Liwei Liao Creates a Tasting Menu of His Own at The Butcher’s Counter

Dry-aged fish guru Liwei Liao has influenced how elite chefs all over the country serve seafood. Now Liao, who’s sold fish to restaurants run by Dominique Crenn, Wolfgang Puck, Aitor Zabala, José Andrés and Enrique Olvera, is launching his own high-end restaurant inside his new Joint Seafood fish market in Los Angeles.

The Butcher’s Counter at Joint Seafood’s Arts District location will debut on Friday, August 14, with a $280, 10-plus-course tasting menu.

“I want to do it because it’s fun,” Liao tells Observer. “But I’m also doing it because there’s only so much I can share with other chefs. I need an outlet to share myself. This is an outlet for me to understand my ingredients better and to portray them in my words, because I keep creating the pen and the paper for chefs, but I never do the writing.”

And as is befitting of a fishmonger whose seafood has been on the menus of three-Michelin-starred restaurants like Atelier Crenn and Somni, Liao is using the highest-quality ingredients.

“I think the perfect way to explain this would be that I don’t do food-cost math,” Liao says. “I’m literally working from the inventory that all these other restaurants order from, so I have access to the best shit.”

For example: “We’ll start with an oyster and then lead into an uni crostini, where the best uni that week is going to go on my French omelet and house-made sourdough,” Liao says. “I’m always going to have a sashimi dish that’s broken down from beginning to end in front of the guests. I’ll break down a whole Ōra King salmon and Cut its belly out just to serve at The Butcher’s Counter.”

The fish might change from week to week, but the format of the menu at the eight-seat counter will always include a couple of starters, soup, salad, two main courses and four hand rolls. 

“I’m going to pick those special small silver Japanese fish that I will incorporate into hand rolls, like sardines or kamasu, which is baby barracuda,” Liao says. “I will incorporate those in a very non-traditional way.”

Liao, who is Taiwanese-American, isn’t trying to compete with Japanese restaurants. He wants to do something different. At the Uoichiba hand roll bars he has inside Joint Seafood in Sherman Oaks and the Arts District, he serves toasted lox bagel hand rolls and wagyu cheeseburger hand rolls. The Butcher’s Counter is a new way for him to showcase his point of view and his insatiable appetite.

If you ever go out to eat with Liao, you’ll probably notice that he orders a lot of meat. He loves steak, Korean BBQ and fried chicken because it’s not what he’s sampling at work every day. So he’s serving Westholme Wagyu—dry-aged in-house, of course—at The Butcher’s Counter.

“If I do all fish, I will drive myself crazy,” says Liao, who’s also been hosting monthly block parties at the new Joint Seafood with food from restaurants like Tacos 1986, Heng Heng Chicken Rice, Fuegos, Frank ‘n’ Frank’s, Souu LA and Porto’s.

It makes sense that a purveyor who spends countless hours thinking about rarefied ingredients enjoys ragers with food from quick-service restaurants. This is how Liao lets loose.

At its core, dry-aged fish isn’t about frills. It’s the opposite of gilding the lily. It’s about purity and enhancing the essence of an ingredient.

“Our main goal is to purge impurities,” Liao says. “Dry-aging removes the blood, the slime, the water content that makes fish spoil quicker and develop those fishy flavors. If you remove all those impurities, you have a protein that is a lot cleaner. And when it has that clarity, you can taste the fruit notes of the salmon, the flavors that are otherwise hidden. What I’m actually trying to do is present fish in the most simple way.”

This focus on optimizing seafood has turned Liao into a game-changing fishmonger. You can taste Joint Seafood’s fish at Andrés’ restaurants like Zaytinya in Las Vegas and at Puck restaurants like Cut and Spago in Beverly Hills. Michael Cimarusti of three-Michelin-starred Providence in Los Angeles credits Liao for turning him on to dry-aged fish. Zabala’s Somni, the only other L.A. restaurant with three Michelin stars, serves Liao’s sardines. Olvera’s Damian in Los Angeles has used Liao’s branzino, barramundi and striped bass for its pescado a la talla.

Before Crenn started buying Liao’s tuna and black cod for Atelier Crenn in San Francisco, she popped by Joint Seafood to learn about the dry-aging process.

“She visited the shop by herself just to meet me and understand what we do,” Liao says. “That’s the kind of chef she is.”

Liao is always eager to share ideas and tell chefs how he thinks they should prepare certain fish. But ultimately, what restaurants buy and how they use these ingredients isn’t his call.

The Butcher’s Counter is about Liao finding his own voice. It’s also about letting the ingredients tell the story. Liao, with just two cooks alongside him, and his wife, Iris Chen, handling the front of the house, knows it’s important not to overcomplicate things. This is his tasting menu, with his ingredients, and he’s preparing every dish himself. 

Guests will see him cutting 16-day dry-aged salmon and hand-toasting nori. They’ll see him mixing ultra-premium Yukitsubaki rice that they will enjoy at the end of their meal.

“If you were to cost out what we do for this meal, it should cost way more than $280,” Liao says. “I’m doing it for fun because so many people are not doing what I think they should be. I’ve spent years talking to so many chefs about how to use this or that. This is the first time I get to do what I want to do.”

The Butcher’s Counter at Joint Seafood, located at 600 E. 1st St., Los Angeles, CA 90012, will serve its tasting menu every Friday in August and add Saturday service in September.