The Third Plate: Field Notes on the Future of Food

by Dan Barber

  The answer is that you cannot compare the greatest of meals. There is no one great meal, no perfect standard against which you measure every other meal. But you can think of certain meals as game changers, meals so profoundly original and singular that they forever transform how you think about food. Here was one such meal.

  On our way to a second visit with Eduardo, Lisa and I made a pilgrimage of sorts to Aponiente, a tiny thirty-seat restaurant in the town of El Puerto de Santa María, at the far southwestern tip of the Iberian Peninsula, not far from the Strait of Gibraltar. The restaurant belongs to Ángel León, a man frequently referred to as the “Chef of the Sea”—an epithet he both promotes and laughs off.

  I had met Ángel briefly once before, at a talk he gave in New York to a slack-jawed group of cynical city chefs. He was renowned only in the culinary world, the kind of chef who fearlessly broke boundaries—not with wild juxtapositions of different foods or with chemical manipulations, but by looking to nature, and the sea in particular, to define his cuisine. The results were astonishing. Instead of butter, for example, he used a puree of fish eyeballs (detritus for most chefs) to thicken fish sauces, giving his dishes an added boost of ocean flavor. And then there was his preparation for “stone soup,” made with algae and weeds from stones he’d plucked from the ocean floor.

  At the talk that day, Ángel showed off his latest invention, a mixture of dried algae that looked like sand. He used it to clarify a broth without the addition of heat and—even more amazing—without removing any of the flavor. Over the course of a two-hour demonstration, he rambled a bit about the plight of the oceans and gave what seemed like a loopy defense of a certain kind of tuna fishing, but when you are in the presence of Ángel’s extraordinary creations, you quickly adjust to the fervent and poetic way he experiences the world around him.

  Having never actually eaten his food, I arrived at Aponiente with enormous expectations. I came not only because of my own curiosity about Ángel and his work, but also because of Caroline Bates, of Gourmet. What better way to start righting the wrong of that bluefin than to learn about cooking fish from a chef who actually understood the ecology of the oceans? Ángel surprised me by sitting at the table and joining us for lunch.

  I should pause here and say: this never happens. Chefs don’t eat in their dining rooms, just as conductors don’t sit with their audiences during concerts. I was flattered that Ángel would join me, until I discovered there were no other reservations for lunch. Not one other table. El Puerto de Santa María, like many southern coastal towns, is a haven for summer vacationers. The population swells tenfold in July and August, which is when Aponiente does 80 percent of its business. The rest of the year—especially in March, when I was there—the restaurant loses money.

  “I learned everything I know about fish from my father,” Ángel said, toying with his fork as we waited for our server to arrive. (As he does not speak English, Lisa became the bridge once again.)

  “We went out fishing one day, just the two of us, and we found this great place to fish for grouper—it was so great, and we caught a ton of grouper, like five fish that same day. It was a huge haul.” He took a long, slow drag of his cigarette, drawing out the sweetness of the memory. “But it wasn’t an accident, this place we found. Whenever we caught a fish, the first thing my dad made me do was open up the belly. If, inside, we saw razor clams and certain kinds of shellfish, we would take the boat to the area we knew had a lot of razor clams and shellfish and we would start fishing there. I was just a kid, eight or maybe nine, so I didn’t pay any attention. I just thought, Well, this is how you know where to go and fish. But it was really investigative work—you know, Quincy-like—and I learned to love it, to know my fish. It informed me as a chef so much because it has all these culinary implications. You’re paying attention to what you eat eats.” He paused to extinguish his cigarette and waved his hand in the air, signaling for the food to start coming out of the kitchen.

  (A few years after this meal, I met Ángel’s younger brother, Carlos. He described their relationship as exceptionally close, except for when they fished with their father. “We would fish together, the three of us, and Ángel wouldn’t let me touch any fish when it came out of the water,” Carlos said. “Nothing. He’d scream: ‘Don’t touch!’ He didn’t want me to tamper with the evidence, you know? He was afraid even my fingerprints would make the fish less pure or something. And then he’d go in the corner of the boat and dissect the fish, so slowly and carefully. He’d carry it over to me and say, ‘You see that?’ And I was like, ‘See what?’ ‘The stress,’ he’d say. But to me it just looked like a dead fish. He started to see things I couldn’t see.”)

  Ángel sat up and continued. “And so the next day we got up at five o’clock in the morning to go back to fish in the same spot. My dad was so excited, I remember—only, when we got there, a dragnet had been set up and the fish had been caught up in it. These people were taking all the fish! So my father got super pissed off. You didn’t want to be around my dad when he was pissed like that—completely . . .” Ángel raised his eyebrows and whistled at the memory. “So he took out his big knife, and he just started cutting the nets. Chhh, chhh, chhh.” Ángel cut through the air with his fist, making vertical slashes. “The people that had done it were in a boat with binoculars and could see him. They were in a pretty good-sized boat with a large motor in the back. And they started chasing us. My dad was calm, but he had us rowing hard until we got close to land. When my mom found out, she was furious and wouldn’t let my father bring me fishing for a while. She was sure he would get me killed. My dad only said, ‘They were taking too much,’ and that, at least, I understood.”

  Ángel calls himself a sea-ologist. He is in his thirties and stocky, with a thick neck and dark, deep-set eyes. His manner suggests he’s not easy to get to know, and that if you try, he may at any minute blow up at you.

  After a glass of fino, warm bread was served. It was dark green and smelled overwhelmingly of the sea. “Plankton bread,” said the server, but he didn’t have to. I had heard about Ángel’s signature bread, with its homemade brew of phytoplankton, which Ángel had a laboratory grow for him. “You mix the yeast with the plankton,” he said, “and it gives you a 70 percent better rise in the dough.”

  He told me that when he opened Aponiente, he initially didn’t want to serve bread. (“What the fuck for?”) He said it had no meaning for him in the context of what he was trying to express. But when customers started demanding it, he relented. “I said, ‘Okay, fine, bread—but you’ll have to taste it with the sea, because the first thing I want you to taste here is the expression of the sea.’”

  And the second thing, too. I was served a single clam—an unnamed variety that Ángel explained was quite unpopular because it supposedly had very little flavor—poached so lightly in its own juices it appeared raw, sitting in phytoplankton sauce. I mopped up the puddle of phytoplankton with the warm phytoplankton bread and breathed in through my nose, smelling the sea.

  “It’s a very elemental plate—humble, but at the same time it’s the greatest thing that you could eat. You’ve got the sea, and the primary ingredient of the sea, the origin of life,” he said. And then he paused. “The beginning of every meal should start with the origin of life, don’t you think? I feel very lucky to be creating cuisine with the origin of life.”

  I asked him how he came to make the origin of life in a laboratory. “To me it was always like a Star Wars adventure,” he said. “I had this infatuation with being able to use the primordial form in my cooking. But nobody else really wanted to figure it out with me, so I stopped talking about it. I didn’t stop dreaming about it.”

  Eventually he drummed up the nerve to approach the University of Cádiz, where he learned about a kind of netting they use to harvest phytoplankton in the Strait of Gibraltar in order to test for pollution. “I thought, Okay, not so hard. I will finally have plankton for
my kitchen.” Ángel took a boat and dragged the net for four hours. In the end, he collected less than two grams, enough for a small loaf of his bread. He decided to test it and he learned that nearly the entire periodic table was present in those two grams.

  “You know what? That confirmed for me that I was right to be so excited about it. The itch wasn’t going to go away. Lucky for me, I live near the sea, surrounded by people who relate to the sea.” Working with a group of scientists, Ángel and the team created a kind of marine garden using special lighting and heavily oxygenated water to grow uncontaminated, superconcentrated plankton. Ángel could now harvest twenty kilos every five months.

  As our plates were cleared, I was amazed at how long the smell of phytoplankton lingered. Ángel nodded, pleased. “The taste, the aroma, it stays with you. That’s what I want. I want it to stay with you for the whole meal. It’s almost like I can take fish out of the equation—I can go straight to the source. I can say to my diners: if there’s no phytoplankton, there’s no life.”

  The next course, horse mackerel with wasabi sesame seeds and lemon caviar, was rolled in nori like maki sushi. The mackerel had been deboned and pressed into a medallion shape, the seaweed resembling the skin of the fish. Ángel told me the fish had been sold to him that morning just off the boat, but that the lot he bought was badly bruised. For a chef so obsessed with, and knowledgeable about, great seafood, I was surprised to learn he went ahead and purchased the damaged goods.

  “Of course I did,” he said. “The fisherman came to me because he knew I wanted it. And why not? Fish are bruised all the time, just like us, but they’re no worse off. You know who’s worse off? Fishermen, that’s who.”

  By pressing the mackerel together and presenting it like a sushi roll, Ángel hoped to create something exalted out of what might be thrown away. He explained that he had every intention of creating a market for what the fishermen would otherwise treat as a loss.

  When I asked Ángel, gently, if he saw a contradiction in buying damaged goods when his restaurant charges so much money for a meal, he was quick with a response. “Isn’t this what it means to be a chef? To use what is merely half-usable and make it delicious?”

  The next course was tonaso, a fish I had never heard of, and one that in Ángel’s parlance was less than half-usable. It was trash fish, literally, a frequent bycatch of shark fishing. Ángel explained that it’s usually either ground up into fishmeal or, in the case of the fishermen he deals with, thrown back into the sea. But because he has cultivated a relationship with these fishermen, they humor Ángel by keeping a handful of the fish that are in better condition and delivering them to his door.

  Steamed and thinly sliced, the fish had the consistency of tofu, almost custard-like. Ángel finished the dish with fermented black garlic and an intensely rich reduction of infused shrimp shells and fish bones. There was no butter and no oil in the sauce, and I guessed that Ángel had thickened it with his famous eyeball-puree technique, but he shook his head and said its sheen and powerful aroma came from a long, slow reduction. It was the kind of sauce that reaches out and pulls you in long before you taste it, not unlike the sauce Palladin had prepared in Los Angeles when I was a young line cook. The tonaso itself was rather plain, but, again like tofu, it was a perfect vector for tasting the sauce. In the same way that Palladin used sauces to elevate discarded and underappreciated parts of an animal, Ángel’s mastery of the craft helped highlight an underappreciated fish.

  Ángel discovered tonaso, and many of the other fish on his menu that I didn’t recognize, by getting onto the larger boats that supplanted the small-scale fishing vessels he grew up knowing so well. These weren’t the largest of the industrial fleet boats, the bottom trawlers that wreak havoc on the ocean’s floor. Their methods were slightly more humane. Nevertheless, in them Ángel saw a level of destruction and wastefulness that haunts him to this day.

  “I remember how excited I was to finally get on my first boat,” he told me as the empty plates of tonaso were cleared. “I had tried for months, but these fishermen don’t want to fish with strangers. I kept asking and pleading, and then finally I was allowed on. And what I saw from the second day horrified me. Can you guess out of every tonne of fish caught how much is kept on board?” He didn’t wait for me to guess. “Six hundred kilos! The rest—either dead or damaged—are dumped right back in.” He lit another cigarette. “I decided, at the moment, that whatever I ended up doing with my life, even if it was on the smallest scale, it would have to include being the caretaker for the other four hundred kilos.”

  He convinced the fishing captain to hire him for a stint as the boat’s chef. One day he asked if he might cook with some of the catch they were going to discard overboard. “They were really impressed with how delicious it all was, but not that surprised—they’d been saying the same thing, only no one would buy it.” Ángel was hired as a chef on different boats over several years, learning more about the industry.

  It’s tempting to look at Ángel’s motivations through the lens of that young boy who witnessed his father risking both their lives to free fish from human greed; instead of direct confrontation, Ángel infiltrates the boats and changes the crewmembers’ attitudes from within. But that’s a thin read of his philosophy. Born and raised in El Puerto de Santa María, Ángel is the fishermen’s greatest defender.

  “I’m much more pro-fisherman than I am fish,” he told me. When I asked if he had a guiding principle for his work, he waved his hand across the table. “It comes from a feeling,” he said, and then, as if to correct a drift toward self-involvement, he added, “It comes from watching fishermen cry as they throw fish back into the sea because they know they can’t sell it.”

  Ángel has become something of a hero to the fishermen. After Aponiente first opened, word spread about a townie turned world-famous chef willing to pay for damaged and unwanted fish, for fish so obscure they were nameless. That was when Ángel set about convincing diners to pay for these fish, which has proven to be more difficult.

  “Because of the way we’re socialized about fish eating, we want to eat glamorous fish—the ones with names,” he said. “They might not even be the real names of the fish—they’re names that were created for marketing. Oceans cover 70 percent of the planet, and yet we eat like there are only about twenty kinds of fish out there. I want to change that.”

  I headed to the bathroom before the next course and came across a Photoshopped picture of Ángel, his hulking frame emerging, merman-like, from the body of a squid. Ángel was smiling joyfully. Just opposite the photo, to the left of the entrance of the kitchen, was a small silver plaque. It read, WHEN THERE’S A CAPTAIN, THE SAILORS ARE NOT IN CHARGE. You could interpret this as Ángel’s credo on the hierarchy of the kitchen. The chef is in control; the lowly line cooks are there to obey. But perhaps Ángel wants it applied to the diners as well. And why not? He placed it at the entrance to the kitchen, for everyone to read.

  It occurred to me that Ángel saw his diners as sailors, along for a ride. Eating at Aponiente means a kind of surrender to the sea, the way I’d hoped that, in doing away with menus, we had made eating at Blue Hill at Stone Barns feel like a kind of surrender to what a landscape can provide. Just as nouvelle cuisine chefs broke apart the traditional recipes and conventions of fine dining—the “it is prohibited to prohibit” school of cooking—Ángel was doing the same through the ocean’s vast offerings. As a sailor on his boat, you are prohibited from expecting one of the twenty fish you associate with the sea.

  The waiter announced the next course as “a little nose-to-tail eating.” It was three small prawns, floating in a bisque of shellfish, with the shells of the prawns lightly smoked and then fried. A phytoplankton cracker topped with a spoonful of aioli accented the side of the bowl.

  This was a calculated, ironic dish—“nose to tail” referring to eating all the parts of an animal, a buzz phrase for sustainable cookin
g—and I smiled at the oddity of it. The prawns, normally hulking in size, were small and, to be frank about it, unattractive, as were the fried shells (what I surmised were the “tail” equivalent). It looked more like an attempt at a political statement than a tasty dish.

  But then Ángel started talking. The prawns were in fact bycatch, decapitated by the netting process. Ángel said he refused to cook with head-on shrimp, the way it’s traditionally served in Spain, the head supposedly being one of the best indicators of quality. His own research with the laboratory at the University of Cádiz confirmed what he’d suspected. More than 80 percent of the shellfish in Spain, he learned, comes with boric acid on it. The chemical preserves the bright red color of the shrimp, providing the illusion of freshness.

  “Who needs the head if it’s marinated in boric acid?” he said to me. Instead, for a fraction of the price, he buys decapitated shrimp, which would otherwise, like the damaged mackerel, be ground for fishmeal.

  “Most of the ingredients I cook with are too ugly to show in their entirety. I’ve stopped caring about that. I still want them to be pretty and look nice, but it’s not important to me that a dish be more beautiful than it tastes.”

  We both ate the prawns. “Delicious, no?” he said. And they were. “Every nine days or so, I get a delivery of decapitated shrimp and a mixed bag of other shellfish from one particular boat that’s been supplying me since I opened. A lot of it we can’t use, it’s really beat-up, but those go into the bisque.”

  “Bisque” doesn’t do justice to the sophisticated soup. Actually, I don’t know that “soup” does, either. “Velouté” comes to mind, because it was thick and richly satisfying in a way that reminds me of what the best veloutés are all about. It was redolent of Ángel’s skills as a chef, coaxing flavors out of seafood that I didn’t think possible to express, and creating something smooth and unctuous without butter or cream.