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.
Dave tells me that thanks to conservation efforts, this sea has been getting cleaner for years, and that it now attracts marine turtles and ospreys. All around us, cormorants, which tend to shun cloudy water, are standing sentry on posts and pilings. Out in the mazy wetlands, we can see feeder rills that sidewind their way toward the inlet, and in these feeders, Jimmy says, you can spy tiny grass shrimp, which fluke like to feed on. But soon the marshes are swallowed up behind us in a blaze of light, and the Atlantic Beach Bridge floats overhead, a brief shadow. Around its piers, we glimpse the silhouettes of men, bent and intense, baiting their lines for stripers.
Heading southwest toward Rockaway Reef—an artificial structure composed of metal junk deposited to attract underwater life—we hit a sudsier sea. Toward the offing, we make out long, lavender-tinted profiles standing on the horizon, vast enough to seem permanent fixtures but actually just container ships awaiting permission to enter New York–New Jersey Harbor. Suddenly, a big red clam boat materializes, rigged with cranes jutting out on either side like an old-fashioned nun’s wimple. She’s chugging and listing heavily to one side, and as we slip around behind her we see the huge, comblike dredge, half weighing her over, being hoisted amidships. Striped bass often cruise in the shadow of such a tub, feeding on the dislodged clams spinning down through the water and on the loose bivalves kicking along the ocean floor—the jaws of a striper can easily crush a clamshell. As stripers like the clam boat, fishermen like the stripers, and numerous small craft are excitedly whipping around the vessel, their motors hacking and grinding. The men call back and forth, companionably trading tips. We drop our lines to the sea bottom, then wind them up five reel-turns. Jimmy is cutting bait—squid and whitebait, and live bunker from a brine-filled basin—and tossing the chunks astern.
And so hours pass in the crystalline light: The sea laps at our hull, seagulls gurgle and wheeze, and the wind twists the sound of the clam boat into a fitful snore. We’re rolling with a spiral motion, the water black and glassy as obsidian, the breeze blowing it into furrowed swells that mesmerize and lull me into a strange, vigilant doze. Though I haven’t been fishing in years, I’ve remembered not to bring a watch, not to fret, not to guess at the time ... yet after a long, dreamlike spell, I realize with a start, as the clam boat grinds backward for the umpteenth time and hauls its dripping rake out of the water, that the sun, which used to be needling my left cheekbone, is now scorching my forehead and is also much higher in the sky. It’s early afternoon, we’ve been tossing around out here since eight this morning, and we still haven’t caught a thing.
Sure, Dave thinks he can beat the Devil. But today we’re having a nasty little run of bad luck, and everyone on board has a different way of dealing with it. Dave repeatedly drops and reels in his bait. Jimmy chunks more bunker and flings it loose over the stern. Artie gives the ocean a profane piece of his mind. Pete, scrutinizing his computerized sonar screen, steers us quietly from point to point.
Jimmy: Fishing—you gotta love it.
Dave: It ain’t over till it’s over.
But soon the tide has turned, it’s ebbing now, and the water is pocked with trails of white bubbles; by five o’clock, we’ve casually pulled in several sea bass and three stripers. Drifting into shallower water to catch fluke, we dangle our bait just off the bottom, and soon a big one flashes in the air, its rich umber color badged with white whirligig patterns. Yet the sky, no longer blue, is cloudy and opalescent, the horizon a gray smear. Golden evening highlights dance on a steeper sea, the gulls shriek and snatch at our bait, and spray slaps over our gunwales. “One more drift?” says Artie, but the others feel that we’ve done what we can, and we yank our lines.
Just as we put on some speed, however, and are plowing out of the bight, Pete flaps a hand toward something up ahead. It’s dusk now, but we can just make out what he’s pointing at: Moving along the hilly sea is a strange patch that’s all dark, blackened as though by rain. “The bluefish are running,” shouts Dave. “Grab the net!” Drawing nearer, we see that the water is actually bristling, tweaked upward into a zillion arrowy points by tiny fish—bunker struggling to escape into the air. As a net flies overboard, I catch sight of fragments of small fish passing in a mountainous, glassy swell, like sardines in aspic—they’re the butt ends of bunker sheared apart by bluefish. The bluefish,more than a yard long, dart for 10 or 15 feet along the surface of the water, gnashing at their prey and leaving white tails of foam like shooting stars, their teeth cutting a clean, semicircular arc right through the bunker. Dave and his friends are moving with the speed and precision of infielders nailing down a triple play. We make several runs upwind of the black water, then drift down into it, each time netting lots of writhing bluefish, which are immediately packed in ice. But it’s almost dark now, we can hardly see what we’re doing, and we all know that this piece of luck should have come along hours earlier. With two ice chests packed full of fish, we turn back, calling it a day.
To move from the open sea straight to a working kitchen is a jolting experience, because you’re leaving the dominion of water for a place where fire reigns supreme. In Esca’s kitchen, the tall flames on the ranges glint like toothy half-smiles.
“Look at that rainbow effect, look at that sheen!” Dave is filleting a huge, rich halibut, slipping his knife along its row of pearly vertebrae. “Fish like this are fattest in winter,” he says. “Partly because of the cold, and partly because they’re going to spawn soon and need the energy reserves. Okay, now here’s a salmon. Put your hand in the cavity—yeah, right in the belly. Feel the oil? Well, that’s what we’re after!”
Dave’s voice is as sandpapery as his one-day beard, and every few minutes he’s on the phone, doing deals with fishermen and fish brokers. He shows me live razor clams from Long Island, striped bass provided by Pete, shimmering new whitebait from Jimmy, tiny scallops like fairy fans, Hawaiian moonfish (opah), weakfish just bought off some fellows under the Atlantic Beach Bridge. “My cooking is rooted in relationships,” Dave says. Artie calls in about some fantastically fresh cod he’s just got his hands on, from Stellwagen Bank, 25 miles east of Boston; afterward, Dave turns to me and says, “Cod is the most important fish in the world, historically and commercially, and I love the stuff. It was my grandmother’s favorite fish. Her name was Gertie Pasternack; she had a little family-style restaurant in Coney Island, and she never, ever ate fish off the bone. She would heat the cod over a low flame, without liquid, so it would sort of braise itself.” Dave shows me how he roasts cod steaks in a dusting of special flour (his secret recipe) that, together with the oil in the fish, creates a golden, caramelized crust. When I begin to ply him with questions about seafood cookery, he answers me directly, unguardedly; and when I remark on the excellence of a soup one of his cooks is preparing, he says, “Listen, put some fatty fish in your soup. Some good mackerel, for instance—just enough, not too much. It may be unorthodox, but it gives the soup body.”
Hours later, as dinnertime arrives and the cooks are dancing furiously at their stoves, Dave pulls me downstairs to his walk-in refrigerator to look at the cod that’s just come in from Artie. In the frosty room, he dandles a big, speckled beauty.
“You gotta see this, you gotta feel it,” he says. As he draws near, his face fills my field of vision, his smile radiant, exultant. “This cod is so fresh its muscles are still tight; it’s stiff as my arm. Hold it—that’s right. Man, you could drive a nail with that thing!”