Miami's Best New Restaurant Serves a Peruvian Grandma’s Recipes

[upbeat music]

Ever since we started a year ago with Maty's,

the restaurant just blew up.

We entered the Michelin Guide.

Over 10 publications have written about us.

I oversee the prep kitchen.

My team preps for the entire week, not only for one day.

We are ready for war. We are ready to keep crushing.

We use traditional Peruvian techniques,

but elevated with influences from Miami.

Maty is actually Chef Val's grandmother.

Most of the recipes have been passed down for generations.

Learning these recipes from a family

that I didn't come from is very special.

I will forever be grateful.

[gentle music]

Oh my God.

[gentle music]

Hi, how are you? Good morning, I'm Giulie.

I'm the prep chef here at Maty's.

I just got 200 pounds of oxtail. Let's get to work.

Come on in!

I do this probably once a week, twice,

depending on how busy we are.

This is our dining room.

Follow me, I'm taking you through the kitchen,

where magic happens every day.

This is the first thing we should do in the morning,

since it takes six hours to prep.

We're just gonna do 25 pounds this morning.

I'm gonna put this away. I'm gonna change.

No one has come yet. I'm the first one here.

[bright music]

Oxtail is the tail of the ox.

This is the bone and it is surrounded by a lot of tendons

and meat and fat.

So that's what we're gonna sear first,

so we get all the caramelization from the fat and the meat.

We stir fry it during service with onions, scallions,

tomatoes, and crispy potatoes coming all the way from Peru.

This is a hot skillet, big quantities.

This is where we do it. We're gonna start putting some oil.

We're using oxtail just to make honor

of the Caribbean culture.

My boss is Valerie, who grew up here in Miami,

eating Caribbean foods.

But the braise and the sauce we're making

is from Maty's recipe.

See the color? That's what we want.

Every single piece, every side. And this is very hot.

Everything is good when we cook it slow.

I am a very patient person, honestly.

I think you have to have a lot of patience to be a chef.

If you're gonna deal with people,

if you kind of act like a psychologist also with working

and leading the kitchen, you know?

So this all of that is left right here in the skillet

is the caramelization of the oxtail, the fat.

And that's where we wanna cook all the vegetables,

so they get all the flavor from the meat.

200 pounds makes like 50 portions.

We just started doing like 300 covers a night,

and maybe before when we started,

we started cooking only 25 pounds.

This is nonstop, nonstop, nonstop. And it's pretty fun.

Not even in our wildest dreams,

we thought we were gonna be where we at right now.

But right around September,

we just got three nominations in the same week,

and it just popped.

These are scotch bonnet peppers.

Can you feel that? [Giuliana chuckling]

We're just trying to sweat all the vegetables.

A little bit of soy sauce,

so everything can come out from the bottom.

Oyster sauce. This is a very Asian ingredient.

There's a lot of Asian culture in the Peruvian cuisine.

Hoisin sauce.

[Valerie] Okay, good morning.

[Giuliana laughing]

Where's the Asian influence come from?

You see it right here.

My grandmother, and my grandparents.

My great-grandparents immigrated from China to Peru

in the late 1800s, and then, here we are.

I think our menu is a mix of all the Peruvian traditions.

With somebody who's already left Peru 20 years ago.

So we have to work with the product we have here.

My grandmother did write a lot of recipes,

but also we were just born in a house that cooked.

Food was so important,

that we just grew up eating really good food

and watching our grandparents cook really good food.

And our great grandparents cook really good food.

We are very much,

[Valerie] We're besties! We're besties.

This is sauce from the previous oxtail.

So that's why we're not adding salt.

We're not adding any chicken stock.

Since this has already a lot of flavor

from the six hours that cooked last time.

It's like a mother sauce.

Oh my god, hold up.

There you go. There is a lot of heavy lifting.

And we are pretty much all women here.

Working with a lot of women feels very powerful.

It's a women-dominated kitchen, so it feels great.

We're gonna add the water, oxtail, mushrooms,

and then that's it.

Now this is gonna go for about 45 hours, so now it's 9:15.

I'm gonna go to the prep kitchen in the back.

Let's go check on the list,

and see what we're gonna do for the day

and assign tasks to everyone.

[bright music]

Good morning! [Giuliana laughing]

This is Mama D.

[Off-Screen Voice] Hello.

She's the mama from everyone.

This is our fish counts for the day.

This is what we have from the night before.

Normally I get the counts of what we did in the week

to have an idea of how much I can prep for the day.

We're missing three other people. They're late.

They're gonna make family meal.

When they're late, they make family meal.

So we're gonna do six cases of limes today.

Mama, leche. Mm hmm.

The leche de tigre,

we squeeze every lime with the hand squeezer,

so it's very painful.

If we over squeeze the limes,

we get the oil from the limes,

the [speaking foreign language]

We don't want the bitterness in our leche,

which is the main thing probably for every dish.

But I'm responsible of overseeing the prep

and making sure everything is ready for service.

And I also think I'm very organized.

One of the most organized here.

[Giuliana laughing]

I am gonna work on geoduck.

This board is only for fish.

For today we're gonna do 30 mixtos.

I want 100 oysters pre-shucked.

I want 60 portions of scallops, 25 tunas, and 25 kanpachis.

By 3:00 PM, I want this ready, okay?

[Off-Screen Voice] Okay.

I'm gonna put this, or I want for everyone to see,

and then we have some geoduck that we're gonna clean.

[bright music]

This is heavy.

Oh my God.

Oh my God.

We just got this geoduck from Washington.

Geoduck is one of the largest clams

that we get from shellfish farms.

It's part of our ceviche mixto.

In our ceviche mixto right now,

we are working with black grouper.

We have surf clams, shrimp and octopus.

We make it with our rocoto leche de tigre,

which is very spicy.

It's one of the hottest peppers in Peru.

I love ceviche. I can eat that every day.

Look at the reflexes of the geoduck. They're still moving.

See that? This means it's very fresh.

Water is ready.

So we're gonna put and cook the geoduck,

to change the texture of the geoduck a little bit.

We're gonna put three first.

We're gonna count one minute,

just to not to lower the temperature of the water

and make sure that it's cooked properly.

We don't wanna overcook the geoduck.

So that's why we put it right away into ice bath.

It helps to remove everything from the geoduck.

Oh!

It's like, I don't wanna get cooked!

Probably.

So Papa Chang, who is the dad of the family,

he's the master.

Migrated to the US years and years ago,

to provide for his family, of course.

After he arrived, his first job here was as a sushi chef.

That's why we work with a lot of seafood here.

They pretty much, that's what they did their entire lives.

So, wow.

It's crazy, 'cause out of this whole thing,

we just get this part to actually use it for the ceviche.

The other part that we don't slice for ceviche,

we use it to make stocks.

I'm gonna take out the shell first.

I'm taking out the membrane, the first membrane.

Geoduck is probably the sweetest clam from all the clams.

This is the inside of the shell. Look at that!

I wonder who dig in the sand and thought,

Oh, let's try this! Let's eat this.

Who thought? But here we are.

Okay, so we're gonna cut it in half. This is how it looks.

I'm gonna let it air dry in the walk-in cooler.

It's already 10:30.

Let's go make some huacatay oil for our scallop ceviche.

[bright music]

This is our service kitchen actually.

This is our huacatay.

We get it frozen from our purveyor

just because we want big quantities.

I wish you can smell this, but it is delicious.

Delicious!

It tastes like licorice.

Like pesto, it's a mix of tarragon, limes. Very powerful.

I know Peruvians use it for a lot of dishes,

especially like stews and soups.

So we're just gonna pass it through boiling water,

just like shock the huacatay and sear that green color.

And then we're just gonna stop the cooking in ice.

Just a super fast procedure. I do this to help oxidation.

So if we don't do this, it will turn very dark, super fast.

And it won't last for our last purpose, you know?

So for the shelf life.

This huacatay oil,

mainly we use it for the scallop ceviche,

which is also one of our biggest sells here at Maty's.

The scallop ceviche has the Hokkaido scallop

that we get from Japan.

We cover the scallop ceviche with some green grapes.

Normally the person in charge of that station,

of the ceviche station,

has to shave the grapes every day for that dish.

Probably like four to five cases on a busy Saturday.

The dish actually is very beautiful. It's green.

It's just a mix of sweet and spicy and limey. It's perfect.

This is ready. I like being a prep chef.

I'm a morning person. I like my routines.

I like waking up early, get here,

like I need like to master things

and to know what we're doing during the day.

I'm just gonna squeeze. I like to do it in small parts.

I'm just taking out the water

so we make sure we separate the water from the oil.

[bright music]

So what we're gonna do right now

is we're gonna weigh what we got

after squeezing the huacatay,

and adding double of the amount of olive oil and canola oil.

We're gonna blend until the vase is very hot.

It emulsifies better because the heat, it's very dense.

It's gonna take a day to actually get the oil from this.

We don't squeeze it by hand

because we don't want the sediments in our oil.

We want it as clean, as green as possible.

Okay, so I'm gonna leave this here.

It will be ready tomorrow.

I have to go and break some dorades that just arrived.

So let's go, follow me for my next task.

[bright music]

We're gonna start breaking down the fish the way we cook it.

Normally we do like 60 dorades a day.

On a busy Saturday, we've done 80.

It comes with a beurre blanc sauce,

which is a very French cheese sauce

based of white wine and shallots and garlic.

And we make it Peruvian, adding aji amarillo,

which is another pepper that Peruvians use.

We oven roast it with the skin side up

so we can protect the meat.

The skin gets crispy, crunchy, you can eat it.

It's probably one of the most delicious fish in Peru

due to their fat content.

It's very hearty and tasty.

So we're gonna open it through the head, slice it.

Very tight to the bone and very careful.

We go all the way down

without making a hole on the other side.

What I like to do here

is to open with my scissors.

We use a lot of scissors for precision.

And you will see why.

I'm just taking apart the spine from the meat.

I am butterflying this fish from the head.

We do the same on the other side, like a little bag.

You always have to wipe your knives

before doing another transition.

Not to get the the meat dirty with blood, you know?

Here comes the fun part.

Before taking the spine,

I like to open it through the mouth.

So my dad used to be a shrimp farmer.

And I remember him waking us up at 4:00 AM

in the morning to go fish.

And I remember seeing all of these.

I never thought I would actually live by doing this.

Not even in my wildest dreams, like I always said.

Definitely cooking is my lifestyle right now.

Now I think, What would I do if I'm not doing this?

Like I have no idea.

I thought I wanted to be like a professional gymnast,

and I'm here breaking down a lot of fish.

I moved from my house when I was 18,

and I started traveling.

I went to Argentina, I studied in Argentina,

and then I went to Colombia.

After that, I ended up in Mexico.

And then I ended up here, six years ago.

I miss home. One day I'll be back.

We're just gonna cover it with our maguro.

This is bamboo paper,

which will preserve better the meat of the fish.

So now I have to finish 30 dorades for today.

So let's keep working before service starts at four.

[bright music]

We're ready to go eat.

After we have family meal,

we're gonna give the counts for today's service.

So let's do it.

[bright music]

As the morning sous chef,

I have to make sure everything is ready for service,

and making sure that I'm giving all the counts to my team

that's gonna take on for the rest of the night.

And they cannot leave until they're done.

This is Chef Luci.

Hello.

So basically we have two lists.

We have our opening list and our closing list.

At the end of the night,

I leave Chef Giulie our accounts

of what was our remaining inventory,

and then she tells me what the parts are

for the rest of the night.

And then I delegate that to my team over here.

For today, oysters, we have Pink Moon.

For the mixtos, we're gonna do...

All the tartare has been cut?

Everything has been cut.

So Luci, I'm out! That's all.

I am done now for the day.

I hope you had a glimpse of my life here at Maty's.

I'm done and I'm out. I'm going to the beach.

Peace out.

Bye.

[gentle music]