Menu Talk with Pat and Bret is a collaboration between Restaurant Business senior menu editor Pat Cobe and Bret Thorn, senior food & beverage editor of Nation’s Restaurant News and Restaurant Hospitality.
Menu Talk: Bret is joined by guest co-host Lisa Jennings and they discuss the latest trends and share an interview with chef Alyssa Osinga of The Butcher’s Cellar in Waco, Texas
On this week’s podcast, Nation’s Restaurant News and Restaurant Hospitality senior food & beverage editor Bret Thorn is joined by Lisa Jennings, executive editor of Restaurant Business, who subbed in for Pat Cobe.
Lisa came fresh off of the launch of Rokusho in Los Angeles, which has an 8-sseat omakase room upstairs that’s an outpost of a Udatsu Sushi, a Michelin-starred restaurant based in Tokyo. It’s headed up by chef Shingo Ogane, but it will also host visiting Japanese chefs for three-week stints.
Downstairs is a more casual sushi restaurant run by Carlos Couts, recently of Sushi by Scratch.
The venue is a collaboration between the Japanese parent company and Boulevard Hospitality Group, which operates many properties in L.A., including Yamashiro, Comedor, and the TCL Chinese Theatre.
Lisa particularly enjoyed an avocado half stuffed with salmon tartare and served with nori seaweed for people to make their own handrolls.
Bret discussed the trends that Rokusho addresses, including experiential dining, making news with visiting chefs, and providing luxury for guests who can afford to pay for it.
He went to the opening of the second location of Reserve Cut, a kosher steakhouse. It has long had a restaurant in Manhattan’s Tribeca neighborhood, but the new one is in Midtown. It’s a much grander space than its downtown sibling and is trying to show that kosher dining can appeal to a broader audience than just Jews who follow religious dietary practices. Apart from steak, Bret enjoyed the restaurant’s sushi, short rib tacos, butternut squash bites and more.
He also is continuing to explore his new neighborhood of Sheepshead Bay in Brooklyn, N.Y., where he discovered fresh dates, which taste like less concentrated versions of dried dates, and are crunchy.
Lisa had not had fresh dates, although California has a robust date industry, but she did recently try paw paws there for the first time while she was visiting Philadelphia. She said they’d be great as ice cream.
Bret marveled that fresh dates apparently weren’t being used by Angeleno chefs, and recalled that chefs in Atlanta didn’t used to cook with local green peanuts, but now they do. So perhaps there is a future for fresh dates in restaurants in California.
Then the editors discussed TV food competition shows. They’re not fans, but Bret did enjoy his interview with Alyssa Osinga, who is chef de cuisine of The Butcher’s Cellar, which opened earlier this year in Waco Texas. She was a contestant on Hell’s Kitchen where she met Alejandro Najar, who is executive chef of The Butcher’s Cellar and Osinga’s life partner.
Bret shared clips with his interview with Osinga, who discussed the restaurant and the fact that she strives to find uncomfortable situations, because they help her to grow.
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