100 Hour Weeks: How a Master Italian Chef Runs an Elite Restaurant

[Chef Funke] A hundred hour weeks are easy,

if you spread them out over seven days.

But that's what it takes.

This is a brand new restaurant, brand new team.

And for me, it's extremely important

for the entire team to see that I'm in it.

Cooking Italian food is 90% ingredients and 10% technique.

I had only cooked Asian and French technique

for seven years before I moved to Italy.

All that went out the window.

All the manipulation, all of the pureeing,

and the sous vide,

and to make it look like something else,

I just didn't wanna do it anymore.

I wanted it to be pure,

and the pristine ingredients that we have in California,

this is an extraordinary palette to paint with.

My name is Evan Funke.

I'm the chef owner of Funke in Beverly Hills.

We're at the Santa Monica Farmer's Market.

It's about 6:45 in the morning.

Typically, I'm the first chef on the scene,

which seems to be the case at the moment.

I've got three restaurants, Funke, Felix and Mother Wolf.

Funky is nine weeks old,

and we typically spend about eight to $10,000 a market

every Wednesday, week in, week out.

And my goal is to like have the first pick of figs,

or the only case of something that a certain farmer brought

and that's why I show up so early.

This is Karina.

She's our market liaison.

She does a lot of the communication with all the farms,

making sure that pre-orders are done.

This is a pre-order kind of guide.

Pre-orders kind of happen Sunday Monday.

We'll make pre-orders and then obviously go through

and check everything and make sure that it's tight.

We've added on a couple different things,

we added on-- ooh.

Yeah, these are big.

Nine forty, so almost a thousand bucks,

just on stone fruit alone.

So, and we'll sell that in two days.

These are Violetta artichokes.

If the artichoke gets too much heat, it'll bolt.

So basically go to flour,

and it'll develop these like hips.

So if you squeeze the artichoke,

like this one right here, you squeeze it,

you can feel that there's hips, even though it's small.

You cut this open,

it's gonna have the choke on the inside,

versus something like this is very tight,

no hips, we cut it open.

Perfect. No choke.

240 pounds.

We'll sell that in four days, maybe.

This is first of the season,

Violette De Bordeaux figs from JJ's Lone Daughter Ranch.

This is all the competition.

Us getting a single flat is actually a win.

I'm stoked.

We're gonna sell all those tonight.

All of them.

Pre-orders actually look pretty good.

Everybody's nailed it this week.

So this is our, our last farmer that we're paying.

We're about to pack up everything.

It's like 8:30, so it's about to become a social scene,

and we're gonna head back

to the restaurant as soon as possible.

Merci beaucoup.

[jazz music]

So it's 10 o'clock, we just got back

from the farmer's market.

Produce is on its way.

We're standing in the Amaro bar.

This is the Pasta Laboratorio.

Beyond that is the main dining room.

And then upstairs we have a mezzanine,

which is also full dining,

as well as a private dining room

that's just upstairs. And then we have a rooftop bar Funke.

Last night on Tuesday, we did about 500 all in.

So it's been a very steep ramp up since nine weeks ago.

Alright, we're gonna go check in and then see if

the produce is here and what we're gonna get after.

Unloading an entire van into this area,

it's kind of where we have to stage.

This restaurant's full of little nooks and crannies.

So first thing I do when the van shows up,

I'll jump on, something that's a heavy lift

for one of the prep guys.

I'll grab artichokes, because it's a really long process,

and I'm fairly quick at it.

And I'll just take that off of their plate for the day.

Wear gloves when you clean artichokes,

unless you want to taste bitterness all the live long day.

So first we wanna make some acidulated water.

If you just open up an artichoke,

it'll start to oxidize and get super brown,

so this keeps it nice and white.

My setup's really simple.

I always work left to right.

Peel the artichokes until you see the yellow color

halfway to three quarters up the product.

And then that's it.

I put it in this little bin and I just continue.

So these are for the Carciofi Alla Giudea,

which means Jewish artichokes.

It's a dish found in the Roman Jewish ghetto of Rome.

Typically, there they're just served with salt

and the Romanesco artichokes are slightly bigger.

But I like these, 'cause you can eat the entire thing.

And we've made a slight change by adding salsa del chuga,

which is like an anchovy vinegar, and some lemon.

Add mint to it. Just delightful.

Alright, so I want to trim them first.

So I trim the bottom and I put 'em there.

I'm gonna peel these and as we turn the artichoke,

like turning a key, we're just about finished.

We've got some time to take a look

at the menu and talk to the sous chefs.

[light jazz music]

For me, shopping for produce

when it's at its peak is what it's all about.

So there's a lot of small changes

that have to happen every single day.

We're gonna verbal the Melone Prosciutto on the roof.

Verbal is a feature, something that's off menu,

that's special, it's very hot out today, it's super sunny,

so Melone Prosciutto is nice.

And then on the mezzanine and the main dining room,

we're gonna put on Fichi e Prosciutto,

with those spectacular figs from JJ's Lone Daughter ranch.

I think the rest of it is just counts.

Counts come down like limited availability.

So tonight, for instance, the Cipolline Catanesi.

Last night we had 20 and we sold out at 8:30.

So we'll bump that number up slightly.

There's a thousand ways to bleed out, in this business.

Learning how to do food costs, is something

that I teach the youngest people here,

because they're not teaching that in culinary school.

They'll teach you how to dice an onion,

or make a chicken galantine,

but they won't teach you how to do this.

If I knew how much math I was gonna do as a chef

when I was a kid, I would've paid

so much more attention in math class.

It's just past noon.

Sous chefs are wrapping up their primary tasks.

We're just gonna get in, go over the menu

and go over the changes.

[Sous Chef] Tuna, we're gonna buy 18 orders for those.

Verbal, the fungee.

Two pizzas, three here.

That's fine, I think you're fine.

These guys all know what to do.

I'm gonna do the agnolotti filling with Alan

and we'll get on to some pasta making.

[light jazz music]

Come on over buddy.

Okay, we make this filling basically every single day,

because we like it to stay as fresh as possible.

So this is the filling for the Angolotti Dal Plin,

it's a self-sealing pinched ravioli,

very small, about half an inch from piemonte,

all the pastas made day of and sold the day of.

There's about 19 on the plate,

and it's served with a demi glace of sorts,

which is a highly concentrated meat jus, if you will,

blended with butter, on the pickup.

And then finished with Parmigiano Reggiano vaquero.

Five year parmigiano.

We're gonna start with butter.

Brown butter, not too brown.

Sweat the garlic, a little bit of color.

Alright, and then we're gonna go straight in

with the swiss chard.

Italians cook vegetables perfectly

and then they cook them another 15 minutes.

So we're gonna do the same thing here.

Inside of the pasta is not where I wanna focus the texture,

the structure and shape of the Angolotti

is where the texture's gonna come in.

So I want the filling inside the Angolotti

to play second fiddle to the texture of the pasta.

You wanna add some salt to that?

So we want to cook as much of the moisture out

of this as possible.

And the reason why liquid is the enemy

of stuffed pasta is that, when you roll fresh pasta

everything's at room temperature.

And then we put that fresh pasta

into a refrigerated setting.

The cold setting osmosis happens

and the moisture inside the room temperature pasta

wants to come to the surface in order

to create balance equalization.

So that's why you see a lot of chefs

throwing a ton of semolina

on top of their pasta, in order for it to not stick.

That's because there's too much moisture

inside the actual filling.

This is the estratto di pomodoro,

this is ground tomatoes grown in Sicily,

in volcanic soil, spread by hand on wooden planks

and allowed to dry over a long time under the Sicilian sun.

So this is used in the sauce for the Angolotti.

Per six ounces is like $38.

You want to try-- wait

I don't even know if I've actually...

Why not?

Let's just do.

Yo that's like raw, raw. That's, it's intense.

Is that a caviar spoon?

Yeah, sure.

Okay. Don't go too big 'cause you're gonna,

it's gonna be a day.

Just tomato paste that makes you happy.

And that's why it costs a million dollars.

So we're wring out as much of the liquid as possible out,

out of the Swiss chard

and we're gonna grind it with the meats.

So we have our meat mixture already here.

Alright, load.

We want the farce or the filling

for the Angolotti to be super smooth

and very refined and also as dry as possible.

So we're gonna run this through,

so that it's smooth-ish and then we're gonna add this

and grind it all together again.

Okay, let's run it one more time.

So we're gonna grind this one more time,

so that it's absolutely butter smooth.

And then we break down the Swiss chard even more.

Okay. Parmigiano.

And nutmeg.

So into the piping bag.

When I make pasta, I don't like the piping bag

to be too full, because I have to pipe with one hand

and shape with the other.

So, it has to be one handed piping bag.

It can't be too full.

We are in the Pasta Laboratorio at Funke.

This is a temperature, humidity controlled space

and we make all of our pasta here every single day.

Start making pasta around 6:30 in the morning,

all the way, sometimes till 10:00 PM.

We're gonna roll a sfoglia from this dough here.

I've taught 15 people at this point to roll sfoglia.

We are going to go over a new shape

that we're gonna be putting on the menu.

It's a shape that is a larger variation of the tortilini.

We're gonna do an egg shape right in the middle,

maybe a little bit more, right in the middle.

We're gonna orient the sheet

and a diamond on top of the hand.

Conventionally, people would just fold this over and then,

you know, press it all.

And then you have double thickness pasta all over the place.

But what I do is, I just roll it straight over,

and then I press

just around

the filling,

so that this is completely open,

so that the water can move quite freely throughout.

And we do a very gentle fold.

And then we pull this around,

and connect the tiniest little bit at the tip,

so that if I was to open this up,

the pasta water has a very clear path of travel.

And everything is single thickness.

So that there's no hard bits, there's no overcooked bits,

everything cooks very, very uniformly.

She'll start Angolotti at 2:30, 3 o'clock,

she'll roll it until say 4, 4:30, 5 o'clock

and as soon as the doors open, she rolls again

and starts to do the tortellacci.

'Cause these pastas will continue to dehydrate

and get stiff and stiff and stiffer.

So we wanna maintain as much of the freshness as possible.

I think we've gone over this maybe one time

and that is a very close facsimile of my shape.

Like that's really close.

I would just back off on the amount

of the where you're touching.

[Pasta chef] Okay.

So you want it to be like a quarter of an inch

off the top of the filling.

Instead of using the the full pad of your thumb.

Right.

Use the spine of your thumb as you close.

So you have a smaller footprint going all the way around.

Make sense?

Yes.

And that's it. We have tortellacci.

Very nice.

You're gonna finish that.

I'm gonna go in there, check in on everybody.

It's getting close. It's about three o'clock.

So staff meal's coming up at 3:30,

so I'm gonna make sure everybody's organized.

Staff meal's broken down, everybody's broken,

eaten, ready for service.

Three minutes to staff lineup.

So let's go.

[clears throat]

Bouna sera!

[chefs] Bouna sera!

Let's get into it.

I've got 20 chippo all day , last night, fantastic job.

It took us all night to get there, but we sold all 20.

So good job.

10 each porcini tagliatelle.

And we're gonna verbal the Fungee.

Porcini from Pacific Northwest.

This is the last hurrah

for all the Porcinis, people are gonna

decide whether or not we're good.

It's how they feel when they leave,

that's gonna determine whether or not

they're gonna come back.

Everything that you do has meaning.

Every single repetition has meaning.

That's it. That's all.

Thank you so much.

[chefs applause]

So I expedite every single night

and this is kind of like my only time

to set the intention for the rest of the night,

because I'm gonna stand in this spot for the next

five and a half hours, after already working

almost 12 hours at this point.

So I need to reset my mind.

So this is part of it, setting up the past

and I set it up the same way every single day.

It's all done kind of like by rough measurement and feel.

It's actually weird that I'm talking about it,

'cause I, people are gonna think I'm super strange.

I just tear off four pieces of tape

to like start the process.

I think a lot of chefs have like

superstitions of sort, and how they do things

when they're going into like a busy service.

This is my mental mise en place.

Physical mise en place is all the food that we prepare

before we go in.

But the mental mise en place

is kind of how you set your station up,

so that your mind starts to focus on the job ahead.

So it's 5:00 PM, doors open.

And we're about to get our first ticket, so we're finishing

up last little bits just down to the wire and here we go.

Alright. Everybody ready to go to church?

[Restaurant Team] Yeah.

Fire focaccia, blossom, cho.

[Team] Focaccia blossom cho.

Ordering a fish.

[Team] Fish.

It's time for you to go, so please go.

I'll get busy.

There's literally 60 people outside waiting.

Go on the roof, so,

bye-bye.