“I’ve seen it,” Meehan says. “It’s there. But he doesn’t pursue it. His happiness is not a priority in his life. It’s an incidental benefit, but he’s not dead to it. Maybe, if someday he realizes that happiness can help him achieve his goals, he’ll give a shit about it.”
The waiter at Yakitori Totto comes over and reminds us we have to be out by seven. They need the table. Chang looks out the window, then back at me. “My great regret is I can’t get drunk with my cooks anymore.
“I’ll die before I’m fifty,” he says, matter-of-factly.
My Aim Is True
Spanish is the language of the early morning in Manhattan. At the bagel place where I get my coffee, everybody, customers and counter help alike, are papi or flaco or hermano—or addressed by country of origin. Doesn’t matter if Spanish is even your language. At this hour, it’s what’s spoken. It’s how things are done. The Bengali shop owner, the few American suits—everybody addresses each other in one form or another of Spanish. That’s who’s up and working this time of the morning and who owns this part of the day: the doormen from the nearby apartment buildings, the porters, the nannies on the way to work, the construction guys sent out on a coffee run, the dishwashers and early-arriving restaurant help, they greet each other with the familiar nicknames. If they don’t recognize a face, they ask, in Spanish, “Qué país?”
It’s seven a.m. in the chilly, white-tiled bowels of Le Bernardin in New York City, where the language is also Spanish, and Justo Thomas is looking at seven hundred pounds of fish. A stack of Styrofoam crates packed with halibut, white tuna, black sea bass, mahimahi, red snapper, skate, cod, monkfish, or salmon, mostly unscaled, on the bone, guts still in, reaches halfway up the wall of his tiny workspace.
“The way they catch,” he explains—meaning, on the bone, the way God made them, the way they came out of the ocean and the way that Le Bernardin insists on receiving them. Shiny, clear-eyed, pink-gilled, still stiff with rigor, and smelling of nothing but seawater. Everybody from outside the restaurant—the constant procession of deliverymen who bring cases of wine, vegetables, langoustines, octopus, uni, dry goods—they call him “Primo” (“first” or “number one”). Which seems to please Justo.
Le Bernardin is probably the best seafood restaurant in America. It’s certainly the most celebrated: three consecutive four-star reviews from the New York Times, two-time winner of three Michelin stars, Zagat’s best-rated restaurant in New York—every honor, award you could imagine—the best by any measure of assessing such things. Which means they don’t cut fish at Le Bernardin like other restaurants. The standards are—to say the least—different. Expectations for a hunk of protein are…higher.
Justo is from the rural Dominican Republic. He was the middle brother of three in a family of eight kids (five sisters). His father was a farmer—growing coffee and coconuts. The family raised a few pigs for sale—and chickens for the table. As a child, Justo went to school, then helped on the farm after. His first job was as counter help at his uncle’s pastry shop—six a.m. until ten p.m., every day. He never learned to bake.
He’s now forty-seven years old, and he’s been working in New York City restaurants for twenty years—first under conditions of questionable legality but quickly thereafter, as a permanent resident and then as a citizen. He’s got three kids; the eldest, a twenty-year-old, in college. At Le Bernardin, he makes a flat salary that would be considered spectacular by industry standards—an amount in the neighborhood of what I made in my best years as a chef. Like all employees of the restaurant, he has full medical coverage. Once a year, he takes a four-week vacation back in the DR. Unusually for the restaurant business, Justo has no set hours. He leaves whenever he feels like it—which is when he’s done.
He came to Le Bernadin six years ago, having heard good things about it when he worked across the street at Palio. “They didn’t even say ‘Good morning,’” he says, shaking his head.
“The chef treat everybody the same,” he says, proudly, adding that he’d been looking for someplace with job security. “I don’t like to jump around.” And at Le Bernardin, unlike almost every other job in the restaurant industry, “I work by myself.” In fact, Justo Thomas enjoys a degree of autonomy unheard of by his peers.
The room where he works is actually a ten-foot-by-five-foot dogleg off the hallway through which deliveries are dragged or wheeled from the underground loading dock of the Prudential building on Fifty-first Street. Justo works right next to the steward’s, Fernando’s, tiny office, a few feet from the service elevator to the upstairs kitchen. He’s got one worktable covered with cutting boards, a shelf stacked with clear plastic Lexan storage trays, a child-size overhead shelf where he keeps a small electronic scale and some needle-nose pliers. At the other end of the room is a two-basin sink. The walls, curiously, have been carefully covered with fresh plastic cling wrap—like a serial killer would prepare his basement—to catch flying fish scales and for faster, easier cleanup. The plastic will come down, of course, at the end of the shift. Justo likes things clean and organized.
Each pre-positioned plastic tray has been fitted with a drainage rack—so that the fish are raised up out of any liquid—and each rack additionally wrapped in cling wrap. Justo’s knives—a not particularly expensive slicing knife (usually intended for carving roasts), a cheap stainless steel chef ’s knife, a severely ground-down flexible filet knife (barely a half inch left of blade), and another personally customized mutation with a serpentine edge—are laid out in a row at knee level on a clean side towel. Hanging on a nail behind him, there’s a roll of bright red labels reading WEDNESDAY, which he will use on each and every tray of fish he cuts today—so the cooks upstairs know at a glance which portions to use first and from whence they came. He wears a bright yellow dishwashing glove on his left hand, as he doesn’t like to actually touch the fish. Justo Thomas, one notices quickly when observing him, is something of a germophobe.
One gets the impression very quickly that the concept of cross-contamination has made a powerful—even terrifying—impression on him. When he wipes down his cutting board with a wet cotton side towel, he throws the towel away. Every time.
He is a man set in his habits. He has organized his time and his space the way he likes them. He has a routine, a certain way he likes to do things. And he never deviates.
“With Justo,” says Le Bernardin’s chef de cuisine, Chris Muller, just arriving for work, “it’s all about no wasted motion.” In a Buckaroo Banzai–like explanation of the universe (“Wherever you go…there you are”), Muller holds up one hand flat, representing a fish in Justo-Land, and says, “It’s here…” then turns the palm over, like flipping a page, “…and then it’s there.” He holds my gaze for a split second as if I should understand that he’s just revealed something profoundly important.
Every sous chef, line cook, pâtissier, and stagiere who walks by Justo on the way from the locker rooms, stops, smiles admiringly, and says, “Good morning, chef” (which is the way it’s done at Le Bernardin—courtesy is a matter of policy—one says good morning to all of one’s colleagues, regardless of position, addressing each and every one as “chef”), every one who passes by and sees me standing there with a notebook in hand has to linger for a second, to determine if I’ve gotten it yet, how phenomenally, amazingly, supernaturally fucking good Justo Thomas is at doing this job. They appreciate this better than I ever could, because when Justo goes on vacation, it will take three of them to cut the same amount of fish that Justo, alone, will scale, gut, clean, and portion in four to five hours.
It’s not just that one man will cut seven hundred pounds of fish today, and a thousand pounds Friday, and do the same, more or less, every day, day after day after day. But that every single portion must be perfect. He is well aware of what’s at stake.
“Every piece. It’s the chef ’s name,” he says.
He’s not overstating the case. At Le Bernardin’s level of success and visibility in the
fine-dining firmament, it is no exaggeration to say that were a single order of monkfish to smell even slightly “off”—to hit the table, the result could explode across the Internet like a neutron bomb. The scrutiny of a place of Le Bernardin’s particular longstanding preeminence atop the high-wire is ferocious. There are all too many people ready, upon hearing of even one such incident, to declare the restaurant “not as good as it used to be” or “over” terms that are, for better or worse, the currency of influential food nerdism.
Let’s put it another way: I graduated from the best culinary school in the country. I spent twenty-eight years as a professional cook and chef. I’ve cleaned and portioned thousands and thousands of fish in my time. The executive chef–partner of Le Bernardin, Eric Ripert, is probably my best friend in the world.
And I would never dare to put a knife to a piece of fish at Le Bernardin.
Ripert maintains an unofficial intelligence network that would be the envy of the CIA—solely for the purpose of Defending the Realm. If you are a food critic, a person of importance, anyone who could possibly hurt or impact the restaurant in a negative way, you are recognized within seconds of walking in the door. Your likes and dislikes are…known. Even if you’re a journalist who’s never been in the restaurant—but are likely to visit soon—and write about it, chances are, you will not, on arriving, be a completely unknown quantity. Ripert is an astonishingly plugged-in guy. Point is: he has to be.
So, Justo’s not being disingenuous when he says he identifies each piece of fish with the name and reputation of his chef. That—at that level of fine dining—is The System, where every server, every cook has to look at every little detail as having the potential to bring down the temple. Everything—absolutely everything—must be right. Always.
If you’re Justo Thomas, and you cut and portion fish for a living, you find it’s necessary to do things in a certain order. He works in the same unvarying progression every day. Fernando, who receives and weighs the fish, always arranges it in the same order and configuration. The way Justo likes it.
“I like fish,” says Justo without a trace of irony. “I eat a lot of fish.” He does not feel the same way about meat. He doesn’t like it. “I don’t trust the blood,” he exclaims, almost shuddering at the thought.
“I get cut? The blood get in me.” Fortunately, he’s not required to touch the stuff often. Perhaps out of sensitivity to Justo’s phobia, the one beef dish on the menu—a Wagyu beef surf and turf—is portioned by the line cooks.
Today, halibut comes first. It’s one of the easiest fish to clean: two fat, boneless filets, top and bottom on each side. You zip them off the central spine easily, the skin comes off in one go—and the meat portions itself—like cutting filet mignons off a tenderloin. A twenty-five-pound halibut takes Justo about eight minutes.
Cod is a different matter. It’s delicate. Extremely delicate—and perishable. The flesh, handled roughly, will mash. The physiognomy of a cod is not suited to eventual portioning as the identical, evenly shaped squares or oblongs a three-star restaurant requires. But before I’m even fully aware of what’s going on, Justo’s got the filets off the bone—neatly stacked. He puts all the left-side filets in one stack—the right-side filets in another. With the inappropriate (one would think) slicing knife, he’s drilling out absolutely identical cubes of cod (all the left-hand filets first—then the right-hand ones). If they’re not identical, he quickly—and almost imperceptibly—squares them off, trims them down to uniform size and shape. The trimmings form a steadily growing pile off to the side, which will be joined throughout the morning by other trimmings, for eventual donation to City Harvest. Tail ends—or smaller but still useful bits, doomed to never be uniform but, in every other respect, perfectly good, form another pile—above and away from the uniform ones. After he finishes one stack, he lays them out in a plastic tray, in the order that they came off the fish. When the uniform, cookbook-quality left-hand sides and right-hand sides of fish have been arranged (never stacked on top of each other) in the plastic tray, he pulls down the little gram scale from the shelf above him and, at supernatural speed, starts pairing up oddball pieces. He needs only weigh one piece for reference. The scale goes back to its shelf and he squares off and pairs up the remaining pieces of cod—segregating them to the side in the tray. These will be used either as two separate orders for a tasting menu—or artfully positioned on plates as whole orders. The point of segregating them from the others is that when the cooks have two or more orders of cod for the same table, it will be easy for them to ensure that all the plates will look the same (either two smaller pieces of cod—or one brick). The whole system is designed for uniformity and ease—under worst-case-scenario circumstances, the user, after all, is presumably a very busy line cook in a hurry. When Justo’s done loading the cod, he covers the portions with plastic wrap, slaps a bright red WEDNESDAY label on top, covers that with the clear plastic lid. He puts the scraps of cod for City Harvest on a small, plastic wrap–covered sheet pan below the work table. He wipes down his station completely with hot water. Presses the button for the elevator. Washes his knives and hoses out the sink, knowing that he has just enough time to do this while the elevator to the à la carte kitchen comes down—not wanting to waste a minute waiting. Then he takes the tray upstairs, opens the walk-in, and places the tray on the shelf in the same exact place that the cod of the day has always been placed and always will be placed. The cooks will be able to find it blindfolded, if necessary.
Le Bernardin is a seafood restaurant—and we are hip-deep in the stuff. Ice from the fish crates is melting onto the floor, and Justo is even now hauling an enormous mahi onto the cutting board. But it does not smell of fish in this place. There is not even the vestigial smell of seafood you get at even the best wholesalers or Japanese fish-markets. The fish is exquisitely fresh. Fernando is constantly mopping—around and below us—every few minutes with hot, soapy water.
Full crates come in, empties are dragged out, an ongoing process—almost organic. It reminds me of the opening passages of Zola’s Belly of Paris, a supply train of horsecarts laden with food, stretching from market into the countryside and beyond.
Any piece of fish you are likely to see at your supermarket or fish-monger’s would be sniffed out and thrown away immediately here.
“If it smells like fish, it goes back,” says Justo. Fish obtained from regional sources is sent back if deemed inferior in any way. Fish from a high-end wholesaler in Maine is simply weighed and thrown out if not up to standards. They reimburse without question.
He attacks the mahi with his chef ’s knife, taking the filets off with two strokes. Elapsed time? Sixty seconds. Left-side filet goes to one side, right-side to the other.
By eight fifteen in the morning, Justo has finished the day’s portions of halibut, cod, and mahi.
It’s time for the skate, a fish he’s not so fond of. He empties a big bag of large wings into the sink, about thirty-five pounds in all, and immediately starts washing them with cold water. Skate are slimy, delicate, highly perishable, and loaded with transparent bits of cartilage, which, if left inadvertently inside, could do serious damage to the inside of your mouth or throat. Picture an airplane with fat wings. Top side of each wing is a thick filet. On the underside, another, thinner one. The perimeters of each wing bristle with little bones, and between the top and bottom filets is a barrier of thin, flexible, dangerously translucent, cartilagenous spokes, like the buttress of a church—and about as unpleasant to bite into.
Justo picks up the chef ’s knife. “I sharpen myself. Once a week.”
I can’t help asking, “Once a week?”
For a guy as scrupulous as Justo, that seems like a long time to go between sharpenings. Cooks much less conscientious than he labor over their blades on a daily basis. The very essence of knife maintenance—a notion inextricably tied up with one’s self-image as a cook—is that the sharper the knife, the better.
Not necessarily, expla
ins Justo. “I like medium sharp,” he says, pointing out the cartilage of the skate as an extreme example of his principle. “Too sharp? You get part of the bone. When it’s sharpened correct, it passes over the bone.” With this, he grabs a large skate with his gloved hand, and, with the chef ’s knife, removes the fattest part of the flesh from the top of both wings. It looks like he’s savagely and indifferently hacking at the things. One skate after another, he quickly and brutally removes only the fattest part of the top of each wing. The rest, the two unexploited filets on the underside of each fish, go straight in the garbage—along with about 70 to 80 percent of the total body weight of the animal: skin, bone, and cartilage.
One could be forgiven for asking about City Harvest—an organization with whom Eric Ripert works very closely and actively raises a lot money. Why don’t they take that fish? It’s complicated, I gather. Simply put—and, I’m guessing, this is true across the board in similar fine-dining restaurants—there’s nobody and no place and no time to winnow out every scrap of fish from every carcass, or even most of them. Even the most good-hearted restaurants just can’t do it. City Harvest does not, it appears, have the facilities or the personnel to transport, hold, process, and prepare the more close-in leavings of New York’s seafood restaurants. Fish like skate are, in any case, so extremely perishable that they’d likely be spoiled by the time any secondary team could get a knife to them. The way things work now, they don’t even like to take the incredibly high-quality filet meat that Le Bernardin generates unless it’s fully cooked first. The restaurant boils or steams the stuff before City Harvest takes it away. (They claim it makes the trucks smell bad otherwise.)
It occurs to me that a worthwhile endeavor for a charitable organization might be the creation of a flying squad of ex-convict or ex-substance-abusing trainee fish-butchers—who could pick up and quickly trim out every scrap of useable fish from contributing restaurants. They could probably feed a whole hell of a lot of people. If perishability is a problem, perhaps they could quickly puree the stuff on site—prepare and freeze Asian-style fishballs and fish cakes by the thousands. (Note to self: talk to Eric about this idea.)
Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook Page 24