- 14 hours ago
How does a seafood counter in a Los Angeles food court become the city’s only Michelin-starred Mexican restaurant? At Holbox, Chef-Owner Gilbert Cetina has built one of America’s most sought-after dining experiences, where a $135 tasting menu draws hundreds of people to the waitlist every day. Follow Gilbert through the making of both the lunch menu and tasting menu as he shares the four principles behind every Holbox dish. From his signature live sea urchin and scallop ceviche to the tostadas that achieve their signature chicharrón-like crackle through a meticulous dehydration process, every plate reflects years of refinement and lessons passed down from his father. Once told that Mexican food wasn’t an appropriate use for luxury seafood, Gilbert transformed a humble food-court counter into one of the most acclaimed restaurants in the country.
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LifestyleTranscript
00:05Hulbosh is a seafood counter in a food court.
00:09I never thought that a Michelin star was a possibility for us.
00:12At the beginning, it was kind of tough.
00:14We got turned down by purveyors and by fishermen
00:16because they didn't think Mexican food was an appropriate use
00:20of what was considered a high-end ingredient.
00:22Probably a couple years of being on wait lists and calling people,
00:26but we finally convinced some of them.
00:27And as Hulbosh grew, we're currently the only Mexican restaurant
00:31in Los Angeles that has a Michelin star.
00:33I think Mexican food is worthy of whatever ingredients
00:36you want to throw at it.
00:38My name is Gilberto Setina, and I am the chef and owner of Hulbosh
00:42here at Mercado La Coloma.
00:47We're going to show you guys both the lunch menu
00:49and also a little bit of a behind-the-scenes look
00:52into the tasting menu.
00:56The tasting menu reservations, they have gotten a little competitive.
01:00When we release tasting menu reservations for an entire month,
01:03they sell out in about two seconds.
01:07There are constraints to a Hulbosh dish.
01:10Every dish has to meet certain criteria.
01:13It has to use exceptional ingredients, preferably local.
01:16It has to be rooted in tradition, and it has to contribute
01:20to the overall narrative of what we're trying to do at Hulbosh.
01:22That Mexican food is and can be a top-level cuisine
01:26that should be respected and revered in much the same way
01:30as other cuisines.
01:32Mexican food is more than what you expect it to be.
01:35It can be a lot more.
01:38And it has to be good also, let's not forget that,
01:41because, yeah, flavor first, always.
01:47Every day here starts with decisions.
01:51Morning, Warren.
01:52What's going on?
01:53Sourcing is the most important thing, I think, for us.
01:56Okay, let's go with everything.
01:58I'm going to load these so that you don't get out of the water.
02:00What deliveries did we get?
02:08How much do we have stocked?
02:16If we have signature dishes,
02:18it's got to be the live sea urchin and scallop ceviche.
02:21We crack the sea urchin and take the uni out.
02:24Then we fill the urchin shells with a ceviche made with scallops.
02:29A lot of times, you know, the tasting menu is really formed.
02:33It's shaped based on what did we get today
02:35that we can do something that we find interesting
02:38to present to the customer.
02:39We don't have the product that we wanted for a new menu dish.
02:43We did get the soft-shell crab.
02:46Sometimes we'll have to make last-minute changes.
02:49All right, guys, we got soft-shell crabs in the house.
02:52There is no tasting menu item with soft-shell crab,
02:54but there might be.
02:56The tasting menu kind of comes together like that,
02:59depending on what we get is what we serve.
03:04We do have to print out our menus daily.
03:06It really depends on if the fishermen went out,
03:09if they were able to find anything, what the weather is,
03:11if it's too windy.
03:12All these things really impact our menu directly
03:15on a day-to-day basis.
03:16So, Leo, these are going to go on the menu today.
03:19The soft-shell for Maryland is top-notch.
03:22Love having it on the menu.
03:28Oh, no.
03:31It's a big boy, man.
03:32It's like a 150-150 pound.
03:40How much do we need apart from that?
03:42You want a top one?
03:43Yeah.
03:43Or you want a bottom?
03:45Can I have a top one, please?
03:46I'm going to go grab a hook for this guy.
03:52When we remodeled our space,
03:54the entire design of the remodel was based around
03:57having a dry-ager.
03:59For us, we used it as the ideal storage method for fish.
04:02It's a very important tool.
04:05You know, really respect this fish
04:07that was lovingly caught and handled by the fishermen.
04:12And making sure that we continue the careful stewardship
04:16of the fish all the way to the customer's plate.
04:29On a busy day, we'll serve 1,300 guests.
04:39Our staff includes 50 cooks and 25 front-of-the-house workers.
04:44It can be a little chaotic, but we make it work every day.
04:48I don't come from a fine dining background or anything.
04:51I actually have no cooking background
04:52other than working with my mom and my dad.
04:55We started 25 years ago with Chichen Itza,
04:58another restaurant here at Mercado La Paloma.
05:01It's a community center that has the mission
05:05to provide food and culture and arts
05:07for people here in South LA.
05:10Growing up, my sister and I were my parents' little helpers.
05:14They always cooked.
05:14It was always a secondary source of income.
05:17Like a lot of immigrant families, you need two jobs.
05:20I remember my dad constantly calling my grandmother
05:23to ask her, how did you used to make this dish?
05:27But working at Chichen Itza with my mom and my dad,
05:29it was missing the really delicious and unique,
05:34special experiences that I would have
05:36or get in different coastal regions of Mexico.
05:39The reason those experiences were so special to me
05:42was because I knew the ingredients were here.
05:44There was great seafood to be found.
05:47Spot prawns and live crab.
05:48And I was like, that's the stuff.
05:50That's the stuff that, back home,
05:52we would have pulled out of the ocean.
05:54And that was the idea.
05:56Let's do mariscos with product that had come from that area.
06:00Mariscos is a Mexican term that just refers to all seafood cookery.
06:04When I started cooking and I started realizing this is something that I enjoy doing,
06:09I wanted to learn everything.
06:11I was just brave enough to do it, to like jump into it and to figure it out.
06:18And I've always been the type of person that doing is the way you learn.
06:25One of the things that I learned really well from my dad and about traditional Yucatecan cooking is sofritos.
06:30Sofritos are the flavor base of what we do.
06:32Aromatic vegetables, liquids, just cooked down into this really concentrated flavor base
06:37that can then go into a soup or can be served as a sofrito in and of itself,
06:41like in our octopus taco, taco de pulpo en su tinta,
06:44that takes this tradition of Yucatecan cooking, which is making sofritos,
06:49adding calamari ink to it, minced octopus,
06:52and just creating kind of this flavor bomb, quintessentially Yucatecan dish.
06:57The idea for jolbosch was the dish has to at least pay homage to a traditional Mexican technique,
07:06like flavor combination, use of ingredients.
07:08That doesn't mean that the dish has to be traditional, how my grandma used to make it.
07:13We will never make anything that is better than someone's Mexican grandmother.
07:18That's the gold standard.
07:22It's not an exaggeration to say that the most important component of Mexican food is masa.
07:33So our masa is made by comal here at Mercado La Paloma.
07:42The nixtamalized corn to make masa with six or seven different varieties of heirloom corn
07:48that they lovingly source from small farms in Milpas in Mexico.
07:54The nixtamalization turns corn, specifically dent corn or sometimes called field corn,
08:00from a not very nutritious, undigestible kernel into a highly nutritious, fully digestible product,
08:09which is called masa.
08:15By far the best masa in Los Angeles.
08:17It's one of those things that really connects our menu back to like the roots and traditional Mexican cooking.
08:25The tostada is one of my favorite things that we make here.
08:27Fresh ball masa, hand-pressed tortilla.
08:29When we cook this tortilla, we mostly cook one side.
08:32So essentially one side is slightly overcooked, the other side is raw.
08:35Then it comes off the plancha and it goes onto what's called a metate.
08:38Metate is a volcanic stone grinding table used to grind nixtamal or spices and chiles for mole.
08:45Is the dough working well?
08:47Yes.
08:47How many of these are you doing today, Rosa?
08:49450.
08:50It's Friday.
08:51Yes, 450.
08:52How many are you going to do for Wednesday?
08:54The same amount.
08:55The same, 450.
08:57Very good.
08:57After that, we have a super thin, like single layer hand-pressed tortilla.
09:01We pop it in the dehydrator.
09:02Once it's fully dry, then we fry it.
09:05And when you fry this dehydrated tortilla, it puffs up ever so slightly, almost giving it like a chicharron-like
09:11crackle.
09:21It's a really great tostada.
09:22Holds up surprisingly well to like the moisture of a ceviche.
09:25And it has a lot of like nooks and crannies.
09:28That makes it for me the ideal tostada to serve a ceviche on.
09:32Because those nooks and crannies kind of hold the juices all in.
09:35It's a great tostada, I love them.
09:45There's the lunch at scale and then the precision of the tasting menu.
09:49Some recipes highlight a process.
09:51Others highlight the ingredient.
09:53The dish has to be Mexican in its essence.
09:56But we like to be a little edgy with it.
10:03The tasting menu reservations, they have gotten a little competitive over time.
10:08Currently, when we release tasting menu reservations for an entire month worth of seatings, they sell out in about two
10:15seconds.
10:16I came here when it was relatively easy to get a reservation.
10:20Luckily, I have Roberto's phone number and I was able to text him.
10:24Hey, can you give me a reservation?
10:25We've got to come and eat here.
10:32The tasting menu is where new ideas get tested.
10:35So the new dish for our tasting menu this week is going to be a soft shell crab dish.
10:39We did some trials earlier today.
10:51We did two tests.
10:53Same marinade on both for the soft shell crabs.
10:56But one we did on the grill.
10:58And one we did roasted kind of underneath the grill in these tunnels that we invented as a method of
11:04cooking.
11:04So under there it's about six to seven hundred degrees.
11:07Although it's also more flavorful and roasted.
11:10Yes, but I think it's the flavor of the humo in this one.
11:15I love it.
11:16The one that was cooked on the grill definitely went out.
11:18The smoke flavor from the wood went really well with the soft shell crab.
11:23So we're going to go with that.
11:24And all we have to do is figure out the sauce, but we're on a good track.
11:31You know, I was talking with Manny.
11:32I think we found an interesting way of presenting it.
11:36We're going to plate this with the sauce made with a traditional Yucatecan spice mix.
11:40It's called a recado negro.
11:41We're going to make a sauce with that with Dungeness crab stock.
11:44The thickener for the sauce is going to be masa.
11:46So continuing the theme of using different varieties of masa throughout the menu.
11:51Let's see how that goes.
12:00We get three or four hundred people on wait lists per day.
12:05We were very surprised to receive the news that we'd actually won a Michelin star.
12:10I didn't even think that was possible for a order at the counter restaurant and a food court.
12:22We're going to be doing ten courses total.
12:25Five from the raw bar, four from the hot kitchen.
12:27We always start the tasting menu with oysters and clams.
12:31In Mexico, we call it conchas.
12:33Large shell is going to be our gui duck ceviche.
12:37A small dark one across from it is a Baja California blood clam,
12:41which is a traditional bivalve from northern Mexico.
12:44Two oysters on your right hand side with the uni on it is our grassy bar oyster from Morro Bay,
12:50California.
12:50On the other side, Chigoku oyster from Washington State.
12:54Enjoy.
12:57Our abalone tamale, which I'm, you know, from Yucatan.
13:02I grew up watching my mom make something called tamales colados.
13:11We took this beautiful masa that Fatima nixtamalizes.
13:14It's a corn called maíz chalqueño cremoso.
13:17It's corn that really is specialized for tamale making.
13:20But instead of stovetop cooking them, we use the shell of the abalone as a vessel.
13:25This is done wrapped in banana leaves with the actual abalone
13:27that has previously been tenderized and then marinated on top.
13:31It all cooks together, abalone, masa, and shell.
13:35And then when it comes out of the steamer,
13:37it's just this like really gentle, sweet abalone smell together with the masa.
13:42To make the recipe even more interesting,
13:45then we make a mole using the liver of the abalone.
13:48My mom would probably say it's not a tamale.
13:51But mom, it was inspired by you.
13:54It is a tamale.
13:58Our first hot bite today is going to be our purple sea urchin,
14:02Dungeness crab, and butternut squash soup.
14:04These are absolutely delicious. I absolutely love them.
14:08If the dish doesn't kind of meet the criteria,
14:10we won't serve it because, you know, we want to keep our Michelin starved.
14:15God forbid one of these inspectors is one of the 16 doing the tasting.
14:19Doing good?
14:19This looks really, really good, chef.
14:21It tastes so good.
14:34This is our Dungeness crab taco.
14:37We get these beautiful live crabs in from Fort Bragg,
14:39steamed and picked in-house.
14:41The sauce on the plate is a crab butter salsa matcha.
14:47This is a binchotan grilled soft-shell crab.
14:51The chili has a tip to it.
14:53Appreciate it.
14:54To be able to represent Mexican food, Mexican culture,
14:58on these, you know, important stages, to me, it's significant.
15:02The crab taco, incredible.
15:04If I was on death row, that would be my last meal.
15:06Significant enough for me to want to stay here,
15:09and I don't want to open another restaurant.
15:11I don't want to expand.
15:12I just want to keep doing what we're doing,
15:15and hopefully we'll continue to be able to represent Mexican food like this.
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