All right.

[music] It's okay.

If I'm going to name this thing Poltergeist.

The actual translation is "Noisy spirit."

It's making your presence.

I want to make noise.

Whatever the equivalent of throwing a booking across the room or flickering lights or maybe scaring a few patrons is if I could do that with food, I'll be doing my goal in this space.

[music] Poltergeist is created in this space.

It's not something I had an idea for or a concept I had before.

It was sitting down here and making burgers and French fries for a couple of months and marinating and what this place is and with the noise and the arcade games and still being in the part of the neighborhood that's very, very much alive.

Even on the titles of all the dishes, we're just catfishing the audience of making it approachable where you see a Parker house roll but it's something completely different.

You see ravioli but there's oxtail and it's a Chinese-American staple now on a plate.

A fried dorado or a chicken gizzard stuffed with game hens but it's a classic chicken dish.

Just imagine how much did not taste good.

Right now, we have a green curry Bucatino.

If we're going to bring it to Poltergeist we just got to change the .. How do we do that but still making it delicious and tasty and also reflecting what we are and who we are?

We start making tomato molasses and we just take tomatoes and we blend them with sugar and a little bit of citric acid.

We just churn that into pretty much a jam.

Not even look at the color and the texture but we taste test to be we need the zing, we need the zang.

Cool.

It was just really fun to recreate a pasta that didnt exist and on top of that cook it in a curry with the green Muhammara with a strawberry Adjika, which is this Georgian sauce that's normally made of tomatoes and peppers but we did it with strawberries.

Fried curry leaves just to put green on top of red and colors are important but we need to make the curry taste good.

Then a crispy Sunchoke just so you know what the curry is based off of.

We take red shiso powder and make tajin, citric acid, Aleppo pepper and these components in this give brightness.

The dish becomes powerful, give it an identity and we are a restaurant inside an arcade bar.

[background conversation] Oh, hi You guys are not doing that right.

How hard is it to put a patty on a burger?

You're right there, chef.

Burgers are fucking us up.

Hey, hey.

What is going on, man because you're not even, what?

The burgers are even coming up.

There's five people there.

We're going hard right now but for what?

You've got to make sure.

You say it with them.

Say it in Spanish Say it in English.

Say it in [unintelligible] dude.

don't.

You've got to make sure you're not calling back He's not giving you more days.

-Fried ravioli.

-Fried ravioli.

Fried ravioli.

Who's plating these cheese fries?

Yo, yo.

Who's plating Chochyotes and how long do we go on Chochyotes?

Miguel, how cool if they [Spanish language] Cesar.

Por favor.

[Spanish language] Someone drop off the fudge right now, please.

The Octopus Burrata comes more from spite, from expectations, and people asking you to deliver something that they want and that was my way of rebelling against those expectations in a way that reflects who we are.

I thought it'd be cool to do, what is the one thing that Burrata isn't associated with?

Let's just base it off a very classic dish and no one else knows about it but me.

The potato, I made a concrete potato that was nice and crispy and then the octopus we put Al Pastor.

Now, I'm making the game even harder for myself because now with the octopus there's an expectation of what that is.

Really, how do we confuse people even more?

It's like when we want bread, we need to get bread.

I made a Navajo fry bread.

We have five different ethnicities, five different countries, five different people that we really piss off.

Now, it has to taste really, really good, and I'm just brown enough to get away with it.

Let's fucking go.

For me, growing up in LA is an identity crisis and it's also how I felt growing up being Ecuadorian.

I'm not Mexican but our family, everyone that we know, everyone that was raised was either Salvadorian, Guatemalan, or Mexican.

It was being in a box where no one knew what our culture is, what our food is, but we could still relate in that same sense.

[Spanish language] [Spanish language] [Spanish language] [Spanish language] I can't.

Look.

I might.

You've got to read my lips.

[whispering] I was just saying olive juice, olive juice, olive.

Yes, homie needs to go.

That guy's done, dude.

The little dude.

Oh, my God.

It's chill.

Something has happened.

You didn't see it.

You didn't see it.

It happened.

I am [unintelligible].

It was crazy.

It was the whole thing -I'm trying to set an example.

I never wanted to be a chef.

I like cooking a lot, cooking on the line.

It could become a sport for some people, but that's just not my feeling.

I feel like a quarterback or a drama king.

If it's on the menu I'm going to order a Cesar salad because I always hate Cesar salads.

If I'm going to call something Thai Cesar I'm using a country as an adjective.

I'm already not making friends right now or am I?

These will taste good and we just kept on going higher.

We started using one piece and I just use the whole rice paper.

One thing and I was like, even now, it's like, "Yo, dude.

It's not tall enough.

Karate chop it and be it needs to be taller."

I'll drop the salad and people will be like, "How do you eat this?"

I'm like, "I don't know," and I'll just walk away.

Yes, you just put the salad on the rice paper and make a taco out of it.

I just crush it up but if I can make a salad taste really, really, really good enough to get that much attention for a piece of lettuce that you can go buy at home.

That's important to me for the history of the city and the food in the city.

Those rabbits have been defrosting, for sure.

I have a lot of kids that are like, "I love what you're doing.

I like what you're saying," and I'll sit them down.

I'm like, "This is not for everyone If you just want to be a cook this isn't the place."

I had a chef once tell me that just pretend that someone has a gun to your head and another person has a gun to your family's head.

Would you move faster and I started moving faster.

It's really fd up, but that's the mentality I have and I dont want to teach that to other people but it's also all I know.

Yes, there's always a gun to my head and my family's head constantly because that's what I've been trained and it's something I want.

to unlearn and I don't think very healthy and then you say that to a roomful of people that don't cook and they're like, "Oh, that sounds traumatic."

I'm like, "Trauma builds the foundation of how to get better."

Charles, do you want me to grab that?

[music] [background conversation] Oh, yes, bro.

Let's go.

Dude.

Do it.

Ravioli up.

[background conversation] You've got to communicate.

Don't stop talking to each other.

-Yes, chef.

-Yes.

Do not stop, tell jokes.

How was your day?

Dont stop talking to each other We are going to work as a team, right now.

We're going to go [?]

together.

[music] Do we have chicken shui?

Please and thank you.

[background conversation] [music] [background conversation] I don't know how to describe my food because everyone else does for me.

They call it unhinged or frenetic or chaotic and all these words.

Words nearly you're looking at, yes, the colors and the energy behind it.

There's so much thought behind it of giving value and light to these things that I love, and I feel that's forgotten a lot.

Inspiree boldness and taking chances and bringing flavors and just trying to find an identity.

I think that's something that we all do here.

I want their struggle to mean something.

I want our Argoti to mean something and its also for the city.