The Bizarre Truth (11 page)

Francisco dives into those bays nearly every day of the week, bringing in anywhere from twenty to forty octopuses per trip, each of which weighs roughly two kilos. His method is ancient and bare-boned, to say the least. Armed with only a thin, metal, yard-long stick with a hook attached to the end of it, and wearing only a tight faded Speedo, some fraying, cracked flippers, and an ancient diving mask, he flips over the gunwale and out of the boat. I follow him. He starts out by diving twenty feet under the water and hovering there for a minute or two. At this point, he’s not even looking for octopus, just checking out the visibility and current, all the while he’s expanding his lungs’ capacity to hold oxygen. By the time he finds a good spot to look for octopus, he’s able to hold his breath for four or five minutes, which seems like an eternity when you’re sitting in the boat or floating nearby hoping your diving buddy—and only means of transport back to shore—isn’t dead.

Francisco started me out on a few of the tamer dives, but after a few short lessons, we were off in search of our catch together. I should remind you at this point that I am five feet ten inches tall, weigh 240 pounds, and exercise as often as I can, which is about once a month. My idea of fun water sports is not heading ten miles
from the nearest dock and free-diving in deep water with a swift current in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. But sitting with Francisco, prodded by his immensely toothy grin and halting guarantees of my safety, using my kitchen Spanish as our only means of communication, gave me all the confidence I needed. Besides, if we catch octopus, we eat octopus, right? The water in Tagolunda Bay, especially at the two outermost points of the bay, was some of the cleanest, most pristine ocean that I’ve ever spent time in. The seabed here is composed entirely of rocks and boulders, which means that no sand exists to be stirred up and cloud the water. These conditions are what Francisco looks for in a good octopus bed. You could see hundreds of feet in either direction. The water was teeming with bait and sport fish. The morning sun, facing away from the shoreline, afforded us some incredible light as it entered the water. It was just absolutely breathtaking.

I wish I could have enjoyed the setting as much as I would have liked while I was in the water itself. Even though I was with a pro, my nerves wouldn’t subside. I was in water up to forty feet deep and fighting a ferocious current. In this part of the Pacific, you need to be careful not to get too close to shore or the rolling surf will smash you against the rocks. The entire time I was diving, I struggled to stay at least twenty-five feet off the shore, simply holding my position so I wouldn’t get distracted by the job at hand and wind up tossed against the rocks.

I wasn’t able to follow Francisco into the deepest areas (does that make me an octo-pussy?), but he pointed out clusters of dozens of octopuses a few yards below us. They are just so plentiful that you could actually just nab them out of the open space where they are eating or playing, doing whatever it is that octopuses do in the late morning. Francisco could pick up three or four at a time, swiftly swim back to the boat, and toss them in a live well. Of course, octopuses aren’t always this easy picking. When they aren’t feeding, they tend to squeeze their invertebrate bodies into the rocky nooks and crannies. Francisco poked around the large,
round boulders that made up the underwater terrain, trying to coax the little cephalopods into the open. If he can’t grab them in his hand, he’ll hook them and place them in his free hand. Oddly enough, the octopus inadvertently aids this part of the process by clinging to your hand with its suction-cup-covered tentacles. Once back floating alongside the boat, Francisco demonstrated how to hold the octopus by putting your finger in and around the area of its mouth that sits on the underside of the head—right next to its gaping maw—and sort of squeezing and holding him there. Don’t put your fingers in their mouths; they have sturdy beaks, and trust me, you don’t want to get nipped by an octopus beak.

Within a few hours, we’d filled our boat with all the octopus we had come for, but Francisco wanted to make a few more stops on the way back to Santa Cruz and the dock. On our return trip, we went through the majestic Chahue Bay. The views here were nothing short of stunning: limestone cliffs dramatically plunging into the water, giant boulders with waves slapping over them. We dropped anchor and dove back into the water to scare up a few more octopuses and take advantage of a little more underwater sightseeing before we headed back to a small town called La Crucecita. This is where all the locals live, a cute hamlet with some of the best seafood restaurants in southern Mexico. It is also where I would finally meet up with Francisco’s wife of twenty-six years and get to check out their other business.

Together, the couple runs a local eatery called El Grillo Marinero, which roughly translates to “the seafood grill,” located at Carrizal 908 La Crucecita. It’s a cozy, palapa-style shack with eight or so tables that features a seafood-intense menu: ceviche, seafood salads, traditional seafood appetizers, local shrimp, and about a thousand preparations of
huachinango
, the local red snapper, typically fried. Of course, the
especialidad de la casa
is
pulpo
, octopus. After we dropped our catch in the kitchen, Francisco went to get cleaned up. I stayed behind in the kitchen with Pola, who is known as one of the best seafood cooks in the area. While
untrained, and humble beyond words, her skill set would be the envy of any of the world’s great seafood chefs. She works efficiently and quickly, meticulously cleaning each octopus, discarding the heads and viscera, preserving the ink sac for later use. Next, she butchers them and tenderizes the octopus’s tentacles by pounding them by hand against a large stone perched next to the sink.

If you’re ever looking to cook octopus, be prepared for one of two things: (a) No work, or (b) A lot of it. When it comes to the giant ones, I really love to eat them raw, sashimi-style, which is delicious. If we’re talking smaller octopuses, like the ones from Tagolunda Bay, their size makes for good cooking. Big octopus, especially if you want to cook it, means spending at least an hour beating the invertebrate against a rock to tenderize the meat. Then you must cook it for a long time, often a few hours. One of my favorite little seafood shacks is on the isle of Sifnos in the Cyclades, about half a day out of Piraeus in the Aegean Sea. There you place your order for braised octopus in wine and ink, and watch as the chef’s grandma beats it on a rock for an hour in the water near your table. A few hours later your meal arrives, your patience aided by ample bottles of ouzo and retsina.

But lucky for me, all the octopuses here are small, and Pola made short work of kicking out several different versions, each one tasting more delicious and complex than the last. Francisco returned to the dining room and we sat down to eat. Pola started us off with octopus and shrimp cocktail, made up of steamed diced octopus and poached shrimp, cooled and sauced with onions, garlic, lime juice, cilantro, and fresh tomatoes, served in a tall sundae glass with spoons and fresh tortilla chips. Think cold poached seafood that melts in your mouth bathed in the best gazpacho you can imagine. As we inhaled that dish, the octopus platters came rolling out of the kitchen one at a time. Next was Creole-style Mexican octopus, sautéed with some garlic and onions, fresh tomatoes and peppers, and finished with a little bit of wine, braised all together for fifteen or twenty minutes and served in its own
reduced pan sauce with some rice and soft corn tortillas. The second dish was fresh octopus cooked in wine with garlic and a healthy dose of the octopus ink. I adored this octopus version of a squid dish I first ate with my dad forty years ago when we traveled to Venice. The rich, thick black sauce that coats the octopus is slightly citrusy, and redolent in the most profound way of the dark, briny ocean. There is an earthy and deeply nutty taste that squid and octopus have, and the idea of cooking the animal in its own ink is the perfect combination, allowing not only the whole animal to be used at once but also providing a beautiful flavor contrast thanks more to the slightly lemony edge this particular ink offers.

The dish that absolutely blew my mind was the garlic-and-salt-glazed
pulpo
de ajillo
, which is a very traditional Oaxacan treatment and a centerpiece of southern Mexico’s grandmother cuisine. It’s a dish rarely found in restaurants. Pola takes ten cloves of garlic and about a teaspoon of sea salt and pounds it into a fine paste in her mortar, rolling the pestle around the interior of the vessel with quick, precise strokes. There is not a grain of garlic that’s larger than a piece of sand or talcum powder left in her mortar. Pola turns a burner on the stove to a very low setting and gets the pan hot. Keeping the burner on low, she puts a little bit of olive oil in the pan and begins to cook the garlic and salt paste until it’s cooked through, custardy yellow, and sweet to the taste without that scorching acrid quality to it. She then adds the octopus, cut into pieces, and cooks it for a few moments, then adds a splash of wine, covers the pan, cooking it for about twenty minutes or until the octopus is tender. Then she takes the lid off and she lets that sauce and liquid cook down until it has evaporated entirely around the octopus, leaving all the flavor of that winey sauce concentrated inside this dish. All that was left other than the octopus was the garlic and olive oil; the liquids had done their job. She cranks up the heat for the last fifty seconds, basically caramelizing this garlic in the oil-coated seafood, where it clings to the octopus like a supersweet garlic candy coating. Now the octopus itself melts in your
mouth with a sweet earthy flavor that drove me nuts. Some people are crazy about garlic; I’m not one of them. But this garlicky paste of goodness is one of the singular great dishes that I have ever eaten in my entire life, a simple technique-driven dish that I have used over and over again back home with everything from shrimp to chicken. It’s easy.

Hand fishing for octopus on a sunny day in the Pacific is deceptively intoxicating, but I was stuck thinking about the future of fishermen like Francisco. His tiny town of La Crucecita and the once-sleepy port of Santa Cruz, where there was a vibrant fishing industry just a generation ago, is now home to parasailing, scuba-diving, and sea-kayaking companies. The town’s native culture is in desperate trouble due to tourism companies that can drop serious cash for the dockside real estate. They’re squeezing out people like Francisco, whose family is one of the original five that founded the towns back in the day when there was only fishing—before electricity … before the monstrous all-inclusive hotels that now line the beaches.

What was being destroyed stretches far beyond the bulldozed landscape. From our boat bobbing offshore, I could see the giant fishing trawlers plying the waters on the horizon, scooping up every single fish they could like a vacuum. The effect of these massive trawlers on the majority of the world’s conventional fishing fleets borders on the criminal. The equipment is nonselective, with bi-catch totals that are sky-high, about 60 percent of the total weight. Recent studies show that octopus trawlers are returning to ports with a greater percentage of juvenile octopuses, a telling sign that the species is overexploited. The long-term solution for this modern-day culinary Armageddon is to maintain catch levels that correspond to the potential of the stocks available. We have carbon-neutral living standards, so why not a species-neutral meal equation that would allow diners to sleep at night, knowing their dinner didn’t negatively impact the life expectancy of the
species? While the idea may strike some people as saccharine, I think it’s a pretty important notion.

Promoting artisan fishing would certainly be a step in the right direction. Francisco’s operation, old school as it may be, is a role model for how we can make it work. Take the animals by hand, catch only what you need, and let the fishery self-regulate. Once trawlers are sent packing, the octopus population will rebound quickly, due to their species’ ability to reproduce in a short amount of time.

Of course, getting people to care about an alternative protein, like octopus, is a hurdle in and of itself. While octopus is wildly popular in most other parts of the world, Americans perceive shrimp, black cod, tuna, and salmon as the sea fare with the most sex appeal and most table-friendly attributes. However, octopus (and the small whole fish that the rest of the world eats regularly) should be on everyone’s radar and dining room table. These are some of the best-flavored sea fare, high in protein, low in calories, usually inexpensive, and fairly easy to prepare. Eating alternative proteins is the only way to ease the pressure on center-of-the-plate commodity foods like chicken, pork, and beef.

Octopus is not a novelty item. It represents our salvation, which was one of the reasons I wanted to go diving with Francisco in the first place. We can control the degree to which we allow development to destroy the coastline of one of the most gorgeous physical landscapes in the entire world. We can control the degree to which we allow commercial fishing to destroy the sea life that has kept families employed for as long as there have been people there. As it stands, we’re teetering on the verge of cultural homicide, watching something die and not doing anything about it. I’m not in the business of guaranteeing Francisco has a job and I’m not in the business of keeping the El Grillo Marinero afloat. I am in the business of advocating the preservation of a culture that will allow those elements of our human development to flourish so that one day my son can meet Francisco’s son and they can go fishing.

restaurant’s life span is much like a dog’s. If it lasts seven or eight years, it’s lived a healthy and decent life. If it makes it ten or twelve, and can put a little money back into the investors’ pockets after paying off its opening and carrying costs, it’s had a really good life. But if a restaurant is a couple hundred years old, passed down from generation to generation, and manages to continue serving up one of the best versions of its country’s national dish, which once fueled the most machismo elements of the local culture—well, a restaurant of that caliber is more than just a precious family heirloom, it’s a national treasure, the Lassie of the restaurant world. It seems that if a restaurant of that caliber is rotting at the core and fading away, it’s worth fighting the upstream battle against the bulldozer of globalization. I’m not exactly sure how to go about it, but I do know that when you find an iconic restaurant withering on the vine, a place that is in and of itself a business, and represents one of the last bottles of Coca-Cola in the desert, it’s definitely something worth hanging on to.