Oyster Garnishes

When we started serving oysters, back in the primordial days of Noodle Bar, we garnished them with a fine dice—a brunoise—of radish kimchi, because in Korean cuisine, kimchi and oysters go together like milk and cookies. Around that time, we signed on to do a dinner at the James Beard Foundation in New York City, the sort of thing you do as a young restaurant to get people to pay attention to you. (Which doesn’t necessarily work, but you do it anyway.)

As Quino and I were prepping, we realized it would be absolute madness for one of us to brunoise enough radish kimchi to top oysters for 150 people along with everything else we had to tackle. So we decided we’d purée the kimchi. It needed a little vinegar to help get it going in the blender and I added a little bit of sugar, because I was worried that it was too hot and pungent. We funneled the puréed kimchi into squeeze bottles and used it to garnish the oysters.