Secret Ingredients (34 page)

2002

GONE FISHING

MARK SINGER

A
poll that I recently conducted among several of David Pasternack’s friends and colleagues yielded a nearly unanimous result. The question was: If Dave were a fish, what kind would he be? The answer was: a tuna. One respondent, Artie Hoernig, a commercial fisherman who also operates a retail fish market and restaurant in Island Park, New York, was more specific. “Absolutely a bluefin tuna,” he said, referring to a species that I’d heard Pasternack characterize as “like a freight train swimming in the ocean.” A minority opinion from his father, Mel (“striped bass—wild, big, good fighter”), dovetailed with Dave’s own measured self-appraisal: “Half tuna, half striper, I guess. Tuna for the thrill of the chase, the hunt. I love to catch a tuna. And striped bass is the king of the fish inshore. It’s our native fish, and I grew up catching ’em, you know.” He went on, “Basically, I’ve fished my whole life. I started fishing with my father when I was about five, in Jamaica Bay, off of Floyd Bennett Field, in Brooklyn. Snapper, bluefish, blowfish, flounder. I fished regularly with a guy named Captain Lou. I always fished with older guys. It was, like, somebody would introduce me and they’d take me under their wing. People don’t necessarily do that anymore, which is too bad, because that’s how you learn—‘You’re tying it
that
way? No, you tie it
that
way.’ If you wanna catch a lot of fish, you’ve gotta take an aggressive approach. And what’s the point of fishing if you don’t wanna catch ’em?”

Pasternack is the chef and co-creator of Esca, a five-year-old fish restaurant on West Forty-third Street in Manhattan. His recipes are unaffectedly refined, and he defines his culinary creativity in elliptical, prosaic terms: “It’s passion, plus knowing when something needs a little something”—the emblem of a cook, or, for that matter, any artist who knows what to put in and what to leave out. A focused, sensible fellow, he understands the fish business better than just about anyone, in ways intuitive, visceral, and pragmatic. Before dawn one spring morning at the Fulton Fish Market, as we were admiring a machete-wielding Ecuadorean who, with the celerity of a Jedi, was quartering and trimming a mattress-sized yellowfin tuna, Pasternack noticed a neatly pressed silver-haired gent standing nearby. He said to me softly, “A good old-fashioned ‘made’ guy. Nice guy. But he’s notorious. The market was run by ’em for years, until they passed the RICO laws, and then these guys were supposed to be banned. I’m surprised to see him here, even though he owns the business. And if you print the name of the business I’ll have no glass left in my windows.”

Local climate and geography have surprisingly little bearing upon the experience of eating in New York. The foods most closely identified with the city at street level—pizza, pastrami, pretzel, dim sum, falafel—all made their way here on immigrant tides. And the past decade has witnessed an exoticism that often seems more than a little forced. When a phenomenon like Jean-Georges Vongerichten creates an empire in Manhattan, his ambition—which presumes, of course, that a critical mass of people will ante up the equivalent of a mortgage payment for a meal—reflects a high-wire determination to move far beyond his Alsatian roots. (French-Thai fusion! Malay-Thai street food!) Pasternack happens to be Jewish and Esca happens to be resolutely Italian (if unlike any other Italian restaurant in the city). Whatever. Compared with New York’s other celebrated chefs, he has stayed unusually close to home; Esca is, among other things, the direct consequence of his years of experience with a rod and reel. Pasternack lives in Long Beach and, for a while, had a habit of schlepping to Esca, on the Long Island Rail Road, plastic garbage bags containing fish that he’d caught the previous day. “But I’d be exhausted by the time I made the walk from Penn Station,” he said. So he persuaded his wife, Donna Peltz, to make deliveries in their 1988 Toyota sedan, which she did until two years ago, when he decided that he could justify investing in a truck. No other restaurant in the city—not now and presumably not ever—offers year-round wild game that has been personally bagged by the chef.

Before Esca (“bait,” in Italian), Pasternack worked for two decades in a succession of mostly French-themed New York restaurants, bistros, and brasseries, and before that he attended culinary school at Johnson & Wales, in Providence, Rhode Island. During his year and a half in Providence, he drove every weekend to his hometown, Rockville Centre, a Nassau County suburb only a few miles inland (or only a madeleine-like sea breeze) from the South Shore of Long Island. Then, after he found work and began living in Manhattan, he stayed connected to the old neighborhood by renting a room or an apartment close to the beach. As often as he could manage, he spent his days off fishing, in the bays and inlets and in the wide-open Atlantic, from the Rockaways to Montauk Point. He took stripers, tuna, flounder, fluke, sea bass, porgies, cod, weakfish, bluefish, mackerel, the inadvertent shark—in his concise inventory, “whatever swam.” Though there’s no mistaking Pasternack for a literary type, spending time with him got me thinking about the way a chef ’s evolution can mirror that of a novelist. In the same way that a fiction writer can rely upon the dictum “Write about what you know,” Pasternack, as much as a New York–born-and-bred chef can, has thrived by cooking best what he knows best.

In the differentiation between executive chefs, celebrity chefs, and working chefs, Pasternack is plainly in his element in the third category. He doesn’t have a cell phone or respond to e-mail, but he’s easy to get hold of. His office, in effect, is the same spot in the kitchen where he cuts fish, orders supplies, conceives menus, plates food, and supervises his staff. He’s at Esca five, sometimes six days a week, typically from 10
A.M.
to 11
P.M.
Though he rents a pied-à-terre on the East Side, most nights he takes the train home to Long Beach, where he and Donna live with their year-old daughter, Ruby, in a redbrick and rose-stucco bungalow with a detached garage. My first glimpse inside the garage was a moment of recognition: suspended from the rafters were two punching bags. Days when Pasternack is neither working nor fishing, he likes to ride his bicycle along the Long Beach boardwalk—it extends nearly two and a half miles—and then spend a half hour thumping the heavy bags. On or off the job, whether he’s giving instructions in Spanglish to a fish cleaner (“Antonio, you’re gonna take this
abajo
and this
abajo
and you’re gonna keep ’em
separado,
okay?”) or butchering a side of veal or setting the hook in a fish that’s on the line, he has the authority of a nimble middleweight, at once firmly grounded and light on his feet. He’s five nine, with powerful arms and shoulders and a creeping waistline. At forty-one, he looks his age. He has short light-brown hair that’s receding and thinning at the crown, a nose you notice, broad cheeks, a strong jaw, blue-gray eyes, and often a slightly weary demeanor. His smile is wry and asymmetrical, listing toward starboard. About every third day, he’s clean-shaven.

The kitchen at Esca is relatively small—two levels, six hundred square feet in all—but for the twenty or so prep cooks, line cooks, runners, and dishwashers who circulate during peak hours, it probably feels less crowded than others they’ve worked in, because the boss isn’t inclined toward histrionics or harangues. He speaks in a low, even register, with an inflection and delivery that are pure South Shore, which is basically blue-collar Brooklynese that’s moved farther out on Long Island. “Saint Francis said you have to speak in the vernacular, and that’s Dave,” Mel Pasternack, a semiretired trial attorney, told me. “When he talks to a fishmonger, he speaks fishspeak.”

“The fish business is very complicated, very complicated,” Dave says when the conversation turns to catch limits, size limits, quotas for different species in different jurisdictions, and the vagaries of a marketplace in which the law of supply and demand regularly conflicts with conservation laws that often strike commercial fishermen as impractical and convoluted. In general, his sympathies lie with the fishermen. Which is to say that Pasternack is a resourceful guy who has cultivated mutually beneficial relationships with certain other guys: “My striped-bass guy called this morning…. I was talking to a guy who just came back from Florida. He was snook fishing every day…. Whenever Mike goes cod fishing, I’m his guy…. The way they ship stuff now is pretty amazing. Here, try this opah. It’s also called moonfish. Fatty, right? A lot of natural fat to it. Kinda has that tuna texture? With a completely different flavor. Very buttery, almost swordfishy. Opah comes from somewhere in the Pacific. I can speak to a guy, he’ll call me at eleven or twelve o’clock, the fish’ll be here when I get here the next morning…. A lot about buying fish is spontaneity. A guy called me yesterday and told me what he had and what he recommended. You’d have to be an idiot to buy what he didn’t recommend. I talked to a guy this morning, he was unloading a boat of monkfish. I bought some of the monkfish livers from him, to make pâté. He also had big jumbo scallops. And I bought a box of blackfish from him…. I called my crab guy last week. To find out when he’s gonna have blue claws and soft-shells. He told me to call him back in a month. I call guys all the time.”

The great majority of restaurants in the city, from cozy to corporate, buy all their fish through a single supplier. Pasternack deals with at least fifty: brokers; wholesalers; gillnetters; dredgers; and pinhook, or rod-and-reel, anglers. On any given day, salmon might arrive from Alaska; abalone and black cod from British Columbia; giant clams from Puget Sound; mahogany clams, sea urchins, and diver scallops from Maine; spot prawns from Santa Barbara; pink snapper and John Dory from New Zealand; yellowtail from Japan or California; red snapper, pompano, mahi-mahi, and grouper from the Gulf of Mexico; sardines from Portugal or California; scorpionfish, branzino, orata, and calamari from the Mediterranean; red mullet from Senegal; Arctic char from Iceland; octopus from South Carolina, Portugal, or Thailand; halibut, hake, skate, monkfish, fluke, flounder, kingfish, weakfish, sea bass, striped bass, scallops, sole, and tuna from up and down the East Coast; oysters from Long Island, Rhode Island, Maine, the Canadian Maritimes. Almost all of it is wild, and none of it has ever been frozen, nor will it be. (The freezer at Esca, no larger than a domestic fridge, is reserved for pasta and desserts.) The fish travel by truck, express mail, air freight, courier, UPS. Some arrive at the kitchen still flopping.

Pasternack speaks almost daily with Rod Mitchell, the owner of Browne Trading Company, in Portland, Maine, where hundreds of boats a month unload at the Portland Fish Exchange, the largest display fish auction in the country. Mitchell, who has been described as the “fish purveyor to the stars” but prefers to call himself a “fish picker,” combines his talent for scrutinizing individual fish with a global overview of the seafood trade, and he regards Pasternack as an ideal customer. “Dave’s quest is to have as many different kinds of fish as he can and still be able to sell them all,” he told me. “He wants to know every kind of fish that he can get his hands on. If I mention something he hasn’t heard of before, he says, ‘Send it.’ He can get something new and taste it raw, and he knows exactly what to do with it. I’m about to send him a new fish from Brazil, pintado. It’s also called a tigerfish. Amazing-looking. It makes you imagine that it could walk. It has no scales, and its skin is colored like a tiger’s. It’s never been imported to the United States before. It’s a fish we found at a seafood exposition in Brussels. The minute I saw it, I thought of Dave.”

Every weekday, Pasternack dispatches a buyer, Roberto Nuñez, and a driver (“Tony, the truck guy”) to the Fulton Fish Market. About once a week, he shows up at the Fulton market for the predawn rounds (a ritual that, lamentably, will soon be drained of its echt-Manhattan flavor, when the market relocates to Hunts Point, in the Bronx). Pasternack moves briskly from stall to stall, with an open mind and the confidence that if he doesn’t see what he likes (“Some weeks the market’s good, some weeks it has shit”) he’ll find something else somewhere else that will excite him. Certain dishes appear on the Esca menu 363 days a year: Sicilian fish stew, Amalfitano fish soup, linguine with mahogany clams, spaghetti with a whole lobster, squid-ink pasta with cuttlefish, fritto misto, marinated anchovies and sardines, grilled octopus. But the guiding principle is that everything is provisional—dependent upon the quality of the available ingredients and upon Pasternack’s sensibility (“There is no system; it’s more about mood”)—and that, of course, there are always plenty more fish in the sea.

Invariably, when I’ve dropped by Esca to see Pasternack, I’ve found him just inside the open doorway of the kitchen, on the ground-floor level, armed with a very sharp knife. The first fish I watched him perform surgery on was a forty-pound halibut that had recently been swimming in the vicinity of Portland. His workstation—situated to afford an unobstructed view of the line cooks and prep cooks at the grill, sauté, and pasta stations, and to allow him to inspect every dish before it leaves the kitchen—is two and a half feet deep and nine feet wide, sufficient to accommodate the occasional four-hundred-pound tuna. His knife was German, with a twelve-inch blade, one of a dozen of varying sizes that he keeps in a plastic tray within easy reach. “I sharpen my knives every Saturday,” he said. “Nobody touches my knives. Not even my wife. They’re scared.”