Secret Ingredients (36 page)

It hasn’t proved to be a professional or interpersonal liability that Pasternack’s instinctive Italian sensibility doesn’t extend to actually speaking the language (though he possesses a sizable vocabulary of kitchen nouns and adjectives). One of the waitresses at the Beard House addressed him in Italian throughout the evening; he would occasionally nod, and nothing was apparently lost in translation. In the area of Long Island where he grew up there is a great deal of cultural overlap between Italian Americans and Jews. For whatever reason—and probably not merely because in the twenty-eight years since his bar mitzvah he has consumed immeasurable quantities of pork and shellfish—his diction, body language, and general affinities make him come across like a bit player in
GoodFellas,
so much so that he’s occasionally prone to identity confusion. A few years ago, for an appearance with Bryant Gumbel on
The Early Show,
he prepared a crudo that consisted of ivory salmon, fresh soybeans, lemon juice, sea salt, and olive oil. Gumbel asked, “How important is it what kind of oil you use on these fish?”

“Oil is essential,” Pasternack replied. “When we talk about oil, we talk only about extra-virgin olive oil. Because it’s like the Japanese put the soy sauce, us Italians, we put the olive oil.”

When he got home, his father, who had been watching, called and said, “What’s with this ‘us Italians’ business? We’re Jewish. Remember?”

“My wife’s half Italian,” Dave replied.

“Davey,” Mel Pasternack felt constrained to point out, “you don’t inherit that.”

A spring weekday, shortly after noon. In the Esca dining room—pale-yellow walls; brown leather banquettes; brass Art Deco sconces; a floor-to-ceiling expanse of Italian wines along one wall; a cherry-blossom arrangement that would shame a Christmas tree; otherwise, no dazzle and pleasantly little noise—orders are discreetly punched into a computer. Moments later, they emerge from a small printer on the kitchen counter where Pasternack works his way through a pile of striped bass while orchestrating the lunch flow. “Four times,” he informs Pablo Martínez, at the garde-manger station—meaning that a party of four have placed their orders and are now ready for their
amuse-gueules,
a plate of grilled bruschetta topped with a mélange of cannelloni beans, smoked mackerel, olive oil, red onions, and parsley. As the first-course dishes leave the kitchen, he glances at a clock, scrawls the time on the printout, and clips it to a shelf at eye level. At the appropriate moment, he will cue his crew—Sarah Ochs, the sous-chef; Katie O’Donnell, the sauté cook; Mike Sneed, at the pasta station—to mobilize the entrées.

“Pablo, you got two asparagus, two caprese, and a mindora. You got a third caprese gonna go with the oysters and you got a fourth caprese gonna go with another asparagus…. Give me a chicken, got an octo, I got skate with a cod. I got a snapper with an octo, I got branzino…. We got two stripers, a cod, a snapper, an orata, and a fett”—fettuccine. “I got two times…. Two, two. Misto, order branzino, order snapper, a cod, make sure you got a branzino ahead of a cod, you got a cod, two stripers, snapper, and then an orata…. Double octo, and make ’em look soigné, Sarah. Put up a cod in a minute. You got another big branzino, you got a pimente. Mike, order two fetts…. All right, Pablo, you’re gonna give me two asparagus, two caprese, and a spigola. Katie, you got asparagus and a caprese. Mike, you got the fett, it goes with the caprese…. Two two three three two…. Order three stripers and a porgy, another asparagus with arugula, another asparagus with a misto…. All right, Mike, spaghetti pimente. You got another spaghetti following the second branzino. You got a spaghetti with an orata. You got a spigola, snapper, skate, and an orata….”

The temperature literally rises, but the atmosphere remains coolly businesslike. When Simon Dean, the Esca manager, wanders in holding an envelope and a magazine and says, “Dave, here’s a piece of what looks like hate mail. Also, here’s your copy of the latest issue of
Private Air Magazine: Life at the Speed of Luxury,
” Pasternack replies, “It’s a little hard right now to be funny. I’d love to, but…” In fact, his mood is sanguine. A very nice piece of fish arrived that morning, a crimson shoulder cut from a seven-hundred-pound bluefin tuna—by way of Rod Mitchell, in Portland. “There’s a lot of competition for these fish,” he says. “I don’t want to say I’m at the bottom of the pecking order. But I’m near the bottom. Plenty of people will pay a lot more than I will.” At eighteen dollars a pound, the bluefin is too expensive to grill or sauté, so half of it will become crudo. The other half will go to Bistro du Vent, a calculatedly jointlike joint just around the corner, on Forty-second Street, that Pasternack and his Esca partners opened last January. There it will also be served raw, an appetizer à la steak tartare.

Four crudo plates are ready to be dispatched, but Pasternack first squirts a piece of bluefin with lemon juice, sprinkles it with pepper, sea salt, and olive oil, hands it to me, and declares, “This is the king of tuna, man. Think steak, filet mignon. This is what the Japanese’ll pay exuberant prices for.”

As it happens, he’s just returned from Japan himself—his first visit, the highlight of which was a daily perambulation through Tsukiji, Tokyo’s wholesale fish market (“like walking inside an aquarium”). He’d made the trip as the guest of Hiromi Go, an Esca regular.

“Hiromi’s a very popular Japanese singer,” he says. “He’s like Elvis Presley over there. He’s getting ready to record, like, his sixtieth album. He’s been coming here for years and I’m always saying to him, ‘When are you taking me to Tokyo?’ So his wife set it up. I cooked two dinners, one for twelve people and one for forty. The second was in a Shinto shrine. I ate quite a few things I’d never had before.”

Such as?

“Whale. It’s really only fresh in Scandinavia, Russia, and Japan. Very interesting. A tuna-y texture and a liver-y finish. You know, in Japan they raise horses in the style of Kobe beef—massage it, give it sake, beer, different grains and grasses, play music for it. So I did a crudo dish that was horse, whale, and fatty tuna all on the same plate. They all looked alike. The whale could have been the tuna and the tuna could have been the horse.”

A waiter comes in with the news that a customer has requested cocktail sauce to accompany what might best be described as an order of the original crudo—a half-dozen Peconic Bay oysters. Having just seen Pasternack gracing tidbits of abalone, weakfish, and opah with, respectively, gaila melon, crushed almonds, and
olio verde,
I expect him to take offense. Instead, he reaches into a knee-level cooler and removes a mixture of horseradish, fresh chiles, lemons, ketchup, capers, and olive oil. “It’s their money,” he says. “Give ’em what they want, they’ll come back.”

So that includes tartar sauce with the fritto misto?

“No. They ask for that, which I think happens maybe twice a year, we tell ’em we don’t have it.” He shrugs. “What’re they gonna do? Hey, we don’t have it, we don’t have it.”

I once asked Joe Bastianich, who enjoys sportfishing for tuna, about his experiences on the water with Pasternack, and he said, “Dave’s fishing, that’s a little too blue-collar for me.” For his part, Pasternack, who seems constitutionally incapable of condescension, has said, “I don’t understand freshwater fishing. That’s too Zen for me, too proper. Saltwater fishing, you know, there’s a lot more blood and guts.” A few years ago, Pasternack was invited, along with some other New York chefs, to a culinary event in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. While there, he went fly-fishing on the Green River with Ed Artzt, a frequent Esca patron who was formerly the chief executive of Procter & Gamble. “It was my first time fly-fishing,” Pasternack said. “I was good, I was a natural. I was the only guy who actually caught anything. I caught a cutthroat. After I took it off the hook, I went to open the cooler and everybody on the boat kind of looked at me like, What are you doing? I’m like, ‘Dinner.’ They go, ‘No, everything here’s catch-and-release.’ I said, ‘I spent the whole day to catch this one fish and we’re gonna
throw it back
?’”

My recollection of my first fishing outing with Pasternack, though it took place fairly recently, is somewhat spotty. We were aboard a commercial boat called the
Sorry Charlie,
about three miles from Point Lookout, Long Island. As the tide was running out, a brisk wind was blowing in, which meant that conditions were, by my standards, insufficiently calm. I spent part of the morning in the cabin, seated atop a cooler, resting my head against a wall, wondering when the Dramamine was going to kick in, and smiling weakly when my shipmates periodically impugned my manhood. The captain, Mike Wasserman, struggled nobly to stay anchored over an old shipwreck that was a reliable gathering spot for black sea bass. He succeeded well enough for the group—five of us were fishing—to land about twenty-five keepers and store them in the live well. “The Rolls-Royce of fish,” Pasternack, who caught the most, said. “Steamed, fried, poached, baked, sautéed, grilled—I’ll take a black sea bass any day over a piece of tuna.” In the afternoon, we moved close to the shore and, using clams for bait, hauled in dozens of stripers that had been trailing a clam dredger as it repeatedly plowed a half-mile stretch parallel to Rockaway Beach. At the end of the trip, Pasternack bought everything in the live well and the coolers, plus Wasserman’s catch from the previous day: a hundred or so bass, and three conger eels that were headed for the
zuppa di pesce.

The next time I went to sea was a sultry July day, when Pasternack was in quest of bluefish with his friend, piscatorial mentor, and supplier Artie Hoernig, the captain of
Smokey III,
a thirty-one-foot Down East–type cabin cruiser that he docks in Island Park. We met at 7
A.M.
in the parking lot of Artie’s South Shore Fish Market, where we were joined by Pete Hession, a retired UPS driver. Hoernig, who is in his late fifties, has a mahogany tan, a neatly trimmed silver beard, bloodshot blue eyes, and an inexhaustible supply of fish stories. The date, he announced, happened to be the eighteenth anniversary of one of his most gratifying adventures, the landing of a 782-pound mako shark. That same year, Pasternack, then in his mid-twenties, caught a three-hundred-pound bull shark near Key West. He had the head mounted, and it hung in his bedroom until a couple of years ago, when his wife told him, “Either the garage or you give it away.” It now occupies wall space at Artie’s market, right next to the head of the mako.

Hoernig went inside and returned with the day’s bait, twenty pounds of fresh and thirty pounds of frozen bunker, two flats of frozen spearing that would be used as chum, and ten pounds of frozen squid. A half hour later, this cargo got loaded onto the boat, along with three large coolers filled with crushed ice, and by nine o’clock we’d reached our destination, an area five miles offshore where Hoernig had planted about forty-five lobster pots.

The ocean surface was oddly placid. Hoernig: “It’s like a fucking lake.”

Hession: “I hope we see a breeze.”

Pasternack: “The only breeze we’re gonna see out here, Pete, is thunderstorms.”

Using bait-casting reels with forty-pound-test wire leaders and heavy-test monofilament backing, we tossed treble hooks baited with thick chunks of bunker into water about sixty feet deep. From the get-go, the bluefish were excitable. Pasternack quickly landed a seven-pounder, I caught one, Pasternack caught another. Then things got quiet for about fifteen minutes. “One, two, three, and that’s it?” Hoernig said. “Probably a fucking mako’s down there chasing these bastards.”

When they resumed biting, Hoernig would say, “Davey’s in!” or Hession would say, “Oh, Artie’s in!” Then: “Pete’s in!” Bluefish have notoriously sharp teeth and strong jaws, and the most prudent way to get one into a boat is with a gaff. As promised, there was ample gore—bluefish blood and bunker guts. At times, we had three fish on the line simultaneously. By eleven o’clock, we’d filled one cooler. A half hour later, Hoernig switched to an ultralight spinning rod and tied on a bucktail jig baited with a piece of squid, rigged for what’s referred to on the South Shore as “fluking.” He soon landed a two-and-a-half-pounder, and Pasternack, in a competitive spirit, got busy fluking, too. Occasionally, someone would lower a white plastic bucket over the side and fill it with water for washing our bloody hands. As the midday sun poured down, Pasternack and Hoernig took to cupping handfuls and dousing their heads. “I’m getting fucking ready to jump in, man,” Pasternack said. It was not yet one o’clock when the second cooler reached capacity—mostly blues, a few fluke, a sea bass. Time to go pull lobster pots.

Citing my journalistic priorities, I managed to steer clear of the heavy lifting. As Hoernig eased the boat alongside a buoy, Pasternack would use a gaff to grab the submerged rope, and Hession would wrap a couple of turns around a small electric winch attached to the starboard gunwale. Invariably, the ropes were coated with algae the consistency of sodden shredded wheat and the lobster traps were encrusted with tiny mussels the size of split peas. The first few pots contained little Jonah and calico crabs and conch, and porgies flapping like birds, but were lobster-free. “No wonder your lobster’s so expensive,” Pasternack said.

“A labor of love,” he said to me as he tossed clumps of algae overboard and prepared to dump putrescent bunker carcasses from the mesh bait bag inside a trap. Pasternack wore a plain white T-shirt, loose-fitting gray athletic shorts, white crew socks, calf-length white rubber boots, and an FDNY Rescue cap. Varieties of fish flesh were pasted to his clothing, but he didn’t appear to mind, unlike Hession, who concluded that the best way to clean the filth from his blue jeans was to tie them to a fishing line and drag them behind the boat. Which seemed like a clever idea until the line snapped, stranding him in his green plaid boxers. (“All I can say, Pete, is you’re a victim of circumstance,” Hoernig told him.)

Some squid eggs—transparent Gummi worm–like masses—clung to one of the traps. I asked Pasternack whether he’d ever eaten them. He said that he hadn’t, but that he’d tasted octopus eggs in Italy. Almost defensively, he added, “I ate bunker. I got Artie to eat it, too. Little ones. They fried ’em in his restaurant. We called ’em Hewlett Bay anchovies. The sardines of Long Island. It was good, right, Artie? People squirted lemon juice on ’em.” He leaned over with the squid eggs, handed them to me, and said, “Here, put this in the cooler.”