Invariably, when I’ve dropped by Esca to see Pasternack, I’ve found him just inside the open doorway of the kitchen, on the ground-floor level, armed with a very sharp knife. The first fish I watched him perform surgery on was a forty-pound halibut that had recently been swimming in the vicinity of Portland. His workstation—situated to afford an unobstructed view of the line cooks and prep cooks at the grill, sauté, and pasta stations, and to allow him to inspect every dish before it leaves the kitchen—is two and a half feet deep and nine feet wide, sufficient to accommodate the occasional four-hundred-pound tuna. His knife was German, with a twelve-inch blade, one of a dozen of varying sizes that he keeps in a plastic tray within easy reach. “I sharpen my knives every Saturday,” he said. “Nobody touches my knives. Not even my wife. They’re scared.”
Downstairs, the halibut had already been scaled, gutted, and shorn of its dorsal and pelvic fins. It took Pasternack about a minute to remove the first fillet, drawing the knife handle toward him in sure, even strokes, with his left hand, as he proceeded along the spine. He lifted and flipped the fish, reinserted the knife laterally, just behind the pectoral fin, cut to the caudal fin, and severed the second fillet. He separated the flesh from the skin of both fillets as cleanly and economically as if he were peeling apples. The carcass was headed for the soup kettle, but not quite yet. “The head’s gonna be my lunch,” he said as he harvested two plum-sized lumps of cheek meat. Then he began trimming the fillets. “Pretty nice halibut,” he said. “This time of year they can be on the spawn. The meat can be a little milky.” Not in this instance, however. From each fillet he cut out the bloodline, a dark-meat layer that extends lengthwise below the dorsal fin, and sectioned the collar into strips for fritto misto. “You know, this is a fish that you’re paying six and a half dollars a pound for. You’re gonna lose at least thirty-five or forty percent. So you’ve got to utilize the whole animal. That’s where your knife really makes all the difference.” The halibut’s primary destiny was to be carved into seven-ounce serving portions, poached, and accompanied by smashed fava beans from Pennsylvania and a vinaigrette made with ramps from upstate New York. Twenty-seven dollars, à la carte.
Esca has seating for 60 to 110 in pleasant weather, when an outdoor patio is opened—and on a normal day each table fills four times. Pasternack fillets and slices fish throughout the morning and during lunch, breaks for a couple of hours in midafternoon, and then resumes until seven o’clock. He multitasks in a self-assured manner—announces orders to the line cooks; talks on the phone; consults with the front-of-the-house managers, nodding when he hears that there’s someone in the dining room whom he should meet and greet; gives instructions to the kitchen runners, who shuttle one aluminum tray after another laden with freshly gutted fish—all the while wielding knives with the same rhythmic, delicate precision. How often does he cut himself? “Only when somebody asks me that question. No, actually, not that much. But I’m due.” A wall phone with an extra-long cord rings at all hours, and Pasternack usually answers it himself, always with the same greeting: “Kitchen.”
Between the moment he first looks at a fish and the moment he finishes filleting it, he often changes his mind about what he’s going to do with it. If it’s perfectly fresh yet doesn’t look perfect (it hasn’t been bled properly; it’s bruised; it was caught in a net and drowned and the flesh is now too opaque; spawning season is under way and the texture seems a bit flabby or “funky”), it won’t be right for the house specialty, crudo—sashimi-sized slices of raw fish that have been accented with sea salt, olive oil, and lemon juice, or with other condiments. But it would still be fine grilled or pan-seared or sautéed. I once asked him to try to articulate the process of creating a new dish. What, precisely, is he thinking when he combines raw fluke with sea beans, radish, and salt? Geoduck (a.k.a. giant clam crudo) with sugar-baby watermelon or artichoke? “I don’t know, man,” he replied. “It’s a very hard question to answer. I think it’s more experience than anything else. Experience dictates that you understand certain things about certain ingredients at certain times of year. You look in the fridge and you have to be able to work with what you have, in season. But it can’t be arbitrary. That’s the problem with a lot of these young cooks. They don’t yet get the idea of how flavors can work, how you have to take into consideration acidity, texture, the properties of various oils. They think they’re being creative but they’re pushing the envelope too much. People like Daniel Boulud and Thomas Keller, what makes them so good is that their food is creative but they know the boundaries.”
I suppose it’s odd to say that I’ve been struck by Pasternack’s empathy for fish, given his recurring role in their demise, but he nevertheless seems intent upon doing honor to the deceased, characteristically by doing no more than necessary to evoke essential flavors and unembellished subtleties. Not that he’s unwilling to call a fish a fish. One day, as I watched him reduce an eight-pound mahi-mahi to about thirty bites of crudo, he showed me its pearly, iridescent pale-pink flesh and said, “You don’t always see it this color. Sometimes the meat’s a little grayer.” On the other hand, mahi-mahi is “a very stupid fish. You catch one and you leave him in the water and all the others’ll follow and you can catch ’em all. Not very smart. Good eating, though.”
Next, he went to work on a Pacific sturgeon, scraping away a yellow adipose layer that looked like chicken fat. “Atlantic sturgeon is a protected species,” he said. “This fish was caught in the Columbia River, in Washington. It’s called a bullet because of the shape. Actually, they’re always a little dirty. But this is one of my personal favorites. Really fatty, like eating a piece of pork.”
From time to time, I would prompt him with fish names and he would respond with an off-the-cuff Pasternackian taxonomy.
Flounder: “The quintessential Long Island fish. In New England, they’ve got scrod. Maine, they’ve got haddock. Long Island, it’s flounder. I was born to flounder fish. I fished for them in Jamaica Bay, South Bay, Hewlett Harbor, under the Meadowbrook Bridge, Island Park, East Rockaway. It was a really abundant fish. But the flounder haven’t cooperated in the last couple of years.”
Cod: “Cod is God. The Spaniards came here in search of cod. Italians, the same thing. It’s a great, versatile fish. Unfortunately, none of them seem to make that right turn at Montauk anymore.”
Porgy: “Ghetto fish. It’s a fish that’s usually associated with minorities. A great fish. But not considered your mainstream white-bread fish. I grill it. Sweet meat. Phenomenal skin.”
Hake: “In the cod family but sweeter, softer in texture than cod, not as rich; half the price of cod. I like it roasted, because it can get really caramelized on the outside without doing anything. It’s just got a lot of natural sugars.”
Bluefish: “Godzilla. The other quintessential Long Island fish. Pound for pound, the hardest-fighting fish there is. Ferocious, eats anything, bites anything that gets in its way. Powerful, elusive. You could stick a beer can on a hook with bait inside and the fish’ll bite the beer can.”
Pasternack’s first restaurant job was more turf than surf. At fourteen, he bused tables in a Rockville Centre steak house whose charms included the bookies who hung out at the bar and the pictures of photo finishes that hung on the walls. Not until his mid-twenties, while cooking at La Reserve, an old-school French place near Rockefeller Center, did he commit to the notion that this was what he would do with his life. By then, he’d gone to college for a year; spent a winter cooking in Vermont and a couple of years at Provence, in Greenwich Village; earned a diploma from Johnson & Wales; and worked in a hotel kitchen in Dallas long enough (less than a week) to recognize that he belonged back in New York. He left La Reserve after three years, following the death of André Gaillard, the French-Vietnamese chef who had hired him, and for the next five years stayed in motion as a line cook or sous-chef in a number of busy, trendy restaurants: Bouley, Steak Frites, Prix Fixe, and Sam’s (where he met Donna Peltz, who was tending ba
r). He was in his early thirties and feeling that he was spinning his wheels when Terrance Brennan, a former sous-chef at Le Cirque who had also been at Prix Fixe, asked him to come to Picholine, a year-old bistro near Lincoln Center. Brennan had a clear idea of what he wanted Picholine to be and the good sense to give Pasternack plenty of latitude. When Ruth Reichl, in a 1996 review in the Times, awarded the restaurant three stars, it was understood that Pasternack, the chef de cuisine, deserved much of the credit. One of his signature dishes was seared sturgeon with caviar sauce; the fish was served with a reduction of shallots, white wine, champagne vinegar, tarragon, and peppercorns whisked with a beurre blanc, to which malossol caviar was added at the last moment. Typical of Pasternack’s cooking style at Picholine, it was labor-intensive (that is, French) in a way that his style at Esca is decidedly not.
While at Prix Fixe, he’d become friendly with Susan Cahn, whose family owned Coach Farms, and who often worked at their goat-cheese stand in the Union Square farmers’ market. Through her, he met her husband-to-be, Mario Batali, who was then merely a robustly talented chef, not yet a food-culture demigod and conglomerateur. Batali and his partner Joe Bastianich, who between them had interests in five Manhattan restaurants (this was 1999; they’re now up to ten), dined frequently at Picholine. They could see that Pasternack was crazy about fish yet otherwise demonstrably sane, and, conveniently, they had an available location, Fricco Bar, an underperforming trattoria on Forty-third Street west of Ninth Avenue.
“Joe and Mario kept coming into Picholine and saying, ‘Come on, let’s do something,’” Pasternack recalled. “They asked me what I wanted to do. I said a seafood restaurant, Provençal style. I wanted to call it Rascasse. That’s the name of a very important fish in the whole Mediterranean culture. Bony, spiny, gnarly, a basic ingredient in bouillabaisse, zuppa di pesce, fritto misto. Joe said, ‘Can you make it Italian?’ I said, ‘A good cook is a good cook. I can do it Chinese if you need to.’ He said, ‘Let’s make a deal.’”
That fall, Pasternack accompanied Batali and Bastianich on a ten-day excursion to Italy. Starting out in Venice, they ate and drank their way up the Adriatic coast, toward Trieste and Istria, in northern Croatia. (On a subsequent trip, Batali and Pasternack and Simon Dean, who became a manager of and partner in Esca, spent a week in Amalfi, Sorrento, and Naples.) “We met my buddies who were fishmongers and restaurateurs,” Bastianich, who owns vineyards in Friuli and Tuscany and is the co-author of a book on Italian regional wines, told me. “We found out that everyone was eating raw fish. We had thought we were going to come back with ideas along the lines of what you would consider classic Venetian-style food—risottos and brodetto di pesce. Crudo was a revelation.”
They tasted, among other things, raw scampi, orata, branzino, lobster, scallops, and sole—briny, sweet, chewy, buttery, and enhanced only by lemon, olive oil, and sea salt. Immediately, they knew that the Esca kitchen would become a testing laboratory for crudo—a term that Bastianich more or less coined. (The word crudo means “uncooked,” but when it appears on a menu in Italy it typically refers to prosciutto.)
“Joe conceptualized the idea behind our crudo selections,” Batali told me. “And Dave’s taken the ball and run around the bases several times with it. A month before we opened, we were in the kitchen, trying this and that. Dave did a crudo that was a giant sea scallop with tangerine oil, pink peppercorns, and some Sicilian sea salt. And it was a giant moment. It was: Holy shit, this is gonna be a great restaurant.”
This is, perhaps, benignly revisionist history. According to Pasternack, none of them had quite foreseen that crudo would become the hallmark of Esca, or anticipated that the restaurant would generate such instant enthusiasm. “The crudo appetizers at Esca are the freshest, most exciting thing to happen to Italian food in recent memory,” William Grimes wrote in the Times. Nor could Pasternack have predicted that his handiwork would inspire so much mimicry. “Imitated by many, copied by few,” he likes to say about the post-Esca proliferation of crudo, which has become appetizer fare in such unlikely locales as Cleveland, Denver, and St. Louis.
Each day, Esca offers a dozen or so wallet-lightening crudo options. Thirty dollars, for instance, will bankroll a tasting selection that amounts to two bites each of, say, pink snapper with black lava sea salt, weakfish with a thin sliver of preserved blood-orange rind, opah with baby fennel and wild-fennel pollen, yellowtail with Gaeta-olive aioli, kingfish with pickled fiddlehead, and fluke with sea beans and radish. “Raw fish makes a statement about quality,” Pasternack told me. “People don’t eat raw fish at just any restaurant.” And he draws a firm distinction between crudo and ordinary American sushi and sashimi. “I always liked sushi—and I lived above a sushi place for four years—but I thought it always tasted the same. Place A was the same as Place B as Place C.”
One night last spring, I observed Pasternack adroitly handling a crudo crisis that materialized as he was preparing a guest-chef banquet at the James Beard House, in Greenwich Village. (In 2004, the James Beard Foundation honored him as the New York chef of the year.) Pasternack and his crew had come expecting to serve dinner to seventy-two, but, at the last minute, the Beard House staff had allowed an extra table of eight. Not counting the oysters that were served before everyone was seated, the menu included two crudo courses. The first of these consisted of two morsels of black sea bass garnished with lemon juice, sea salt, pepper, and a sprig of salad burnet, a green that looks like parsley and tastes like cucumber. The bass had been cut by Pasternack that morning, and now eighty plates were lined up in the kitchen—eight of them empty. A loaves-and-fishes moment, of sorts. Somehow he discerned sixteen pieces of bass that could be halved, a sleight-of-knife executed so that no one in the dining room would notice. As he drizzled olive oil over each portion, he said, “How was that for creative management?” A faint smile. “They’ll go home. They just won’t necessarily go home full.”
“For a lot of American chefs, it’s hard to understand how simple things are in Italy,” Batali said. “That was our idea, both with the crudo and with how Esca presents fish in general. It’s all in the ingredients. When Dave talks about the difference between the fluke in Sheepshead Bay and the fluke from some other part of Long Island, you know that in fact one does taste different from the other. Dave has a real understanding of what the Italians call materia prima—the raw ingredients—and making them available for the palate to explore.”
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, short
ly 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….”
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