At NYC’s Essential By Christophe, standout dishes only require the most essential elements. For instance, the restaurant’s scallop dish is made of just scallop, cabbage, and black truffle. Executive chef and partner Christophe Bellanca — who has been butchering all of the restaurant’s meat and fish since day one — pairs simple dishes with meticulous techniques. As Bellanca says, “All of the philosophy of the food here is this: quality of ingredients.”
On any given day at Essential, Bellanca can be found in the kitchen preparing his mise en place alongside his team. He begins by carefully cubing citrus before moving on to butchering all of the fish that will be used for dinner service. Once the fish is filleted and placed into a brine, Bellanca moves on to cutting up venison and then duck. “Some chef friends think I’m crazy to still [be doing] all of this mise en place every day,” he says. “This is the way I learned and this is the way I like to work.”
The mise is fully prepared by 2:30 p.m. Bellanca announces to his team that it’s time to start working on the cheese soufflé, one of the more technically difficult items on the restaurant’s menu. The soufflé, like all of the other offerings at Essential By Christophe, looks deceptively simple, but the ingredients are of the highest quality and the preparation requires a high level of skill. “It looks so simple, but you don’t see the technique behind [it],” Bellanca explains.
Watch the latest episode of Mise En Place to learn how Essential By Christophe transforms seemingly simple ingredients into technically complex dishes.
