One of Durham’s top chefs has launched his dream Test Kitchen in Cary
By the nature of its name, M Test Kitchen is a work in progress.
Each night the new Cary restaurant from chef Michael Lee serves a menu of boundary-pushing dishes, blending cuisines and flavors in pursuit of the delicious.
Lee says he’s having the time of his life.
“It’s all about experimenting,” Lee said. “We don’t have boundaries. It’s everything we wanted to do without having limitations. It’s a chance to test and make things that we all want to eat and put out dishes we’d be hesitant to build an entire restaurant around.”
Lee has pursued the Test Kitchen concept for years, looking to build a restaurant space that wasn’t grouped into a specific kind of cuisine or menu, where the dishes evolve and pop up nightly and fall away when they’ve run their course.
Lee is best known for his M Restaurants in Durham, a group that today is one of the city’s signature collection of menus.
In the original M Sushi, Lee served top tier sushi in a narrow, semi-underground bar. With M Kokko he draws crowds with bowls of noodles and crispy, fiery fried chicken. Then there’s the fry-tastic M Tempura, which was named Restaurant of the Year by The News & Observer dining critic Greg Cox in January 2020. And finally, the raucous M Pocha, serving Korean drinking food.
Cary gets a slightly different version of sushi
Lee’s Fenton restaurants are a bit of a deviation from the vision he had a few years ago, imagining his restaurant empire would remain close to downtown Durham.
But in Fenton, Lee says he found an opportunity to build a different version of M Sushi and feed a new community of diners. He says he’s been surprised how many people are eating at M Sushi for the first time in Cary — diners who hadn’t made the trek to Durham in the eight years it has been widely regarded as the area’s best sushi restaurant.
When the Cary M Sushi first opened last year, Lee tried to serve an entirely new menu, distinctive from its Durham namesake. But over the months, he’s allowed the specialty rolls at the restaurants to mirror each other, like a rock star playing the hits.
“As time grew on we learned a bit more about what guests are wanting,” Lee said. “But the engines of the restaurants are different. Like sushi, there are subtle but important differences.”
It’s the foundations of the sushi, the building blocks, that are most distinct, starting with the rice. In Cary, Lee changed his process somewhat, getting rice shipped from Japan to New York, where its immediately milled and then shipped overnight to North Carolina. He uses two types of vinegar to season the rice, creating a menu that may mirror Durham, but will be a different experience.
“I can’t say one is better than the other, but there’s a touch of character that’s different,” Lee said. “The sauces are not exactly the same. The clientele is a little different..”
Flavor testing at Fenton’s Test Kitchen
In the Test Kitchen, Lee said he was looking for something that was anything but a rigid concept.
The number of dish ideas Lee has developed and tested at home, but ultimately never found a place for on a menu numbers in the hundreds, he said. He’s always been fine with that, but now he said he’s excited to have a restaurant format that is pure creativity.
Lee credits chef Connor Johnson with taking the reins and steering M Test Kitchen in whatever direction it takes week to week.
“He’s been incredible, working with the team and developing a lot of dishes,” Lee said. “This is one of the first restaurants where very little of my own menu, or sometimes none of it, are my dishes.”
M Test Kitchen has been open for about a month and is currently on menu 2.1, but Lee said tweaks and changes can happen nightly. Right now it includes beef carpaccio done as a Thai larb, decadent lobster shumai dumplings with a French butter sauce, a crab fried rice with XO sauce and a $32 Katsu sandwich, which Lee says is made with a special fatty breed of pork sandwiched between milkbread.
There are some general dishes meant to change frequently, like the “Caviar Concoction,” which is really just a caviar showcase that Lee says is already in its 15th version. It’s currently served atop a stick of cornbread.
One of Lee’s favorite dishes on the menu now is a deconstructed plate of carrot cake.
As the Test Kitchen menu was first developed and tried and tasted, he said his own dishes were put on the back burner, making space for others. Stepping back a bit from the kitchen and giving up a bit of control has been challenging for Lee, he said, but in it he said he’s found inspiration in the dishes and ideas of younger chefs.
“I don’t like the sensation or feeling of not knowing,” Lee said. “I like to be involved. But I can’t be at all the kitchens all the time, especially now we’re outside of Durham. There are so many talented people here you can learn from.”
This story was originally published May 11, 2023 at 12:44 PM.
