At four in the morning, the Museum of Fish is grotto-like and cold, its concrete floor awash in melting ice, but it’s filled with connoisseurs from all over the world—Portugal, Brazil, Italy, Korea. To most people, this lower Manhattan outpost is known as the Fulton Fish Market. But for me it remains a museum—the pictorial drama of the exhibits, the beauty and rarity of the objects on display, and the sanguinary quality of what’s going on all remind me of paintings by old masters. That tilefish, for example—the one with the fish dealer’s knife plunged in its gold-speckled breast—might be called the Lucretia of the aquatic world.
I have come here this fall morning with David Pasternack, a discriminating fish cook who needs to buy some sea urchin roe and other delicacies for his restaurant, Esca. Dave is about six feet tall, strongly built, and ferociously energetic. He looks more like a shortstop than a chef, and in fact he throws himself around New York’s coastal ecosystem as if it were his personal infield, bagging every catch he can. What keeps fish fresh, Dave tells me, is how it is handled: People think you have to eat it soon after it’s caught, but for most species that’s not true. “Good fishermen, like the Japanese, ice the fish as soon as they catch it, or store it at once in cold brine,” he explains. “That way it can keep for a week.”
There is something wonderfully honest, even morally exemplary, about a nice fresh fish. This piscine candor rubs off on some dealers, but others are cool and slippery, morbidly fishified by too long an association with the stale and the shopworn. They, too, are present in the market, and Dave indicates one with a slight jerk of his head. “Buying fish from him,” he says under his breath, “is like buying fish from the Devil.”
Plainly, Dave thinks he can beat the Devil, which is one reason he interests me. Exasperated by the dubiousness of so much of the fish served all over this country, he’s come up with a blunt solution to the problem of freshness: He does much of his own fishing, and what he can’t catch himself he often buys directly from fishermen he knows and respects out on Long Island. Fulton Street provides the remainder. One day I hint broadly that I’d like to go fishing with him, and I’m instantly invited.
Off long island’s south shore, there’s a long sliver of land called Harbor Isle, and one clear September morning I join Dave and his buddies at a little fishing station perched on its sandy coast. Our party assembles just before sunup, and we board the Mary D, a 28-foot craft surmounted, lobster boat– style, by a three-sided cabin open at the rear. Out after fluke, striped bass, weakfish, and bluefish above all, we’re soon heading through the watercourse known as Deb’s Inlet toward the New York Bight, which is the bay that lies due south of the city.
Aside from Dave and me, our group consists of three middle-aged, semicommercial fishermen, all of whom have rearranged their lives to accommodate their chief enthusiasm and make some decent money out of it. Pete Hession, a grizzled Long Islander who’s been fishing for more than 40 years, pilots the Mary D; he seldom speaks except to relay information from his sonar, whose screen shows in brilliant colors the wrecks on the sea bottom and whatever schools of fish may be passing underneath us. Artie Hoerning, the excitable, deeply tanned owner of South Shore Fish Grill, a market with a small restaurant that prides itself on freshness, is also aboard. With him is Jimmy Crawford, who took early retirement five years ago, primarily so he could go fishing with Artie. Broad-chested and rugged-featured, with a green kerchief knotted around his head, Jimmy could audition for a remake of The Crimson Pirate. He tells me that his background is actually in retail produce, but he’s had this passion for fishing since he was two years old, when his uncle put him in a boat and he saw no good reason to get out.
Ahead of us, mudflats covered with bulrushes heave into view, surveyed by squadrons of wheeling terns. “We’re always looking for the birds,” Jimmy says. “They tell us where the fish are.” And indeed, farther along on the water we make out a flotilla of wild swans, which stare at us fiercely.
We nose into Reynolds Channel, which glances with the light of a sun now fully disentangled from the horizon; as we gather speed, wharves and boardwalks and forests of wooden pilings slide by, and jetties reach out over tawny beaches only to lose their contours a moment later amid the receding jumble of bungalows. Over the dazzling water ahead a gillnetter appears, its net hidden by the waves but marked by a perimeter of flagged floats. “There are boats, a little larger than that,” Dave says, gazing at the gillnetter, “that go out over the continental shelf for a month at a time. The fish will keep that long if they’re properly iced, but I try to get ahold of the top of the catch, what’s caught toward the end of the run.” I try to imagine bobbling around alone for a month, out of sight of land, but already we’ve left the gillnetter in our wake.
Like his fellow fishermen, Dave also grew up on Long Island, where he still lives. Having worked as a cook for more than 20 years, most recently as head chef at Picholine, he opened Esca in April 2000 with business partners Joe Bastianich, Mario Batali, and Simon Dean. Esca means “bait” in Italian—also “enticement” or “lure”; when somebody is really “hooked” on something, the Italians say that he is preso all’esca.
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