The Third Plate: Field Notes on the Future of Food (27 page)

Yes, I think it does, because the attitudes of the great are the stuff of fashion. Why should the leaders of chemical businesses be held responsible for polluting the marine environment with a few grams of effluent, which is sublethal to marine species, while celebrity chefs are turning out dead, endangered fish at several dozen tables a night without enduring a syllable of criticism?

The irony here is that there’s nothing lowly about a sardine (except for its trophic level and price). In fact, it is among the most delicious fish in the sea. Just as chefs will tell you a chicken gizzard has more flavor than the breast, a very fresh sardine is more flavorful than a slab of tuna.

So why do sardines sell about as well as chicken gizzards on most menus? Blame the long-standing conventions of the American dinner plate. A thick tuna loin seared on a grill—a tuna “steak”—is coveted, with all the comforting connotations of beef.

But blame chefs, too, because after all, we are the supposed arbiters of
taste. Identifying the best ingredients is an essential part of the cooking craft. Of all the complicated problems confronting the oceans, overfishing, especially of the higher-trophic fish, is not only the most immediate threat but also perhaps the easiest one to remedy. Inasmuch as the industry story of the depleted oceans is about greed—or the lack of what Carl Safina called the “sea ethic”—the chef’s story of the sea is about a lack of imagination.

I
’
M
OFTEN
asked about my favorite meal, one meal that stands above all the others, and I struggle to answer, because I find myself editing my reply based on who’s asking the question. How do you rank my aunt’s double-boiled scrambled eggs when I was sick with strep—the barely coagulated eggs sliding down my throat and relieving my pain—against, say, a parade of courses at Alain Ducasse’s Le Louis XV, in Monaco, after a grueling yearlong internship at a Paris restaurant—one dish after the other so delicious I ended up weeping alone at the table? And where to place Eduardo Sousa’s natural foie gras, a liver that changed the way I thought about food—not despite but
because
everyone in the world believed it impossible to produce?

The answer is that you cannot compare the greatest of meals. There is no one great meal, no perfect standard against which you measure every other meal. But you can think of certain meals as game changers, meals so profoundly original and singular that they forever transform how you think about food. Here was one such meal.

On our way to a second visit with Eduardo, Lisa and I made a pilgrimage of sorts to Aponiente, a tiny thirty-seat restaurant in the town of El Puerto de Santa María, at the far southwestern tip of the Iberian Peninsula, not far from
the Strait of Gibraltar. The restaurant belongs to Ángel León, a man frequently referred to as the “Chef of the Sea”—an epithet he both promotes and laughs off.

I had met Ángel briefly once before, at a talk he gave in New York to a slack-jawed group of cynical city chefs. He was renowned only in the culinary world, the kind of chef who fearlessly broke boundaries—not with wild juxtapositions of different foods or with chemical manipulations, but by looking to nature, and the sea in particular, to define his cuisine. The results were astonishing. Instead of butter, for example, he used a puree of fish eyeballs (detritus for most chefs) to thicken fish sauces, giving his dishes an added boost of ocean flavor. And then there was his preparation for “stone soup,” made with algae and weeds from stones he’d plucked from the ocean floor.

At the talk that day, Ángel showed off his latest invention, a mixture of dried algae that looked like sand. He used it to clarify a broth without the addition of heat and—even more amazing—without removing any of the flavor. Over the course of a two-hour demonstration, he rambled a bit about the plight of the oceans and gave what seemed like a loopy defense of a certain kind of tuna fishing, but when you are in the presence of Ángel’s extraordinary creations, you quickly adjust to the fervent and poetic way he experiences the world around him.

Having never actually eaten his food, I arrived at Aponiente with enormous expectations. I came not only because of my own curiosity about Ángel and his work, but also because of Caroline Bates, of
Gourmet.
What better way to start righting the wrong of that bluefin than to learn about cooking fish from a chef who actually understood the ecology of the oceans? Ángel surprised me by sitting at the table and joining us for lunch.

I should pause here and say: this never happens. Chefs don’t eat in their dining rooms, just as conductors don’t sit with their audiences during concerts. I was flattered that Ángel would join me, until I discovered there were no other reservations for lunch. Not one other table. El Puerto de Santa María, like many southern coastal towns, is a haven for summer vacationers.
The population swells tenfold in July and August, which is when Aponiente does 80 percent of its business. The rest of the year—especially in March, when I was there—the restaurant loses money.

“I learned everything I know about fish from my father,” Ángel said, toying with his fork as we waited for our server to arrive. (As he does not speak English, Lisa became the bridge once again.)

“We went out fishing one day, just the two of us, and we found this great place to fish for grouper—it was so great, and we caught a ton of grouper, like five fish that same day. It was a huge haul.” He took a long, slow drag of his cigarette, drawing out the sweetness of the memory. “But it wasn’t an accident, this place we found. Whenever we caught a fish, the first thing my dad made me do was open up the belly. If, inside, we saw razor clams and certain kinds of shellfish, we would take the boat to the area we knew had a lot of razor clams and shellfish and we would start fishing there. I was just a kid, eight or maybe nine, so I didn’t pay any attention. I just thought,
Well, this is how you know where to go and fish.
But it was really investigative work—you know, Quincy-like—and I learned to love it, to know my fish. It informed me as a chef so much because it has all these culinary implications. You’re paying attention to what you eat eats.” He paused to extinguish his cigarette and waved his hand in the air, signaling for the food to start coming out of the kitchen.

(A few years after this meal, I met Ángel’s younger brother, Carlos. He described their relationship as exceptionally close, except for when they fished with their father. “We would fish together, the three of us, and Ángel wouldn’t let me touch any fish when it came out of the water,” Carlos said. “Nothing. He’d scream: ‘Don’t touch!’ He didn’t want me to tamper with the evidence, you know? He was afraid even my fingerprints would make the fish less pure or something. And then he’d go in the corner of the boat and dissect the fish, so slowly and carefully. He’d carry it over to me and say, ‘You see that?’ And I was like, ‘See what?’ ‘The stress,’ he’d say. But to me it just looked like a dead fish. He started to see things I couldn’t see.”)

Ángel sat up and continued. “And so the next day we got up at five o’clock in the morning to go back to fish in the same spot. My dad was so excited, I remember—only, when we got there, a dragnet had been set up and the fish had been caught up in it. These people were taking all the fish! So my father got super pissed off. You didn’t want to be around my dad when he was pissed like that—completely . . .” Ángel raised his eyebrows and whistled at the memory. “So he took out his big knife, and he just started cutting the nets.
Chhh, chhh, chhh.
” Ángel cut through the air with his fist, making vertical slashes. “The people that had done it were in a boat with binoculars and could see him. They were in a pretty good-sized boat with a large motor in the back. And they started chasing us. My dad was calm, but he had us rowing hard until we got close to land. When my mom found out, she was furious and wouldn’t let my father bring me fishing for a while. She was sure he would get me killed. My dad only said, ‘They were taking too much,’ and that, at least, I understood.”

Ángel calls himself a sea-ologist. He is in his thirties and stocky, with a thick neck and dark, deep-set eyes. His manner suggests he’s not easy to get to know, and that if you try, he may at any minute blow up at you.

After a glass of fino, warm bread was served. It was dark green and smelled overwhelmingly of the sea. “Plankton bread,” said the server, but he didn’t have to. I had heard about Ángel’s signature bread, with its homemade brew of phytoplankton, which Ángel had a laboratory grow for him. “You mix the yeast with the plankton,” he said, “and it gives you a 70 percent better rise in the dough.”

He told me that when he opened Aponiente, he initially didn’t want to serve bread. (“What the fuck for?”) He said it had no meaning for him in the context of what he was trying to express. But when customers started demanding it, he relented. “I said, ‘Okay, fine, bread—but you’ll have to taste it with the sea, because the first thing I want you to taste here is the expression of the sea.’”

And the second thing, too. I was served a single clam—an unnamed
variety that Ángel explained was quite unpopular because it supposedly had very little flavor—poached so lightly in its own juices it appeared raw, sitting in phytoplankton sauce. I mopped up the puddle of phytoplankton with the warm phytoplankton bread and breathed in through my nose, smelling the sea.

“It’s a very elemental plate—humble, but at the same time it’s the greatest thing that you could eat. You’ve got the sea, and the primary ingredient of the sea, the origin of life,” he said. And then he paused. “The beginning of every meal should start with the origin of life, don’t you think? I feel very lucky to be creating cuisine with the origin of life.”

I asked him how he came to make the origin of life in a laboratory. “To me it was always like a
Star Wars
adventure,” he said. “I had this infatuation with being able to use the primordial form in my cooking. But nobody else really wanted to figure it out with me, so I stopped talking about it. I didn’t stop dreaming about it.”

Eventually he drummed up the nerve to approach the University of Cádiz, where he learned about a kind of netting they use to harvest phytoplankton in the Strait of Gibraltar in order to test for pollution. “I thought,
Okay, not so hard.
I will finally have plankton for my kitchen.” Ángel took a boat and dragged the net for four hours. In the end, he collected less than two grams, enough for a small loaf of his bread. He decided to test it and he learned that nearly the entire periodic table was present in those two grams.

“You know what? That confirmed for me that I was right to be so excited about it. The itch wasn’t going to go away. Lucky for me, I live near the sea, surrounded by people who relate to the sea.” Working with a group of scientists, Ángel and the team created a kind of marine garden using special lighting and heavily oxygenated water to grow uncontaminated, superconcentrated plankton. Ángel could now harvest twenty kilos every five months.

As our plates were cleared, I was amazed at how long the smell of phytoplankton lingered. Ángel nodded, pleased. “The taste, the aroma, it stays
with you. That’s what I want. I want it to stay with you for the whole meal. It’s almost like I can take fish out of the equation—I can go straight to the source. I can say to my diners: if there’s no phytoplankton, there’s no life.”

The next course, horse mackerel with wasabi sesame seeds and lemon caviar, was rolled in nori like maki sushi. The mackerel had been deboned and pressed into a medallion shape, the seaweed resembling the skin of the fish. Ángel told me the fish had been sold to him that morning just off the boat, but that the lot he bought was badly bruised. For a chef so obsessed with, and knowledgeable about, great seafood, I was surprised to learn he went ahead and purchased the damaged goods.

“Of course I did,” he said. “The fisherman came to me because he knew I wanted it. And why not? Fish are bruised all the time, just like us, but they’re no worse off. You know who’s worse off? Fishermen, that’s who.”

By pressing the mackerel together and presenting it like a sushi roll, Ángel hoped to create something exalted out of what might be thrown away. He explained that he had every intention of creating a market for what the fishermen would otherwise treat as a loss.

When I asked Ángel, gently, if he saw a contradiction in buying damaged goods when his restaurant charges so much money for a meal, he was quick with a response. “Isn’t this what it means to be a chef? To use what is merely half-usable and make it delicious?”

The next course was tonaso, a fish I had never heard of, and one that in Ángel’s parlance was less than half-usable. It was trash fish, literally, a frequent bycatch of shark fishing. Ángel explained that it’s usually either ground up into fishmeal or, in the case of the fishermen he deals with, thrown back into the sea. But because he has cultivated a relationship with these fishermen, they humor Ángel by keeping a handful of the fish that are in better condition and delivering them to his door.

Steamed and thinly sliced, the fish had the consistency of tofu, almost custard-like. Ángel finished the dish with fermented black garlic and an intensely rich reduction of infused shrimp shells and fish bones. There was no butter and no oil in the sauce, and I guessed that Ángel had thickened it with his famous eyeball-puree technique, but he shook his head and said its sheen and powerful aroma came from a long, slow reduction. It was the kind of sauce that reaches out and pulls you in long before you taste it, not unlike the sauce Palladin had prepared in Los Angeles when I was a young line cook. The tonaso itself was rather plain, but, again like tofu, it was a perfect vector for tasting the sauce. In the same way that Palladin used sauces to elevate discarded and underappreciated parts of an animal, Ángel’s mastery of the craft helped highlight an underappreciated fish.