I’ve eaten conch many times, sometimes frozen or canned, many times fresh, but never still wiggling and winking as it came out of the shell. That day on No Man’s Land we feasted on the best-tasting conch I have ever had, and not just because it had been hand collected in cold, deep water, but also because it was so insanely fresh. That made our meal sweeter and more vibrant than anything that I could have hoped for. It was a truly sublime eating experience.
As the sun was setting, we pigged out on the kind of meal that you try to re-create for the rest of your life. A meal that makes all the other beachfront cookouts pale in comparison; a meal you would prefer to forget because it makes all the subsequent meals an emptier experience. Frothy, Skinny, and Adrian made a curry stew of fresh lobster and local vegetables collected at the market that morning, including cocoa, dasheen root, peppers, onions, sweet potatoes, and tomatoes. We made an incredible salad from some wild sea grapes I found. These are a member of the seaweed family whose little bulbous clusters coming off a central stem have inspired the locals to refer to them as sea grapes. We took wild limes, lemon, and fresh grated coconut and made a lobster ceviche, complete with the tomatoes and onions that we’d brought along. We ate it all with our conch, sitting in the sand on this uninhabited island with the sun setting in the background, the wind long since died down, and the seas as smooth as glass.
That part of the world has a confluence of so many cultures. You have the Creole, the African cultures mixed with Spanish, Dutch, and Indian influence, which makes Trinidad and Tobago’s food scene a vibrant hodgepodge of international flavors on a par with countries like Singapore—a place everyone thinks of when the subject of a cultural culinary melting pot comes up. The meal had a little bit of all of those worlds thrown into the pot, and none of us wanted the day to end.
The poignancy of the evening was hammered home when it came time to say good-bye. Elvis was nuzzling the British lady in the back of the boat, and Frothy and Adrian and Skinny were stuffed to the gills, slapping one another on the back. Tobago was walking along the beach, not overly sad, mostly wistful. The afternoon had focused me around the fact that he was the last of his kind, but I didn’t want to fetishize him. I felt bad that I had asked him so pointedly about it earlier on his boat; it seemed to be one of those issues he’d pushed to the back of his mind, and I had brought it front and center—perhaps insensitively? Tobago came walking back down the shore and seemed to read my mind. I began to apologize, stumbling over my words, and he stopped me, smiled his big toothy grin, and began barking orders at Elvis. We were all good.
The world is changing, and often I wish we could bring back the slower ways of doing things. There was a simpler time once, when diving for plentiful conch was a safe and economically viable occupation. It’s not so easy to turn back the clock, and I am not sure we would want to. The world advances, and there is an ebb and flow of civilization that plays an important role in our historical and cultural development. Without internal-combustion engines there would be no rocket ships to the moon. However—and I don’t think that you can lambaste and vilify someone for saying this—in an era when we are praising and even lionizing the slow-food movement, the concept of sustainability, and the notion of locavorism, we need to at the very least preserve the legacy of these people in a meaningful way so that future generations can get an accurate sense of what the world used to be like. The United States’ high-end food culture is obsessed with sustainability, farm-to-table eating, snout-to-tail eating, and eating as close to nature as you can. I hope that some of that trickles down from the awareness of the privileged few to all Americans. Currently, you see a lot more of that kind of talk in the Wednesday Food Section of the New York Times than in the local mechanic’s shop, with guys standing around the soda machine, wiping oil from their hands, and swapping stories about the best farmer’s market to get heirloom dried beans from.
It’s hard not to get emotional about spending the day on the water with the very last person in the world who harvests conch the old-fashioned way, one at a time with his own two hands. And the lessons to be taught about hard work and our rapidly diminishing capacity to save our planet from environmental disaster are best learned not from the nightly news but from men like Tobago Cox.
Saving Huatulco
Free Diving for Octopus
t might not seem like it at first glance, but Mexico is one of the most diverse countries in the world, ethnically, geographically, politically, and culturally. Every time I visit, I marvel at the abundance of things to do and how amazingly different one day can be from another. Americans love heading to Cabo, Mazatlán, or Cozumel, but my favorite destination has to be the country’s southernmost state, Oaxaca. I’m sure you’ve heard of Acapulco, the region’s most bustling beach town, overdeveloped in the extreme and filled with more ethnocentrist globe-trotting tourists than just about any location on the planet. But beyond that, Oaxaca offers the best of everything: gorgeous sand beaches, a phenomenally complex and varied food scene, and that easygoing vibe (in most towns) that nobody I know can ever seem to get enough of.
But the area has so much more to offer than sunbathing, Jimmy Buffet sing-alongs by the pool, and umbrella drinks filled with cheap tequila. The fish and sea life are plentiful, especially when it comes to deep-sea, sport, and hand-line or net fishing. With this readily accessible, renewable food source, it’s not surprising that the locals made the most of it. The Pacific coastline of the state of Oaxaca is lined from top to bottom with fishing villages, both large and small, some thriving, some dying, and some struggling to survive the onslaught of the developers’ bulldozers.
Take the city of Huatulco, which seemed to spring up almost overnight, but really has grown over the past three or four decades from a lonely little beach, with some fun rock outcroppings surrounding a nice deep-water harbor, into a numbingly throbbing hotel zone. Back in the day, this little beach town was wallowing in huge puddles of financial success because of the fishing. The sheer abundance of seafood that is available here is staggering: mollusks, abalone, conch and clams, urchins, squid, fin fish, lobsters and all other manner of crustaceans—you can find it all in the cool, deep waters off Huatulco. These days, tourism drives the economy. Projections are that the once-tiny fishing town will support some 20,000 hotel rooms by 2020. In 2008, nearly 300,000 visitors traveled to Huatulco. Within twenty years, they expect two million.
I spent some time in Huatulco a few years back, staying overnight in one of those horrific all-inclusive resorts on the beachfront, a place seemingly carved right out of a Hieronymus Bosch painting of Dante’s Inferno. The place was filled with lobster-colored, margarita-scented tourists, most of whom never left the hotel compound. Why should you? You’d miss all the free booze, the pool volleyball with the bosomy bikini-ed staff, the free chips and salsa—and God forbid you weren’t first in line for the massive buffet-style meals that made airplane food seem inspired.
Most vacationers talk a big game, boasting that they want to dive into another culture face-first, but they never will. My fellow guests were shocked as they watched me journey out in the morning to discover the real Huatulco. These are the folks who fear getting robbed or acquiring a serious case of Montezuma’s revenge at every turn; these are the people who think that everyone in the city they live in leads a monastic existence predicated on a need to walk the earth performing good deeds at every turn. They also think that all indigenous peoples around the world are hustlers and grifters, drug dealers and terrorists, every one of whom is hell-bent on separating them from their wallets. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: The best experiences you will ever have as a traveler require getting off your ass and spending quality time with real people in real towns, cities, and villages. I prefer to do it by experiencing food and sharing culture.
Anyway, I’ll get off my soapbox, but frankly people become so afraid of venturing into the unknown that they often miss what is right in front of their faces. One of the best meals I ate
in Mexico on that trip came from the water right outside the hotel. I’d been up in my room, taking in the sunset from my balcony, trying to figure out what to do for dinner and where I could go to eat that wasn’t in or near my hotel, when I noticed four or five kids diving off the rocks into the water. Each time they came out of the ocean, they dumped handfuls of shellfish into pails, which I assumed they would later hawk to local restaurants. I ran right down to the beach as fast as I could, asking if they had a knife or some sort of tool to open the shells. They did, and it turned out that not only were they trying to collect some seafood to haul to the back doors of a few local kitchens, but they would also hawk their wares on the beach to anyone willing to buy a plate. I ate a platter of fresh shellfish, one at a time, shucked by a nine-year-old kid right there on the beach. There was an assortment of eight or nine different pieces machine-gunned at me like a little mini raw bar selection on automatic fire. I’ve seen the same plate for hundreds of dollars in swanky Tokyo restaurants—orange and red Pacific clams, abalone, small whelks, oysters, scallops, all fresh from the sea. The big difference with this meal was that it cost about four bucks and I shopped for it from my balcony window.
While I love the Pacific shellfish, Huatulco is actually best known for a different sort of sea creature. The area surrounding the town’s hotel zone, technically called Los Bahias de Huatulco, is made up of about nine bays that stretch for twenty miles along southern Mexico’s Pacific shore. Much of the coastline is extremely rocky, with good currents and clean waters, making it the perfect breeding grounds for octopus. I love hunting and gathering food, so naturally I wanted to fish for octopus the old-fashioned way. Enter Francisco Rios Ramirez, an octopus diver with thirty years’ experience under his belt. I’m beginning to think the fountain of youth is located in the long-lost city of Atlantis—either that or diving is great for your skin, since Tobago Cox and Francisco are two of the most fit and youthful-looking guys I’ve met in a long time. Francisco has a trim waistline, maybe thirty-four inches, but the guy weighs more than I do. He’s solid muscle, with a huge chest and the widest shoulders I have seen on anyone his size. If I hadn’t known better, I would have pegged him as an NFL linebacker, albeit a very short one. We met up with him at the docks in the sleepy port of Santa Cruz. We shared a coffee and a roll, got our gear together, and, under a cloudless sky, boarded his little boat, a small skiff with an ancient outboard motor, and headed out toward our first stop, Tagolunda Bay, which incidentally means “beautiful woman” in Zapotec, one of the area’s indigenous languages.
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.
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