Chef Joshua Smookler of Mu Ramen surely serves the city's most labor intensive and time consuming chicken wings. They involve several processes, each of which can take several hours. Listed as tebasaki gyoza on the menu they are deboned and stuffed with a generous hunk of foie gras, made from scratch brioche chunks and a quince paste that needs to be made as many as five days in advance. Smookler reports that he has an employee on staff whose sole duty is deboning chicken wings all day long. The restaurant goes through around fifty orders a night (that's 100 wings!).
The inspiration for the dish came from the chef's time working at Bouley in the late 1990's and early aughts when the restaurant served sous vide chicken breast stuffed with black truffles. When it came to open his ramen shop (which Ryan Sutton recently praised), Smookler adapted the recipe. "Being a Japanese inspired restaurant, and wings being so popular there, I knew I had to serve them, but wanted to do something different."
Watch as the chef makes the stuffing, preps the wings and then deep fries them using a meringue and rice flour batter in the slide show above.
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