchen know
what they’re supposed to make next.
A KDS is a kitchen display screen.
This is a paperless way of ringing food in.
We have two stations up here.
And these tickets divvy up
to whatever each station has to fire.
So, that station does not see the tickets for this person,
and this person does not see the tickets for that person.
It gives everyone a little bit of a breathing room.
So, churros walked. I’m gonna fulfill that.
We’re gonna ring for a runner.
We’re swamped.
We gotta go.
We’re gonna have to lock in.
So, we need you all to get outta here.
Thank you so much for coming through,
checking out Hellbender and getting to know what we do.
[bright upbeat music]
We love magnets. [laughs]
It’s a collection of places we visited.
People come and visit and bring us one as a souvenir.
Sometimes people give us funny little notes
and we keep ’em in there too, so.