- 2 hours ago
Bon Appétit spends a day on the line with Chef Fidel Caballero of Corima in New York City. After earning a Michelin star just 11 months after opening, the team redefines Northern Mexican cuisine through whole-animal butchery, fermentation, and a bold tasting menu built entirely on trust.
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LifestyleTranscript
00:00Corima is dedicated to Northern Mexico.
00:04People eat with their eyes
00:05and some stuff can be up-putting.
00:07In order for you to submerge yourself
00:09into what we have to offer,
00:10it's much easier to not show you a menu.
00:13Sometimes it feels like if you read it,
00:15you don't want to eat it.
00:16We just believe that you can trust us.
00:18We earned our first Michelin Star 11 months in the opening.
00:22And our mission in this restaurant
00:23is to discover what Mexican cuisine is, was, and it could be.
00:27We believe that Mexican cuisine deserves a seat at the table
00:30of fine dining, and we're here to represent it.
00:40Hello, guys. My name is Fidel Caballero,
00:42chef-owner of Corima here in Chinatown, New York City.
00:44Come on in. We got a long prep list.
00:47Corima is 54 seats.
00:49We usually do about 100 covers.
00:51We have two different menus.
00:53We have a tasting and a la carte.
00:54I'm going to start doing some animal butchery.
00:56Let's go get the whole lamb.
01:00So this is where we keep most of our ending product of ferments,
01:03our misos, garums, and lacto-fermentation.
01:07Down there, we have these beautiful dry-aged pork that we serve.
01:10And we truly believe on dry-aging our proteins.
01:13And today we're going to do this guy.
01:16We usually order to get slaughtered as soon as we order them.
01:18We do put like about 10 days of dry-age on it
01:21before we even get to butchering.
01:24With age, it kind of tenderizes it.
01:26We design this kitchen in a circular way where we can all share techniques, stories,
01:32our personal lives.
01:33And we usually prep around this table, making it a little more cohesive.
01:38And then this is where all the tortillas are done.
01:41We use a wok to cook our tortillas.
01:43First of all, we drink some mate.
01:45Mate is tea that it's very caffeinated.
01:48South America drinks a lot of it.
01:50I guess it's the next step after drinking so much coffee.
01:53When coffee stops doing anything, like stops doing the thing,
01:56you lean into harder stuff like mate.
01:59This is Ezequiel Corona.
02:01He's our CDC, our chef de cuisine.
02:04You know, one of the talented chefs I've ever worked with.
02:06We're going to break down this lamb, today's lamb.
02:09We like to break the whole animal together so we can actually determine how fatty it is.
02:14People always want ribeyes.
02:15People always want strips.
02:17Nobody really talks about chucks, you know.
02:19And chucks are like shoulders, like beef shoulders are so beautiful.
02:22And that's why we get whole animals.
02:23Because we can decide how to butcher, how fresh it is.
02:27All this fag gets rendered to cook our morels.
02:31Instead of buying lamb fat to do what we want, we'd rather just get the lamb.
02:35You know, I mean, come on, look at the freshness.
02:37Like the organs are like, that's the heart.
02:39The heart's like super beautiful.
02:40That's why we're going to share our menu at the beginning.
02:42Because again, we believe that we can make like lamb hearts pretty tasty, you know.
02:47We should have a duck heart taco.
02:49People were super skeptical when they had it.
02:51People were just so obsessed with it.
02:54The way we prepare it, and again, sustainability, people throw away the organs.
02:57Organs are delicious.
02:59The dish that we're doing now, it's a lamb taco.
03:02We're all stuffed with ribeyes sausage.
03:04It's a meatball.
03:05We serve it with a puree made out of Italian artichoke hearts.
03:08We serve it with raw artichokes, sliced very thinly.
03:10Some wild spring onions, some jalapeno vinegar, and finish it with miner's lettuce.
03:15Serve it in a blue corn masa tortilla.
03:17Sometimes people add like fat or butter.
03:20We use brain in our sausage.
03:22You know, we use it to kind of cream out the sausage when we're processing it and seasoning it.
03:27We don't want to use a lot of fat because then it just melts inside of the morel.
03:31When we do the sausage, lamb's looking awesome.
03:33You know, we're kind of pretty much done with the whole animal butchery.
03:37Now it's time to head to tortilla production.
03:43So now we're going to check on Selvin.
03:45He's our mastermind behind the tortillas.
03:48We do something a little not so typical, a sourdough flour tortilla.
03:53It's usually made with lard flour tortillas.
03:55When we were a pop-up, we did it with chicken fat.
03:57And then when we opened the restaurant, we wanted it to be for everyone and for vegetarians as well.
04:01And we decided to switch to butter.
04:03This is a sourdough starter that we had for many, many years.
04:07Six-year-old sourdough starter.
04:09His name is Juanito.
04:11In the north, there's different types of flour tortillas.
04:14I'm from Chihuahua myself.
04:16The concept of Corima is from Chihuahua.
04:18We decided that the best tortilla, don't tell my grandma, but it's from Sonora.
04:23You know, it's like the best one.
04:24So the sourdough is for flavor more than anything.
04:27We wanted something tangy.
04:28And this is kind of our take on bread and butter.
04:30We serve one tortilla and that's when dinner really starts.
04:34It's when you grab the tortilla and you hand somebody a piece of bread.
04:38And I think it's a beautiful thing.
04:39It talks to the community.
04:40It talks to what we believe in.
04:41And right now we do a kind of a mix between the flour, the butter, and the water.
04:47Our butter is also mixed between Hokkaido butter, Chihuahuan Amish butter, and New York State butter.
04:53A little bit of salt.
04:54And then we add the sourdough starter.
04:56It turns into kind of like a batter, so it's very hard to handle.
04:59That's where we decided to, you know, kind of like press them beforehand.
05:02It was so hard to roll them.
05:04We were rolling them before.
05:05It's not just a press.
05:06It's actually a comal.
05:07It's a hot press, like shirt printing.
05:09It's two different planchas that heat up and sets the tortilla.
05:13And when we cook it, we'd spray the bottom and the top of our plancha.
05:17And then we just like press it very quickly, about three seconds.
05:20And then we bring it upstairs for service and we cook it on an upside down walk.
05:24It takes about like 25 seconds to cook this tortilla.
05:27So the reason why we part cook it is to shape it.
05:29It's much easier to manipulate it during service.
05:32We heat this up about 98 Celsius.
05:35The hardest part of this tortilla is about to happen right now, which is portioning it.
05:39It's like, you know, trying to hold water, you know, with your hands and kind of weight water and
05:43like kind of shape it.
05:44So, um, Sandra and I, we're going to portion some of those right now.
05:47And then we're going to come over here and press them.
05:49We usually spray our hands to, um, obviously maintain some sticking.
05:59We're going to let Serving keep on with his tortilla making while we butcher some fish.
06:07Right now on the menu, we do have panished gerbo.
06:10Beautiful.
06:10We also put an H on gerbo for 10 days.
06:12We do serve it with corn husk sauce with this liquor that we like to use called nixta and caviar.
06:19Some plankton as well.
06:20Plankton is recently was brought to us by our, the fish company that we use.
06:24We try to, we try to make a film with it.
06:27I think turbo is one of my favorite fishes to serve.
06:29Right now we're poaching in a Bermonte very lightly.
06:33We usually grill it as well.
06:35It takes grill very well.
06:36I think turbo is one of those versatile fishes and it's very meaty.
06:40I mean, flat fish is probably one of the easiest ones to break down for me.
06:43It kind of like already tells you where it is.
06:45Like to do the incision first in the middle, go around this side, kind of mark it.
06:52The whole kitchen is very into turbo.
06:54Some of us have them on the wall.
06:56Some of us even have tattoos of it.
06:58Chef monster has a tattoo of, big fans of turbo.
07:03There's a lot of people that kind of want to take pictures of the kitchen team after dinner.
07:07It started becoming like kind of like a joke of like wearing like different props.
07:12Maybe, can you put your hat on?
07:15He's a, his name is Melvin.
07:17He's a, he's a, he's a grill chef and he does a meat roast and you know,
07:22so sometimes he cooks with a hat, you know, he's a, he's the French cowboy.
07:25He's French.
07:26And so if you don't, he wears this cool hat, you know, look at him.
07:29We're done with the butchery of fish.
07:35Sofia, my wife and Dub.
07:37We're opening up a bar, you know, down the street, uh, kind of the extension of Korima.
07:41So we're doing the finishing touches at the bar.
07:44It's called Chucho.
07:44So we're just going to check it out.
07:46Got to do the finishing touches.
07:48What's up, player?
07:49What's up, man?
07:49How's it going?
07:50Good to see you again.
07:51We're here to meet with, uh, Jesse Kranzler.
07:54He's a project manager and Vince, which is our GM.
07:57And, uh, we're going to finish up the little last touches before we open.
08:00We've been in 10 days.
08:01So we got pictures on Sunday.
08:03So we're, we're there.
08:04So maybe this color paper.
08:06What do you think?
08:06Or you like white?
08:07I like yellow.
08:08Yellow?
08:08I like the market street, like the thing,
08:10because it's very Instagrammable and people already like,
08:13I mean, if they're here, they know what address it is.
08:14They don't have to read it.
08:15So exactly.
08:16We have you want to see the kitchen.
08:17Yeah, let's do it.
08:18Hey, como esta?
08:21This is, uh, Chef Hector.
08:23He's, uh, he's the chef of, uh, Bar Chucho.
08:25We started with the idea of making one taco.
08:28Like a month before we opened,
08:30I decided to do a whole different menu.
08:32And now we have this like, I think a very awesome menu.
08:38Wow.
08:39Yeah.
08:40Like, do I wasn't like completely sold on them.
08:43And now that I see them here, they're beautiful.
08:45The other thing that's funny, which of course drives me crazy,
08:48but we're like measuring.
08:49And then we realized yesterday when we're actually putting these up,
08:52that these lights are completely different spacing apart, but who cares?
08:57You didn't notice that.
08:57We're going to finish some, you know,
08:59conversations downstairs and then we're going to head back to Corima.
09:04We're back at Corima doing all the prep that we need to do before service.
09:08It's kind of crunch time.
09:09We got a half an hour before we do family meal.
09:12And after family meal, we slide right into service.
09:15These are Massachusetts scallops.
09:16These are beautiful mutant scallops that we use for our crude oats.
09:20The dish has kind of like a reminiscence of an aguachile or a ceviche.
09:23Right now we're doing a whey and pineapple aguachile,
09:27which is like the broth with pine.
09:29We seasoned the scallops with chayote squash,
09:32a little bit of yuzu kosho and olive oil.
09:34Slice it.
09:34We put it between jicama.
09:36That's our first course.
09:37For me, scallops and shellfish is better in the winter.
09:40We didn't want to let this winter go by without us using some scallops.
09:45So they dive for them on a daily basis.
09:48Sometimes they kind of have them.
09:50So we jump in between purveyors and we see what we like the most
09:54and who has them to offer and whatnot.
09:56And we're going to finish this scallop.
09:58It's the last scallop that we have.
10:00There we're going to check in with the rest of the crew,
10:02see if I can be of any assistance.
10:10We're about to go into pre-service.
10:12Now we tone down the lighting and make it a little more zen.
10:14It's a little more focused.
10:15We changed into our service uniforms.
10:18And now we need to feed 100 people.
10:20Let's get to it.
10:21Today on the books, we have 94 guests, 43 confirmed tasting, 16 all day
10:27unannounced tasting menus.
10:29That gives us just shy of 17.
10:32Please push tasting menus today to top table 25.
10:36This is the food influencer, about 22,000 followers on Instagram.
10:40Now let's just make sure they have a good time.
10:41Chef, do you take time?
10:43Everyone's here.
10:44We have extra hands.
10:44We have everything.
10:45So food's going to be coming out extra quick.
10:47Only better for you guys and for your guests.
10:50So let's please be on top of it.
10:52On that note, happy Friday.
10:54Happy Friday.
11:04The service is about to get very intense, so it's time for you guys to leave.
11:07Thank you so much for spending time with us.
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