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.)
What’s left of Justo’s work on the mountain of skate are two large piles of perfectly bone-free pieces of fish. One side, then another, Justo removes the skin with the flexible blade at a forty-five-degree angle, trims off any and all blood or pink color that remains, and evens off the shapes with the slicer into the appropriate thicknesses and dimensions. Most fish—like skate wing—naturally taper off and narrow at the outer edges and toward the tail. Which is fine for moving through the water. Not so good for even cooking. A chef or cook looks at that graceful decline and sees a piece of protein that will cook unevenly: will, when the center—or fattest part—is perfect, be overcooked at the edges. They see a piece of fish that does not look like you could charge $39 for it. Customers should understand that what they are paying for, in any restaurant situation, is not just what’s on the plate—but everything that’s not on the plate: all the bone, skin, fat, and waste product which the chef did pay for, by the pound. When Eric Ripert, for instance, pays $15 or $20 a pound for a piece of fish, you can be sure, the guy who sells it to him does not care that 70 percent of that fish is going in the garbage. It’s still the same price. Same principle applies to meat, poultry—or any other protein. The price of the protein on the market may be $10 per pound, but by the time you’re putting the cleaned, prepped piece of meat or fish on the plate, it can actually cost you $35 a pound. And that’s before paying the guy who cuts it for you. That disparity in purchase price and actual price becomes even more extreme at the top end of the dining spectrum. The famous French mantra of “Use Everything,” by which most chefs live, is not the operative phrase of a three-starred Michelin restaurant. Here, it’s “Use Only the Very Best.”
The rest? You do what you can.
Justo pairs off the last, irregular bits of skate, draping one atop the other. He catches one he doesn’t quite like—a nearly imperceptible flaw. Most prep cooks in this situation would instinctively tuck the less beautiful one underneath a perfect one. Food cost. Food cost. Food cost. Not him.
“It’s like wearing clean clothes with dirty underwear,” he says—without a trace of humor. The unacceptable piece goes in the trash.
It’s only eight forty-five and the skate are done. The table is washed again. Knives, too. The skate is brought upstairs. A large white tuna hits the cutting board next. He zips off the skin and shows me where there’s a single, very soft but hidden bone. “Your knife too sharp? You cut through—you don’t feel it.”
City Harvest is getting a lot of very expensive product off of this fish. Near the tail, Justo sees something he doesn’t like and quickly carves off about a quarter of it. The fish is butchered as if for a sushi bar. No dark membrane, no raggedy bits. Center-cut filet only. He quickly breaks the thing down into four pristine hunks of loin. Then, without hesitating, divides those pieces into appropriate shapes for further slicing into medallions. At no other point during the day does he look so much like a machine. Uniform pieces of identical-looking portions fall away from his knife like industrially sliced bread. Lined up in the tray, they are the same size, weight, and height. He’s almost apologetic about the huge pile of perfectly good tuna left on the board, rejected for its size rather than its quality. After trimming, it’s probably costing the restaurant about twenty-five dollars a pound.
“Hard to balance perfect—and waste,” he admits.
Nine fifteen, and Justo unloads an appalling heap of monkfish into the sink.
Monkfish are one of the slimiest, ugliest creatures you’ll find in the sea. They are also wonderfully tasty—once you slip off the slippery, membrane-like skin and trim away the pink and red.
“This knife only for monkfish,” says Justo, producing a long blade that might once have been a standard chef ’s knife but which has been, over the years, ground down into a thin, serpentine, almost double-teardrop edge. Once the monkfish meat is cut away from the bone, one loin at a time, he grabs the tail ends and runs the flexible blade down the body, pulling skin away. With a strange, flicking motion, he shaves off any pink or red.
The quiet in the room is noticeable—and I ask him if he ever listens to music while he works.
He shakes his head vigorously. “For me—I like to concentrate.” He says the distraction of music might cause him to cut himself, an outcome not so terrible for him, he suggests—but bad for the product: “I don’t want to get blood on the fish. I don’t play around. I work fast because I work relaxed. I got nothing else on my mind.”
The monkfish is finished and safely stored upstairs at nine forty. There are two kinds of salmon to deal with now. One large wild salmon and eight thirteen-to fifteen-pound organically farm-raised salmon. Sustainability has become a major focus of Le Bernardin in recent years, and this particular farm-raised stuff is supposed to be very good. Justo prefers it. “The organic, the farmed is fatter. Better raw. The wild—too much muscle for me. Too much exercise.” With the chef ’s knife, he cuts from collar down and lifts off the filets. He peels a little bit of the meat that clings to the spine off one of the farmed salmon and hands me a piece. It is, indeed, extraordinary. The skins are removed with a few rocking sweeps of the knife. But most remarkable is what he does with the pin bones. These are the tiny, tricky, nearly invisible little rib bones left in the meat when you take the filets off the fish. They have to be removed individually by yanking the little fuckers out with tweezers or needle-nose pliers, a process that takes most cooks a while. Ordinary mortals have to feel for each slim bone lurking just beneath the surface, careful not to gouge the delicate flesh. Justo moves his hand up the filet in a literal flurry of movement; with each bone that comes out, he taps the pliers on the cutting board to release it, then, never stopping, in one continuous motion, repeats repeats repeats. It sounds like a quick, double-time snare drum beat, a staccato tap tap tap tap tap tap, and then…done. A pause of a few seconds as he begins another side of fish. I can barely see his hand move.
I have never seen anything like it in nearly three decades in the restaurant business.
With the slicer, he lifts the grayish meat that runs along the back straight away from the pink, a very delicate operation, which he, of course, accomplishes in seconds. One whole side of the wild salmon is put aside for the chef garde-manger. Justo lines a half sheet-pan with cling wrap, drapes the salmon on the tray—then wraps the whole tray under and over three times with one long piece of film. The fish is trapped in there as snug as if it were laminated.
“That way, if I fall down,” says Justo, “nothing gonna happen to the fish.”
In about two minutes, all the remaining salmon are portioned into seventy-five-to eighty-gram slices. He hand-checks each slice a second time by lightly pinching them as they’re arranged side by side in the tray. Once in a great while, he feels a bone he missed on the first pass and slips it out. Two slices of salmon will constitute an order. Laid out end to end, all pointing the same direction, the slices themselves look like little pink fishes swimming upriver, identical patterns of fatty swirls running through their flesh, lovely to look at, breathtaking in their uniformity.
At ten twenty-five, the salmon is on its way upstairs.
A young cook, seeing me, asks eagerly, “Have you seen him do the pin bones?”
“Yes,” I say, nodding my head. “Yes, I have.”
“First time I heard it, I thought he was tapping his foot,” says the cook.
Justo grabs the first of eight large striped bass out of a crate, with thumb and middle finger hooked deep into t
he fish’s eye sockets, not trusting the usual two-fingers-into-the-gills grab popular with fishermen. They’re on their way upstairs by ten forty-five. Then it’s twelve red snappers. It takes him ten minutes to take all the snapper off the bone and remove their skins. Once again, left sides are put together in one stack, right sides in another. He shows me why: when cleaning the right sides, the knife has to always be drawn in one direction when cleaning membrane and trimming belly; the left sides, the blade is pushed away to perform the same tasks—in the opposite direction. By sorting his fish as he does, Justo saves time and unnecessary movement.
A half hour later, the snapper is done. Only a tremendous shitload of black sea bass (Justo’s least favorite) remain. They are, for easily discernible reasons, the hardest fish to clean: unlike much of what arrives, they are still covered with tough scales, guts still in—and bristling with nasty-looking and extremely dangerous spines.
Fernando, the steward, comes by with Justo’s staff meal: a rather forlorn-looking plate of chicken salad, dressed green salad, and potato, with a bun. The plate is wrapped in plastic and placed unhesitatingly beneath Justo’s work station—as it has surely been agreed, by unwavering routine and practice, that Justo will wait to eat until he’s finished with his work.
He’s saved the worst until the end. At Le Bernardin, fish is served without the skin, the black sea bass being the lone exception. Its skin is an important component of the final dish, adding vital textural and flavor notes—as well as looking really cool. This means that one can’t do simply a serviceable job of removing the scales, assuming that, later, any that remain will surely come off with the skin. Every single one has to be carefully scraped off in the sink—away from the cutting board. Justo is very conscious of the transparent scales’ propensity to fly across the room and cling undetected to the white flesh of the fish. One transparent scale clinging to one order of fish? That would be bad. So, he’s got to carefully scrape off the scales—quickly, of course, avoiding the long and extremely vicious spines on the fish, which could easily penetrate his glove and inflict a painful and instantaneously infectious wound. Then filet off the meat, remove the pin bones (which are even trickier and more reluctant to come out than those in salmon), trim, and portion. It is of tantamount importance for Justo, when portioning, to keep in mind the intended cooking method and result: a still-moist, evenly cooked oblong of fish with a very crispy layer of skin on one side. If the piece of fish is too small, by the time the skin has crisped, the flesh has overcooked. Nature being what it is, no two fish are exactly the same, and the optimal size is not always available. It’s up to Justo to make do.
It’s twelve ten in the afternoon and Justo Thomas has finished cleaning and portioning seven hundred pounds of fish. He cuts a piece of cardboard from a carton and uses it to scrape out the fish scales from the sink. He hoses both basins down, washes his knives, the scale, and all exposed surfaces. He peels the cling wrap off the walls.
He’s done for the day.
In six years at Le Bernardin, and in twenty years cooking in New York restaurants, Justo Thomas has—like the overwhelming majority of people who cook our food—never eaten in his own restaurant.
It’s a central irony of fine dining that, unlike the waiters who serve their food, the cooks are very rarely able to afford to eat what they have spent years learning to make. They are usually not welcome, in any case. They don’t have the clothes for it. Many, if not most, expensive restaurants specifically prohibit their employees from coming as customers—at any time. The reasoning is part practical and part, one suspects, aesthetic. One doesn’t want a bunch of loud, badly dressed cooks laughing and talking in an overfamiliar way with the bartender while trying to maintain an atmosphere of sophistication—of romantic illusion. There is also the temptation to slip freebies to people one works with every day. From the point of view of any sensible restaurateur or manager, it’s generally believed to be a bad thing. Once you let employees start drinking in their own place of work—even on their days off—you’ve unleashed the dogs of war. No good can come of it.
Le Bernardin’s rules reflect this industry-wide policy.
But I figured I had some pull with the chef and asked him to make an exception.
A short time later, I took Justo Thomas to lunch at his own restaurant.
He arrives straight from his shift, having changed into a dark, well-cut suit and glasses with black designer frames, having left work by the service entrance and reentered by the restaurant’s front door. It takes a second for me to recognize him.
He’s nervous but contained—and very happy to be here. He’s dressed right for the room, but his posture and gait are not of a person who lives in spaces like this. His coworkers in the kitchen are excited for him, he says, scarcely believing this is happening, and the floor staff appear happy for him, too—though they do their very best to conceal their smiles. From the very beginning, Justo is treated like any other customer and with the same deference—led to our table, his chair pulled out, asked if he’d care to order from the menu or if he’d prefer the kitchen to cook for us. When wine arrives, the sommelier addresses her remarks to him.
A little bowl of salmon rillettes is brought to the table with some rounds of toast. Champagne is served.
Ordinarily, when Justo goes out to dinner, he’s with his family. They go to a roasted-chicken place or, if it’s a rare special occasion, to a Spanish restaurant for steak and lobster.
When that happens, he does not drink. At all. “I am always the driver,” he says.
Though he is the middle brother, Justo has become, by virtue of his character and what he’s achieved in New York, something of a patriarch. He owns a house in the Dominican Republic. He keeps the top floor for family use and rents out to tenants the first floor and an adjoining structure. His siblings tend to come to him for advice on important matters. His father, he says, taught him the lesson that one should “never let your family be afraid while you’re alive.”
He’s the example for the rest—and he takes that responsibility seriously.
“Family first. Then my job,” he says.
I am enormously relieved when he takes his first sip of champagne—and when he tells me he will indeed be enjoying, along with me, the wine pairing to follow. The kitchen has insisted on doing a tasting menu for their favorite son—and one must, under such circumstances, drink wine. I was concerned earlier. Justo has said that his idea of getting really crazy on vacation is (in between working on his house) taking his family to the beach, buying pizza for his daughter—and maybe having a beer. On a perfect day, he’ll dance with his wife. He will have arranged for a taxi to take them home.
He has made similar arrangements today.
The first course is tuna, layers of thinly pounded yellowfin, layered with foie gras and toasted baguette. Justo enthusiastically cleans his plate—with a critical eye. He recognizes his work, though the cooks have pounded it to paper-thinness. It’s a popular dish—and on the rare occasions when the dinner crew needs to pound more after he’s gone for the day, he doesn’t like it when they use his station. We’re washing the tuna down with a Gelber Muskateller Neumeister from Austria.
“My cutting board is special,” he explains.
Justo handles only fish at Le Bernardin. Oysters, langoustines, prawns, and sea urchin are prepared upstairs in the à la carte kitchen. So, though he’s seen the pricey little boxes of plump, orange sea-urchin roe, stacked neatly in even rows, as he passed by, he’s never eaten the stuff. We get a spiny shell each, the roe on beds of jalapeño-wasabi jam, seasoned with seaweed salt—finished at the last second by our server, who pours wakame-orange-scented broth over them.
“Kasumi Tsuru, Yamahai Gingo,” says the sommelier, serving Justo sake.
“Delicious,” says Justo, closing his eyes. “It’s like…a dream. I don’t want to wake up.”
The next course is seared langoustine with a “salad” of mâche and wild mushroom with shaved foie
gras and white balsamic vinaigrette—and it’s one of the most goddamn delicious things I’ve ever put in my mouth. Small, elegant, lushly but not overly rich.
“When I get out of here—I don’t want to brush my teeth,” he jokes—but I know exactly how he feels. You want to keep this taste.
I lose track of the wines at this point. There are a lot of them—and a trilogy of ales, I think. Then more wines. But I do remember a bread-crusted red snapper with zucchini and mint compote coming our way. An extraordinary poached halibut with braised daikon, baby radish, and turnips in a sesame court bouillon.
“You recognize your work?” I ask. I point to the perfect squares of evenly shaped protein on our plates. Justo just nods and smiles—a look of satisfaction on his face.
His last entrée is the crispy black bass with braised celery and parsnip custard in an Iberico-ham-and-green-peppercorn sauce. It’s the fish he likes least to work with—saves until last, the ever-more-popular labor-intensive fuckers that have to be gutted, scaled, fileted, rid of their resilient little pin bones, then squared off just right so the skin can get exactly this crispy without overcooking the meat.
Justo looks particularly pleased to see his nemesis on the plate. Hopefully, all his work now makes some kind of tangible sense.
I find myself looking up at the enormous oil paintings on the dining-room walls. Scenes of fishermen and port towns in Brittany—where Maguy Le Coze, the founder and co-owner of Le Bernardin (along with her brother Gilbert), came from. Where it all started and where the inspiration began for a fish-centric temple of seafood. I wonder what Justo would think of Brittany—and if he’ll ever see it. I find myself wanting to make that happen.
I ask him what he wants to do—when he retires someday—and he answers me with the things he’ll do when he goes back home, mostly involving repairs, improvements, work. But what about when the work is done, I ask? If things could be…perfect?
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