The Third Plate: Field Notes on the Future of Food

by Dan Barber

  “This reminds me of someone you should meet,” he said. “His name is Santiago. He showed up at my door one day with shrimp from the Bay of Cádiz. He looked like he slept on the beach, he smelled a little, so I took pity. I bought the shrimp. And that night, just out of curiosity, I cooked them. These weren’t just any shrimp. They were the most unbelievably sweet shrimp you’ve ever tasted. I served them that night. Customers thought we fried them in sugar batter. A few days later, he came again, with more of the shrimp—he knew I’d want to buy more. So I bought them all and I said, ‘These aren’t from the bay, are they?’ My whole life I’ve gotten shrimp from every corner of the bay. I was sure these were not bay shrimp. He tells me that they are definitely from the bay. I said, ‘No, they are not.’ He said, ‘Yes, they are.’ I cooked up the new batch, and they were better even than the first. Unreal shrimp. Anyway, this goes on for a long time, until about a year ago, right after I started working with Veta la Palma. Then I got an idea.” Ángel tapped his forehead.

  “One day, Santiago drops off the shrimp and I say to him, really casual, I say, ‘Hey, Santiago, let me buy you a drink.’ And we go for a drink. Then I buy him another. Then another. Then, right in the middle of talking, I interrupt him: ‘The shrimp are not from the bay, are they?’ The poor guy starts stuttering. I have a hunch, so I just say it: ‘You’re stealing shrimp from Veta la Palma.’ Without even pausing, Santiago says, ‘I’ve been doing it for twenty years.’”

  Armed with nothing but a small rowboat, some fishing gear, and a bottle of wine, Santiago works his way through Veta la Palma’s canals, siphoning enough fish to make a small living. His deep familiarity with the terrain comes from years spent as a rice laborer in the surrounding fields. Apparently unable to make enough money to support his family, he ventured into illegal catches—something he had already indulged in from time to time on special occasions. He sells only to chefs, the most discerning ones in the area, but until Ángel no one had ever challenged him about his source.

  “He goes to different ponds in Veta la Palma at different times of the year. Always at the full moon,” Ángel said.

  Thinking of Steiner and his lunar planting schedule, I guessed, “Because the fish have better flavor when the moon is full.”

  “No,” he said, looking puzzled. “So he can see what he’s catching. But he knows exactly when and where to get the fish at the height of flavor. Really, at the pinnacle—every time he brings me something, it’s just a little bit better than anything Veta la Palma has ever sent me themselves.”

  “How has he not been caught?” Lisa asked.

  “Caught? Caught how? It’s thousands of hectares. Where are they going to look? Anyway, even if Veta la Palma were a swimming pool, they wouldn’t be able to catch this guy. Miguel and the others, they know about him, they know this bandit exists, but they haven’t even tried to stop him. Part of that is respect. They owe him, actually. That ice water method to kill the fish—the one that Miguel always talks about? ‘Calms the fish, slows down the metabolism, and the quality is so much better.’ That’s not Veta la Palma’s humane invention, or something they borrowed from the Japanese. That’s because of what Santiago did! One night, I think it was ten years ago, Santiago caught some bass and left it for them in an ice bucket, to show these guys the right way to do it.”

  “It’s right out of the picaresque,” Lisa said to me later, explaining that “there’s a tradition in Spanish literature of rascally characters—they do things like steal, cheat, and drink, but as long as they’re smart, they’re respected and given space to operate.”

  “I have never met anyone like him,” Ángel continued. “He knows more about Veta la Palma than Miguel. One hour with Santiago and one bottle of wine is worth three months with Miguel.” He smiled and shook his head. “Santiago doesn’t know anything about biology, he knows nothing about ecology, nothing about Veta la Palma the company, nothing of what they’ve done. To him it’s canals and ponds with lots of fish. Ángel lit yet another cigarette and seemed lost in thought for a moment. He recovered with a slap to the table.

  “Anyway, anyway, why am I telling you all this about Santiago? Because he’s really the one who helped me get so interested in mullet. He got me to get over my prejudice, the chef’s prejudice, against a terribly misunderstood fish. One day, just before Christmas, he brings me the most incredible sac of roe I’ve ever seen.” Ángel cups his hands and shows me how large. “I mean, I looked at this thing and it blew my mind. He told me to guess where it was from. I was sure it was from bluefin—it was that big. He said, ‘No, not tuna.’ I guessed every fish, and then he looks at me and says: ‘Mullet.’ I didn’t believe him. ‘Impossible,’ I said. I called him a drunk. But he insisted. He said that the mullet get pregnant when the water turns warmer, during the summer. After that, they gorge themselves all fall, to support the baby and to anticipate the long winter.”

  “You’re not going to tell us that the roe sacs of the mullets become like foie gras,” Lisa said.

  “Exactly! Yes, it’s like foie gras. The mullet eat all the time, they eat everything in sight. The roe sac swells, and the fat around the sac becomes enormous—to protect it, I suppose—and then, sometime in October or November, ten days before birthing, they stop eating and they rise to the surface. That’s when you know they’re ready. They flap around and just hang out. If you want mullet roe that tastes better than foie gras, you have those ten days to get it.”

  “Freedom foie gras,” Lisa said, shaking her head. “Of the sea.” She and I sat there, dumbfounded, the connection to Eduardo and his geese almost too unmistakeble to be believed.

  “He sells this to you?” I asked.

  “No, he gave it to me. I tried to pay him. He wouldn’t accept money. He was angry, actually. Maybe he was offended by my wanting to pay for his gift. We sat silently at the bar for what felt like a long while. And then he suddenly turns to me, his finger pointed. ‘Ángel León, you have no fucking idea.’ I said, ‘Santiago, what do you mean?’ ‘Until the day you can pick up a mullet, feel the slime, know how clean the waters are, know the age of the mother and the father of the mullet, know the temperature of the water it came from, know the number of moons that mullet has seen in his lifetime—until you can do all that, you have no fucking idea.’”

  Ángel leaned back and wiped his forehead. “And do you know what? He’s right. I know nothing.”

  The next morning, after Ángel got in the car for our trip to Veta la Palma, I had the thought that he might be suffering from bipolar disorder. The exuberance of the man driving the cart of mullet sausages to our table—so proud to be Ángel León at that moment—had dissolved into a valley of despair. He now wore the disturbed look of a marathoner bleeding in his shoes.

  “There are days when I don’t know if I’ll be able to get out of bed and confront all the things I have to deal with,” he said, lighting a cigarette. The cynical side of me wanted to point out that he had a thirty-seat restaurant, closed for three months of the year, that served no customers the last two times I visited. But my heart went out to him. I told him he was a genius, and reminded him of his fish sausages.

  “Yeah, I’ve been told I’m a genius many times,” Ángel said, in a tone only he could make modest. “All of my friends say I’m going to be a millionaire, but for some reason it’s eluded me up till now.” He stared out the window. “For ten years, I’ve been so disconnected from the people I care about. I only think of my projects and my work. My problem is that I don’t remember why I did all of this in the first place. When I figure that out, I will be free.

  “Dan,” he said, turning to me, “have you ever cooked naked in your kitchen?”

  “I have felt naked,” I said, earnestly.

  “One of my very dear friends, Moreno Cedroni—he has a small restaurant on the beach in Italy—told me to do this a few years ago. I was in a bad state. I had very nearly given up on c
ooking. So I saw him at a conference, and he told me he had a theory about this being the most primitive thing to do—Homo sapiens, fire, naked man alone in his kitchen—and that if I did, I might emerge with a different mind. Moreno, he’s a pretty weird guy. He’s totally nuts, actually. But one night, after everyone had gone home, I was packing up my things and I thought, What does Ángel León have to lose? So I closed the curtains and turned off all the lights except for the kitchen. I stripped. Everything. Socks and shoes, too. I picked up my knife and I started cooking.”

  I asked how he felt. “I felt like an asshole,” he said honestly. “After an hour, not so much. And then something clicked.” He was silent for a few moments. I got the sense that the experience, rather than actually changing him, as he seemed to believe, had merely reinforced his need for a kind of freedom he had always longed for. “What I can say is you should try it. Because all kinds of emotions are going to come out of you.”

  Passing through the large metal gates that separated the old town from Veta la Palma, we were suddenly moving along the familiar dirt road, with the marshes and canals and the dense vegetation on either side of us. The vastness of the open space, with views that stretched on interminably, struck me yet again, even on my third visit, as very nearly unreal. I have never seen anything like it, and I doubt I ever will again. Ángel stretched back to grip his headrest, suddenly more relaxed.

  Miguel had called earlier and asked that we meet him at one of the mullet ponds. We made a sharp left turn on the way there and came to a small collection of flamingos gathered in shallow water. Ángel sat up in his seat and quickly rolled down the window as we drove past. “Hola!” he said, waving. When the flamingos ignored him, he reached over to the steering wheel and pushed on the horn. “Hola!” he said, authoritatively.

  At the mullet pond, Miguel greeted us with three men who proceeded to wade into the pond with a large net. With water up to their chests, they dragged the net, slowly and very gently, across the placid water. There was silence all around us, except for the sound of parting water as the men tiptoed forward. It had the aura of a baptism. I had missed out on the almadraba, but here I was witnessing a fishing technique steeped in a similar kind of tradition.

  Miguel confirmed the correlation. “The mullets come to us. They enter from the Atlantic and fight their way upstream.”

  “It really is like the almadraba,” I said.

  “Exactly like the almadraba, yes. Veta la Palma is a big farm in the middle of a delta. The mullets pass through in their migration from the sea to the lower coast of the river. It’s a self-selecting art,” Miguel said. I asked if any of the mullets were born on the farm.

  “Some, but most of the mullets—that is, 99 percent—that are born in the ponds are taken by bird predation. On the other hand, we don’t lose mullets when there’s a sudden change in temperature. During the summer’s worst heat, for example, we lost 40 percent of our sea bass. They can’t adjust to shocks in the system. The mullets adjust very well.” I told Miguel I hadn’t known that fish could adapt to large swings in water temperature.

  “Very few fish can, really,” he said.

  The fishermen walked toward each other in the pond, hands over their heads, dragging the nets and orchestrating their movements so seamlessly, it brought to mind synchronized swimmers. They emerged with three impossibly large mullets.

  Ángel hurried over to inspect them. “Dan!” he said, laughing. “Look at this fish. Climate-change-resistant, low ecological impact—no, sorry—ecologically beneficial, unbelievable fat distribution, and the ability to produce foie gras of the sea. The greatest tragedy would be to not study this fish.” He turned toward a bass pond in the distance. “Bye, bye, bass! I no longer have interest in you,” Ángel said, waving to the pond. “See you never again.”

  I stared at the gigantic mullet. I admitted to Miguel (making sure Ángel couldn’t hear me) that I hadn’t known mullet could grow as large as sea bass, especially in half the time.

  “Primary consumers that feed on the basis of our system are able to assimilate more energy than bass or other carnivores,” he said. “Which is why we can raise mullets in half the time it takes to raise the bass. That’s true of any ecological network. Lions assimilate less energy from their food than zebras, who feed on grass.” I saw how the mullet, with their gentle ecological impact, might have reminded him of his formative years studying in the Mikumi National Park.

  “And also,” he added, “well, this is a theory I have, but I am quite sure it is true: when stressed—and for mullet, the greatest stress is crowding—the first thing mullet do is stop eating natural food.” I asked what they ate instead. “It’s funny. They’ll eat artificial feed—chicken pellets, for instance. This is what I’ve heard most conventional aquaculture operations feed their mullet.”

  “So they refuse natural vegetation and choose . . . McNuggets?” I said.

  “Yes, I know, it’s so crazy. But when you cultivate mullet in a low-density, complex ecosystem, such as what we do here at Veta la Palma, they eat all natural food. They really do grow larger and stronger. Disease outbreaks are nonexistent.”

  I asked Miguel why he allowed me to get so excited by the bass on my first visit, when it was so clear that the mullet were the real stars. “We knew a lot of things about these mullet, especially how they work to promote good ecological conditions. What we needed,” Miguel said, looking over at Ángel, “was someone to tell us they tasted good, too.”

  Ángel held the mullet at arm’s length and smiled broadly, a magician with his rabbit. You couldn’t help but be dazzled by the sight of the two of them—the proud, hyperkinetic Ángel León and the hulking yet humble and agreeable mullet. It was hard to say who was stealing the show.

  CHAPTER 24

  AS PROMISED, Rod Mitchell imported the first batch of Veta la Palma’s fish only a few months after that lunch with David Pasternack at Esca. By mid-July we were receiving regular deliveries of mullet, which, for the record, tasted every bit as delicious as I remembered. Other restaurants ordered Veta la Palma’s fish through Mitchell as well—almost exclusively bass. Within weeks, Mitchell was selling thousands of pounds to chefs in New York, Las Vegas, and San Francisco.

  It was not cheap. The bass came in at $18 per pound, which, compared with the wild stuff—$7 per pound—was exorbitant. But chefs were willing to pay for the flavor. One of the most renowned, Eric Ripert of Le Bernardin, who assumed the role of chef after Gilbert Le Coze’s death, declared the bass extraordinary.

  Ángel, for his part, devoted himself to Veta la Palma and the sausage project for more than a year. He also dug deeper into his experiments with plankton, managing to successfully cultivate six new types. One was yellow and apparently loaded with 50 percent more carotene than a carrot, and another Ángel said almost eerily encapsulated the essence of pure shellfish.

  “That something so small could express so much gastronomically and ecologically is really powerful,” he told me over the phone, as enthusiastic as ever. “And when it’s that delicious, telling the story of the sea is a lot easier.”

  Ángel made it even easier by introducing a new menu format at Aponiente, which was why Lisa—her own talent for identifying a great story still very much intact—made another visit to the restaurant. It was the off-season, but she was not the lone diner this time. Ángel had earned a coveted Michelin star in 2010. “Everything’s changed,” he told her. “People put themselves in my hands, they trust me.”

  The menu depicted a cross section of the sea. Different fish were shown at varying levels, with the names of the dishes next to the fish. Almadraba tuna, when it was available, appeared near the top of the chart. (Ángel serves it whenever possible, a practice that still offends Carl Safina. Despite recent reports of larger tuna schools, especially along the Atlantic coast, Carl believes bluefin consumption should be banned completely in order to allow stocks to recover. “I cert
ainly feel that they are at, or near, the bottom of abundance in their history—a history that’s hundreds of thousands of years old,” he told me by phone, exasperation in his voice. “I don’t think that any bluefin tuna from any source is currently an ethical choice.”)

  The mullet from Veta la Palma anchored the bottom of the menu. Ángel continued to find new ways to glorify the lowly fish. He featured it in several dishes, including one that treated the mullet as if it were a pheasant, hanging it for nine days to deepen the flavor and impart a meatier texture.

  And then one day, Ángel stopped cooking mullet. There had been a falling-out with Veta la Palma, I learned. What exactly happened is unclear. Veta la Palma shorted him fish for a delivery. Ángel called and exploded, words were exchanged, and he swore to never order from the company again. Ángel said the relationship had been fraught for some time. He was continually frustrated—disrespected, or perhaps misunderstood; either way, he said his ideas were never fully implemented at the farm. (When I asked for examples, he didn’t give any, except for a cryptic critique of the culture of Veta la Palma. “It’s all hippie,” he said. “No woman, no cry.”) And the fish sausage business turned out to be less successful than he and Veta la Palma had hoped, further straining the relationship. Several months later, blaming the abysmal economic situation in Spain, Veta la Palma closed the factory.

  Ángel told me all of this during a visit to Stone Barns, where he toured the farm and prepared a special tasting menu in the restaurant. He looked even more exhausted than usual—his eyes were like black holes, devouring everything in sight. He smoked furiously. It seemed as if his demons, which so fueled his creativity, had begun to consume him.