Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook (26 page)

Full crates come in, empties are dragged out, an ongoing process—almost organic. It reminds me of the opening passages of Zola’s
Belly of Paris
, a supply train of horsecarts laden with food, stretching from market into the countryside and beyond.

Any piece of fish you are likely to see at your supermarket or fish-monger’s would be sniffed out and thrown away immediately here.

“If it smells like fish, it goes back,” says Justo. Fish obtained from regional sources is sent back if deemed inferior in any way. Fish from a high-end wholesaler in Maine is simply weighed and thrown out if not up to standards. They reimburse without question.

He attacks the mahi with his chef ’s knife, taking the filets off with two strokes. Elapsed time? Sixty seconds. Left-side filet goes to one side, right-side to the other.

By eight fifteen in the morning, Justo has finished the day’s portions of halibut, cod, and mahi.

It’s time for the skate, a fish he’s not so fond of. He empties a big bag of large wings into the sink, about thirty-five pounds in all, and immediately starts washing them with cold water. Skate are slimy, delicate, highly perishable, and loaded with transparent bits of cartilage, which, if left inadvertently inside, could do serious damage to the inside of your mouth or throat. Picture an airplane with fat wings. Top side of each wing is a thick filet. On the underside, another, thinner one. The perimeters of each wing bristle with little bones, and between the top and bottom filets is a barrier of thin, flexible, dangerously translucent, cartilagenous spokes, like the buttress of a church—and about as unpleasant to bite into.

Justo picks up the chef ’s knife. “I sharpen myself. Once a week.”

I can’t help asking, “Once a week?”

For a guy as scrupulous as Justo, that seems like a long time to go between sharpenings. Cooks much less conscientious than he labor over their blades on a daily basis. The very essence of knife maintenance—a notion inextricably tied up with one’s self-image as a cook—is that the sharper the knife, the better.

Not necessarily, explains Justo. “I like medium sharp,” he says, pointing out the cartilage of the skate as an extreme example of his principle. “Too sharp? You get part of the bone. When it’s sharpened
correct
, it passes
over
the bone.” With this, he grabs a large skate with his gloved hand, and, with the chef ’s knife, removes the fattest part of the flesh from the top of both wings. It
looks
like he’s savagely and indifferently hacking at the things. One skate after another, he quickly and brutally removes only the fattest part of the top of each wing. The rest, the two unexploited filets on the underside of each fish, go straight in the garbage—along with about 70 to 80 percent of the total body weight of the animal: skin, bone, and cartilage.

One could be forgiven for asking about City Harvest—an organization with whom Eric Ripert works very closely and actively raises a lot money.
Why don’t they take that fish?
It’s complicated, I gather. Simply put—and, I’m guessing, this is true across the board in similar fine-dining restaurants—there’s nobody and no place and no time to winnow out every scrap of fish from every carcass, or even most of them. Even the most good-hearted restaurants just can’t do it. City Harvest does not, it appears, have the facilities or the personnel to transport, hold, process, and prepare the more close-in leavings of New York’s seafood restaurants. Fish like skate are, in any case, so extremely perishable that they’d likely be spoiled by the time any secondary team could get a knife to them. The way things work now, they don’t even like to take the incredibly high-quality filet meat that Le Bernardin generates unless it’s fully cooked first. The restaurant boils or steams the stuff before City Harvest takes it away. (They claim it makes the trucks smell bad otherwise.)

It occurs to me that a worthwhile endeavor for a charitable organization might be the creation of a flying squad of ex-convict or ex-substance-abusing trainee fish-butchers—who could pick up and quickly trim out every scrap of useable fish from contributing restaurants. They could probably feed a whole hell of a lot of people. If perishability is a problem, perhaps they could quickly puree the stuff on site—prepare and freeze Asian-style fishballs and fish cakes by the thousands. (Note to self: talk to Eric about this idea.)

What’s left of Justo’s work on the mountain of skate are two large piles of perfectly bone-free pieces of fish. One side, then another, Justo removes the skin with the flexible blade at a forty-five-degree angle, trims off any and all blood or pink color that remains, and evens off the shapes with the slicer into the appropriate thicknesses and dimensions. Most fish—like skate wing—naturally taper off and narrow at the outer edges and toward the tail. Which is fine for moving through the water. Not so good for even cooking. A chef or cook looks at that graceful decline and sees a piece of protein that will cook unevenly: will, when the center—or fattest part—is perfect, be overcooked at the edges. They see a piece of fish that does
not
look like you could charge $39 for it. Customers should understand that what they are paying for, in any restaurant situation, is not just what’s
on
the plate—but everything that’s
not
on the plate: all the bone, skin, fat, and waste product which the chef
did
pay for, by the pound. When Eric Ripert, for instance, pays $15 or $20 a pound for a piece of fish, you can be sure, the guy who sells it to him does not care that 70 percent of that fish is going in the garbage. It’s still the same price. Same principle applies to meat, poultry—or any other protein. The price of the protein on the market may be $10 per pound, but by the time you’re putting the cleaned, prepped piece of meat or fish on the plate, it can actually cost you $35 a pound. And that’s before paying the guy who cuts it for you. That disparity in purchase price and actual price becomes even more extreme at the top end of the dining spectrum. The famous French mantra of “Use Everything,” by which most chefs live, is not the operative phrase of a three-starred Michelin restaurant. Here, it’s “Use Only the Very Best.”

The rest? You do what you can.

Justo pairs off the last, irregular bits of skate, draping one atop the other. He catches one he doesn’t quite like—a nearly imperceptible flaw. Most prep cooks in this situation would instinctively tuck the less beautiful one underneath a perfect one. Food cost. Food cost. Food cost. Not him.

“It’s like wearing clean clothes with dirty underwear,” he says—without a trace of humor. The unacceptable piece goes in the trash.

It’s only eight forty-five and the skate are done. The table is washed again. Knives, too. The skate is brought upstairs. A large white tuna hits the cutting board next. He zips off the skin and shows me where there’s a single, very soft but hidden bone. “Your knife too sharp? You cut through—you don’t feel it.”

City Harvest is getting a lot of very expensive product off of this fish. Near the tail, Justo sees something he doesn’t like and quickly carves off about a quarter of it. The fish is butchered as if for a sushi bar.
No
dark membrane, no raggedy bits. Center-cut filet
only.
He quickly breaks the thing down into four pristine hunks of loin. Then, without hesitating, divides those pieces into appropriate shapes for further slicing into medallions. At no other point during the day does he look so much like a machine. Uniform pieces of identical-looking portions fall away from his knife like industrially sliced bread. Lined up in the tray, they are the same size, weight, and height. He’s almost apologetic about the huge pile of perfectly good tuna left on the board, rejected for its size rather than its quality. After trimming, it’s probably costing the restaurant about twenty-five dollars a pound.

“Hard to balance perfect—and waste,” he admits.

Nine fifteen, and Justo unloads an appalling heap of monkfish into the sink.

Monkfish are one of the slimiest, ugliest creatures you’ll find in the sea. They are also wonderfully tasty—once you slip off the slippery, membrane-like skin and trim away the pink and red.

“This knife only for monkfish,” says Justo, producing a long blade that might once have been a standard chef ’s knife but which has been, over the years, ground down into a thin, serpentine, almost double-teardrop edge. Once the monkfish meat is cut away from the bone, one loin at a time, he grabs the tail ends and runs the flexible blade down the body, pulling skin away. With a strange, flicking motion, he shaves off any pink or red.

The quiet in the room is noticeable—and I ask him if he ever listens to music while he works.

He shakes his head vigorously. “For me—I like to concentrate.” He says the distraction of music might cause him to cut himself, an outcome not so terrible for him, he suggests—but bad for the product: “I don’t want to get blood on the fish. I don’t play around. I work fast because I work relaxed. I got nothing else on my mind.”

The monkfish is finished and safely stored upstairs at nine forty. There are two kinds of salmon to deal with now. One large wild salmon and eight thirteen-to fifteen-pound organically farm-raised salmon. Sustainability has become a major focus of Le Bernardin in recent years, and this particular farm-raised stuff is supposed to be very good. Justo prefers it. “The organic, the farmed is fatter. Better raw. The wild—too much muscle for me. Too much exercise.” With the chef ’s knife, he cuts from collar down and lifts off the filets. He peels a little bit of the meat that clings to the spine off one of the farmed salmon and hands me a piece. It is, indeed, extraordinary. The skins are removed with a few rocking sweeps of the knife. But most remarkable is what he does with the pin bones. These are the tiny, tricky, nearly invisible little rib bones left in the meat when you take the filets off the fish. They have to be removed individually by yanking the little fuckers out with tweezers or needle-nose pliers, a process that takes most cooks a while. Ordinary mortals have to feel for each slim bone lurking just beneath the surface, careful not to gouge the delicate flesh. Justo moves his hand up the filet in a literal flurry of movement; with each bone that comes out, he taps the pliers on the cutting board to release it, then, never stopping, in one continuous motion, repeats repeats repeats. It sounds like a quick, double-time snare drum beat, a staccato
tap tap tap tap tap tap
, and then…done. A pause of a few seconds as he begins another side of fish. I can barely see his hand move.

I have never seen anything like it in nearly three decades in the restaurant business.

With the slicer, he lifts the grayish meat that runs along the back straight away from the pink, a very delicate operation, which he, of course, accomplishes in seconds. One whole side of the wild salmon is put aside for the chef garde-manger. Justo lines a half sheet-pan with cling wrap, drapes the salmon on the tray—then wraps the whole tray under and over three times with one long piece of film. The fish is trapped in there as snug as if it were laminated.

“That way, if I fall down,” says Justo, “nothing gonna happen to the fish.”

In about two minutes, all the remaining salmon are portioned into seventy-five-to eighty-gram slices. He hand-checks each slice a second time by lightly pinching them as they’re arranged side by side in the tray. Once in a great while, he feels a bone he missed on the first pass and slips it out. Two slices of salmon will constitute an order. Laid out end to end, all pointing the same direction, the slices themselves look like little pink fishes swimming upriver, identical patterns of fatty swirls running through their flesh, lovely to look at, breathtaking in their uniformity.

At ten twenty-five, the salmon is on its way upstairs.

A young cook, seeing me, asks eagerly, “Have you seen him do the pin bones?”

“Yes,” I say, nodding my head. “Yes, I have.”

“First time I heard it, I thought he was tapping his foot,” says the cook.

Justo grabs the first of eight large striped bass out of a crate, with thumb and middle finger hooked deep into the fish’s eye sockets, not trusting the usual two-fingers-into-the-gills grab popular with fishermen. They’re on their way upstairs by ten forty-five. Then it’s twelve red snappers. It takes him ten minutes to take all the snapper off the bone and remove their skins. Once again, left sides are put together in one stack, right sides in another. He shows me why: when cleaning the right sides, the knife has to always be drawn in one direction when cleaning membrane and trimming belly; the left sides, the blade is pushed away to perform the same tasks—in the opposite direction. By sorting his fish as he does, Justo saves time and unnecessary movement.

A half hour later, the snapper is done. Only a tremendous shitload of black sea bass (Justo’s least favorite) remain. They are, for easily discernible reasons, the hardest fish to clean: unlike much of what arrives, they are still covered with tough scales, guts still in—and bristling with nasty-looking and extremely dangerous spines.

Fernando, the steward, comes by with Justo’s staff meal: a rather forlorn-looking plate of chicken salad, dressed green salad, and potato, with a bun. The plate is wrapped in plastic and placed unhesitatingly beneath Justo’s work station—as it has surely been agreed, by unwavering routine and practice, that Justo will wait to eat until he’s finished with his work.

He’s saved the worst until the end. At Le Bernardin, fish is served without the skin, the black sea bass being the lone exception. Its skin is an important component of the final dish, adding vital textural and flavor notes—as well as looking really cool. This means that one can’t do simply a serviceable job of removing the scales, assuming that, later, any that remain will surely come off with the skin. Every single one has to be carefully scraped off in the sink—away from the cutting board. Justo is very conscious of the transparent scales’ propensity to fly across the room and cling undetected to the white flesh of the fish. One transparent scale clinging to one order of fish? That would be bad. So, he’s got to carefully scrape off the scales—quickly, of course, avoiding the long and extremely vicious spines on the fish, which could easily penetrate his glove and inflict a painful and instantaneously infectious wound. Then filet off the meat, remove the pin bones (which are even trickier and more reluctant to come out than those in salmon), trim, and portion. It is of tantamount importance for Justo, when portioning, to keep in mind the intended cooking method and result: a still-moist, evenly cooked oblong of fish with a
very crispy
layer of skin on one side. If the piece of fish is too small, by the time the skin has crisped, the flesh has overcooked. Nature being what it is, no two fish are exactly the same, and the optimal size is not always available. It’s up to Justo to make do.