Liholiho vibe belies expertise

Welcome to Housemade, a Chronicle column by culinary scientist Ali Bouzari. He takes diners on a guided tour of the silent science, brilliant ideas and awesome techniques behind your favorite restaurant menus.

At Liholiho Yacht Club, a couple of blocks west of Union Square in San Francisco, Ravi Kapur and his team channel Bay Area abundance as the soundtrack for a delicious party. Kapur’s culinary antennae reach beyond his childhood in Hawaii to pick up signals from East Asia, Western Europe and the American South, which he broadcasts from the open kitchen as an edible playlist of tasty ideas. Kapur doesn’t want wordy chef-splanations to interrupt the revelry, so most dishes are delivered table side with warm, unpretentious words of welcome.

Like all good hosts, Kapur and his crew are also masters of hospitable sleight of hand. The toil required to produce this food to their standards vanishes behind the scenes, leaving the guest free to appreciate the apparently simple delights of fried oysters on butter lettuce or whole roasted halibut tails.

That understated poise, coupled with our odd cultural tic of equating everything Hawaiian with easygoing chillness, clouds our appreciation of the meticulous labor and thoughtful innovation behind every dish on the Liholiho menu. These aren’t casual cooks slinging breezy cookout food for kicks; this is an elite team of culinary virtuosos infusing hours of focused energy and painstaking process into every bite. Here’s the journey that two of those dishes take to arrive at the party.

Tuna Poke

Remove bloodline and skin from whole tuna loin. Dice and refrigerate. Toss with tamari, sesame oil, minced ginger, jalapeño and scallions to order. Dredge nori sheets in cornstarch slurry, then fry. Top with sriracha aioli, seasoned tuna, roasted sesame seeds, radish sprouts, micro red shiso and julienned radish.

Every Liholiho poke starts as a whole tuna loin, either from yellowtail or bigeye, depending on what’s running at the time. Tuna are aquatic freight trains — hulking engines of muscle engineered for traveling the globe. To continuously stoke their fires, tuna rely on a blush of iron in their muscles to bind and ferry oxygen back and forth from their ultra-efficient gills. During a fish’s journey from boat to cutting board, that iron and oxygen team up to slice through fat molecules, releasing some of the same pleasantly gamy aromas found in red meat. The bloodline is a long streak of burgundy muscle fortified with extra iron and oxygen for nonstop movement. Its oily disintegration runs unchecked, yielding a glut of fishy fat fragments too pungent for a delicate poke. Rather than discard it, the Liholiho team removes, cures and dehydrates the bloodline to preserve it for grating on other dishes that benefit from a blast of concentrated tuna essence.

Kapur directs his cooks to undershoot slightly as they separate fillets from skin, leaving a thin belt of meat attached. Once the rest of the loin is carefully diced, they scrape that meat from the skin with a spoon, mince it fine and fold it into the mix. This isn’t filler; it’s a potent dose of sticky marine collagen that prevents each perfect heap from falling flat on the plate. Prior to service, the team splits the diced tuna mixture into 8-ounce parcels sealed in dozens of small deli cups rather than one large tub. By allowing each small portion to luxuriate in its own private suite, the Liholiho team ensures that none of the perfect cubes are crushed to a damp pulp by the weight of an entire loin.

Kapur clarifies that the mixture of tamari, sesame oil, ginger, jalapeño and scallions is not a marinade but a seasoning, and his cooks season all poke to order. The texture of raw tuna pivots around a delicate, springy network of proteins and water, and prolonged contact with salt or sugar in a marinade causes that water to weep as the protein web warps. By dressing the tuna just before plating, the Liholiho kitchen presents diners with the freshest texture possible. The collagen recovered from the skin also holds the seasoning close to each morsel, delivering the flavorful intensity of long-marinated tuna without the petrified chew.

Nori’s crispiness comes from the seaweed’s eons of coping with the punishing realities of coastal living. To prevent their delicate fronds from being shredded by ceaseless tidal pummeling, nori and other algae evolved a resilient backbone of specialized carbs. The hot oil of a fryer drives water away, leaving those carbs in crispy gridlock, but any trace of humidity could cause that crispiness to transform into soggy rubber as hydrated carbs become pliable once again. The Liholiho crew dredges each nori sheet in cornstarch as an insurance policy so that the juicy fish and crispy cracker can coexist just long enough to reach the table.

As each order is ready to leave the kitchen, one of the Liholiho cooks cuts stacks of fine julienned radish. Cut them too soon and an army of exposed enzymes causes a sulfurous uprising. Soak them in water to rinse out that funk, and the radish loses some of its characteristic bite. Everything must be perfectly choreographed, and Kapur and his crew start this performance anew for 65 to 75 orders a night.

Beef Tongue Steam Bun Mix all-purpose flour, water, yeast, chicken fat and milk powder. Proof, punch down, proof again, shape, rest and roll into rounds. Fold rounds, add poppy seeds and steam. Refrigerate and steam again to order. Marinate Wagyu beef tongues with misoyaki marinade of sake, sugar, mirin and aka miso. Vacuum seal and cook for 9-10 hours. Peel, cool and portion. Sear on one side to order and brush with tare. Top bun with tongue, kimchi, miso aioli and pickled cucumbers.

After eight generations of R&D bun trials, the Liholiho team arrived at a calibrated mixture of all-purpose flour, chicken fat (saved from the roasting of bones for chicken stock), water, whole milk powder and yeast to execute a profound balancing act. Nets of protein and starch from the milk powder and wheat flour act like parachutes, riding waves of gas bubbles from yeast and evaporating water to buoy the feather-soft bun skyward. Too much chicken and dairy fat would weaken and deflate the dough, but a judicious amount lubricates the aerated tangle to help it extend even farther. Kapur wants the bun to have some crunch, but allowing the exterior to harden to a crust would limit how airy the dough could grow. To get the best of both worlds, he cooks these buns in an oven saturated with steam for maximum expansion, and uses throngs of poppy seeds to create an ad hoc crust.

The bun is impressive, but the real miracle of this dish is that Kapur figured out how to summon a perfect echo of a traditional steamed bun texture from something as tough and fibrous as beef tongue.

Each tongue is cooked for 10 hours after spending a day sealed in a deeply savory marinade of sake, mirin, sugar and savory aka miso. While the à la minute pampering of the tuna poke endeavors to leave proteins untouched, Liholiho’s prolonged thermal slog aims to unravel them completely. Once knotty ropes of sinew unwind and melt into succulent gelatin, the Liholiho team can peel away the tough outer membrane. The peeled tongues are so tender that they require an overnight chill to become firm enough for slicing evenly.

The Liholiho cooks sear the tongue on one side to order like a scallop, crowning each wobbly slice with a crust of rendered protein. On the way to the bun, that crust receives one last blast of umami from a brush of tare — a mixture of kombu seaweed, bonito flakes, scallions, ginger, black pepper, garlic, tamari and brown sugar.

Kapur garnishes each bun with house-made kimchi, red miso aioli and pickled cucumber. He adds a final flourish of roasted sesame seeds that are not made inhouse but sourced from Wadaman Co. in Osaka, Japan. (Wadaman is a company run by Etsuji Wada, who has 40 years experience shepherding organic sesame seeds to toasty glory.)

Overall, it takes Kapur’s crew three days to prepare the tongue and two days each for the bun and kimchi. In Christopher Nolan’s movie “The Prestige,” Michael Caine has a line about a magic trick being “too good” because “the audience hardly had time to see it.” This is one of those tricks — days of preparation and conjuring behind the curtain disappear with the flash of two ephemeral bites.

By dressing the tuna just before plating, the Liholiho kitchen presents diners with the freshest texture possible. The collagen recovered from the skin also holds the seasoning close to each morsel.

Christina Chung