The temperature literally rises, but the atmosphere remains coolly businesslike. When Simon Dean, the Esca manager, wanders in holding an envelope and a magazine and says, “Dave, here’s a piece of what looks like hate mail. Also, here’s your copy of the latest issue of Private Air Magazine: Life at the Speed of Luxury,” Pasternack replies, “It’s a little hard right now to be funny. I’d love to, but…” In fact, his mood is sanguine. A very nice piece of fish arrived that morning, a crimson shoulder cut from a seven-hundred-pound bluefin tuna—by way of Rod Mitchell, in Portland. “There’s a lot of competition for these fish,” he says. “I don’t want to say I’m at the bottom of the pecking order. But I’m near the bottom. Plenty of people will pay a lot more than I will.” At eighteen dollars a pound, the bluefin is too expensive to grill or sauté, so half of it will become crudo. The other half will go to Bistro du Vent, a calculatedly jointlike joint just around the corner, on Forty-second Street, that Pasternack and his Esca partners opened last January. There it will also be served raw, an appetizer à la steak tartare.
Four crudo plates are ready to be dispatched, but Pasternack first squirts a piece of bluefin with lemon juice, sprinkles it with pepper, sea salt, and olive oil, hands it to me, and declares, “This is the king of tuna, man. Think steak, filet mignon. This is what the Japanese’ll pay exuberant prices for.”
As it happens, he’s just returned from Japan himself—his first visit, the highlight of which was a daily perambulation through Tsukiji, Tokyo’s wholesale fish market (“like walking inside an aquarium”). He’d made the trip as the guest of Hiromi Go, an Esca regular.
“Hiromi’s a very popular Japanese singer,” he says. “He’s like Elvis Presley over there. He’s getting ready to record, like, his sixtieth album. He’s been coming here for years and I’m always saying to him, ‘When are you taking me to Tokyo?’ So his wife set it up. I cooked two dinners, one for twelve people and one for forty. The second was in a Shinto shrine. I ate quite a few things I’d never had before.”
Such as?
“Whale. It’s really only fresh in Scandinavia, Russia, and Japan. Very interesting. A tuna-y texture and a liver-y finish. You know, in Japan they raise horses in the style of Kobe beef—massage it, give it sake, beer, different grains and grasses, play music for it. So I did a crudo dish that was horse, whale, and fatty tuna all on the same plate. They all looked alike. The whale could have been the tuna and the tuna could have been the horse.”
A waiter comes in with the news that a customer has requested cocktail sauce to accompany what might best be described as an order of the original crudo—a half-dozen Peconic Bay oysters. Having just seen Pasternack gracing tidbits of abalone, weakfish, and opah with, respectively, gaila melon, crushed almonds, and olio verde, I expect him to take offense. Instead, he reaches into a knee-level cooler and removes a mixture of horseradish, fresh chiles, lemons, ketchup, capers, and olive oil. “It’s their money,” he says. “Give ’em what they want, they’ll come back.”
So that includes tartar sauce with the fritto misto?
“No. They ask for that, which I think happens maybe twice a year, we tell ’em we don’t have it.” He shrugs. “What’re they gonna do? Hey, we don’t have it, we don’t have it.”
I once asked Joe Bastianich, who enjoys sportfishing for tuna, about his experiences on the water with Pasternack, and he said, “Dave’s fishing, that’s a little too blue-collar for me.” For his part, Pasternack, who seems constitutionally incapable of condescension, has said, “I don’t understand freshwater fishing. That’s too Zen for me, too proper. Saltwater fishing, you know, there’s a lot more blood and guts.” A few years ago, Pasternack was invited, along with some other New York chefs, to a culinary event in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. While there, he went fly-fishing on the Green River with Ed Artzt, a frequent Esca patron who was formerly the chief executive of Procter & Gamble. “It was my first time fly-fishing,” Pasternack said. “I was good, I was a natural. I was the only guy who actually caught anything. I caught a cutthroat. After I took it off the hook, I went to open the cooler and everybody on the boat kind of looked at me like, What are you doing? I’m like, ‘Dinner.’ They go, ‘No, everything here’s catch-and-release.’ I said, ‘I spent the whole day to catch this one fish and we’re gonna throw it back?’”
My recollection of my first fishing outing with Pasternack, though it took place fairly recently, is somewhat spotty. We were aboard a commercial boat called the Sorry Charlie, about three miles from Point Lookout, Long Island. As the tide was running out, a brisk wind was blowing in, which meant that conditions were, by my standards, insufficiently calm. I spent part of the morning in the cabin, seated atop a cooler, resting my head against a wall, wondering when the Dramamine was going to kick in, and smiling weakly when my shipmates periodically impugned my manhood. The captain, Mike Wasserman, struggled nobly to stay anchored over an old shipwreck that was a reliable gathering spot for black sea bass. He succeeded well enough for the group—five of us were fishing—to land about twenty-five keepers and store them in the live well. “The Rolls-Royce of fish,” Pasternack, who caught the most, said. “Steamed, fried, poached, baked, sautéed, grilled—I’ll take a black sea bass any day over a piece of tuna.” In the afternoon, we moved close to the shore and, using clams for bait, hauled in dozens of stripers that had been trailing a clam dredger as it repeatedly plowed a half-mile stretch parallel to Rockaway Beach. At the end of the trip, Pasternack bought everything in the live well and the coolers, plus Wasserman’s catch from the previous day: a hundred or so bass, and three conger eels that were headed for the zuppa di pesce.
The next time I went to sea was a sultry July day, when Pasternack was in quest of bluefish with his friend, piscatorial mentor, and supplier Artie Hoernig, the captain of Smokey III, a thirty-one-foot Down East–type cabin cruiser that he docks in Island Park. We met at 7 A.M. in the parking lot of Artie’s South Shore Fish Market, where we were joined by Pete Hession, a retired UPS driver. Hoernig, who is in his late fifties, has a mahogany tan, a neatly trimmed silver beard, bloodshot blue eyes, and an inexhaustible supply of fish stories. The date, he announced, happened to be the eighteenth anniversary of one of his most gratifying adventures, the landing of a 782-pound mako shark. That same year, Pasternack, then in his mid-twenties, caught a three-hundred-pound bull shark near Key West. He had the head mounted, and it hung in his bedroom until a couple of years ago, when his wife told him, “Either the garage or you give it away.” It now occupies wall space at Artie’s market, right next to the head of the mako.
Hoernig went inside and returned with the day’s bait, twenty pounds of fresh and thirty pounds of frozen bunker, two flats of frozen spearing that would be used as chum, and ten pounds of frozen squid. A half hour later, this cargo got loaded onto the boat, along with three large coolers filled with crushed ice, and by nine o’clock we’d reached our destination, an area five miles offshore where Hoernig had planted about forty-five lobster pots.
The ocean surface was oddly placid. Hoernig: “It’s like a fucking lake.”
Hession: “I hope we see a breeze.”
Pasternack: “The only breeze we’re gonna see out here, Pete, is thunderstorms.”
Using bait-casting reels with forty-pound-test wire leaders and heavy-test monofilament backing, we tossed treble hooks baited with thick chunks of bunker into water about sixty feet deep. From the get-go, the bluefish were excitable. Pasternack quickly landed a seven-pounder, I caught one, Pasternack caught another. Then things got quiet for about fifteen minutes. “One, two, three, and that’s it?” Hoernig said. “Probably a fucking mako’s down there chasing these bastards.”
When they resumed biting, Hoernig would say, “Davey’s in!” or Hession would say, “Oh, Artie’s in!” Then: “Pete’s in!” Bluefish have notoriously sharp teeth and strong jaws, and the most prudent way to get one into a boat is with a gaff. As promised, there was ample gore—bluefish blood and bunker guts. At t
imes, we had three fish on the line simultaneously. By eleven o’clock, we’d filled one cooler. A half hour later, Hoernig switched to an ultralight spinning rod and tied on a bucktail jig baited with a piece of squid, rigged for what’s referred to on the South Shore as “fluking.” He soon landed a two-and-a-half-pounder, and Pasternack, in a competitive spirit, got busy fluking, too. Occasionally, someone would lower a white plastic bucket over the side and fill it with water for washing our bloody hands. As the midday sun poured down, Pasternack and Hoernig took to cupping handfuls and dousing their heads. “I’m getting fucking ready to jump in, man,” Pasternack said. It was not yet one o’clock when the second cooler reached capacity—mostly blues, a few fluke, a sea bass. Time to go pull lobster pots.
Citing my journalistic priorities, I managed to steer clear of the heavy lifting. As Hoernig eased the boat alongside a buoy, Pasternack would use a gaff to grab the submerged rope, and Hession would wrap a couple of turns around a small electric winch attached to the starboard gunwale. Invariably, the ropes were coated with algae the consistency of sodden shredded wheat and the lobster traps were encrusted with tiny mussels the size of split peas. The first few pots contained little Jonah and calico crabs and conch, and porgies flapping like birds, but were lobster-free. “No wonder your lobster’s so expensive,” Pasternack said.
“A labor of love,” he said to me as he tossed clumps of algae overboard and prepared to dump putrescent bunker carcasses from the mesh bait bag inside a trap. Pasternack wore a plain white T-shirt, loose-fitting gray athletic shorts, white crew socks, calf-length white rubber boots, and an FDNY Rescue cap. Varieties of fish flesh were pasted to his clothing, but he didn’t appear to mind, unlike Hession, who concluded that the best way to clean the filth from his blue jeans was to tie them to a fishing line and drag them behind the boat. Which seemed like a clever idea until the line snapped, stranding him in his green plaid boxers. (“All I can say, Pete, is you’re a victim of circumstance,” Hoernig told him.)
Some squid eggs—transparent Gummi worm–like masses—clung to one of the traps. I asked Pasternack whether he’d ever eaten them. He said that he hadn’t, but that he’d tasted octopus eggs in Italy. Almost defensively, he added, “I ate bunker. I got Artie to eat it, too. Little ones. They fried ’em in his restaurant. We called ’em Hewlett Bay anchovies. The sardines of Long Island. It was good, right, Artie? People squirted lemon juice on ’em.” He leaned over with the squid eggs, handed them to me, and said, “Here, put this in the cooler.”
They hoisted twenty-two traps, good for twenty-one lobsters. As Pasternack relaunched traps by sliding them down a plank and off the rear of the boat, he whistled “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad.”
“You like blue-fishing?” he asked me as we headed back.
Yes, I did.
He leaned against the gunwale. In the background: Atlantic Beach and the high-rises of the Rockaways. The sun was in his face, he was bloody and sweaty and due for a shave. Lunch had been a turkey-and-cheddar sub, and there were dabs of mayo at the corners of his mouth. “I told you, I don’t always catch the biggest one, but I’m always catching ’em,” he said. “Some guys are only about catching big fish. I’ve always been for quantity. I like to eat ’em. I’m a meat-and-potatoes guy.”
I asked what he would do with the bluefish at Esca.
Palms up, he shook his head. “There’s lots of good stuff to work with now,” he said. “Lobster mushrooms. Great corn. Good tomatoes are starting to show up. This time of year it’s easy to be a cook.” Today, though, he’d been fishing and truly hadn’t given it a thought. But tomorrow, back in the kitchen, he’d have an idea.
2005
ON THE BAY
BILL BUFORD
Mike Osinski was an acquaintance, someone I saw every now and then in the elevator of the Manhattan apartment building we’d both lived in for nearly ten years. Although I never knew what he did exactly (something in finance; he was always wearing a suit), he seemed different from the others—affable in a way I associate with people from the Southern states, less formal, with an unpretentious good-ol’-boyness. One day, I spotted Osinski walking his dog and realized I hadn’t seen him for some time. He’d grown a graying goatee and was wearing baggy jeans and muddy work boots.
“I’ve left the city,” he said. “I’ve given up the rat race!” He seemed giddy and made big gestures with his hands. He was now living in Greenport, a town on one of the far tines of Long Island’s North Fork. “I’m working on the water! I’m a bayman!” (Baymen are the region’s traditional seafood hunter-gatherers.) He motioned for me to step closer. “And I’ve lost thirty pounds.” Osinski slapped himself to show off his abs. “Oysters did this. I harvest oysters. I’m a new man. The differences between men and women? Now I understand them. Do you know what I mean? I am a maaaaaaan!” He said the word “man” as though it should always have twelve syllables.
Osinski was born in 1954, and grew up in Mobile, Alabama, with a barefoot taste for the bounty of the intertidal beaches. (He was a youthful advocate of the Southerner’s unspoken principle that, in the Gulf states, your identity is fed by what you pull out of the warm waters for dinner.) But Long Island isn’t anything like the Gulf. I stared at my neighbor and thought, Oysters. Is that what happens when we get older—we take up hobbies?
I didn’t see Osinski for another year, when I ran into him and his dog after a morning of deliveries. Gramercy Tavern had taken his oysters—“The chef says they’re the best he’s eaten in his life”—and other restaurants had followed: Esca, the Four Seasons, BLT Fish, Le Bernardin. These were some of the most respected eateries in the city. Le Bernardin was regarded by many as the best fish place in America. “And they love my oysters,” Osinski said.
Greenport is a hundred miles from Manhattan, on the upper reaches of Peconic Bay, a fast-moving body of water squeezing between Shelter Island and the raggedy narrow end of New York on its way to the open sea. Osinski’s home, built in the 1830s, probably by a whaling captain, sits on a sandy isthmus with views of water in two directions: in front, the Peconic; in back, a brackish inlet, fed by a creek and the bay’s tides, called Widow’s Hole, after one Margaret Leverage, the wife of the whaler. (He went to sea after completing the house, and never returned.) It was a mournful legacy, but one that Osinski nervously ended up drawing from.
On the East Coast, oysters derive their names from where they’re found—they might be called a thousand things, but there is only one species, Crassostrea virginica. The names, therefore, can seem a little arbitrary, which was illustrated by a story told to me by Sandy Ingber, the chef at Grand Central’s Oyster Bar, of the Pemaquid. “This Pemaquid—it was a good oyster,” Ingber said. “But it didn’t sell.” Who knows why? The name had no magic or was difficult to pronounce. “So I started calling it a Bristol.” Pemaquid is near Bristol, Maine. “I couldn’t keep it on the menu.” (Ingber has since gone back to calling it a Pemaquid.) By this logic, Osinski’s oysters could be Peconics or Greenports, but he decided to invoke the pond behind his house and call them Widow’s Holes, even though the name had some unwieldy implications: no eager, neo-oysterman really wants his shellfish to invoke mortality (Here, eat my raw shellfish and you, too, can make your wife a widow). On the other hand, what exactly is a widow’s hole? “It sounds pornographic, doesn’t it?” Osinski asked, as though it were the punch line to a dirty joke, not an entirely unhappy association for the world’s most famous aphrodisiac. “Osinski’s oysters are perfectly good,” Ingber told me, “but my job is to move shellfish. Widow’s Holes—that’s a name I can move.”
The view from Osinski’s home meets just about everyone’s definition of picturesque, but on a cold December morning it was remarkably uninviting. The bay was gray. The sky was gray. The trees were black and bare. There seemed to be no horizon. Out on the water, an empty ferry was leaving for Shelter Island. Overhead, and in all directions, were formations of geese—they made me think of sergeants’ stripes
in Second World War movies—on their way to somewhere else. In the shallow water where Osinski kept a boat, skim ice had formed. I had offered to help out, and was given oyster gear to put on: bright-orange overalls called bib pants, a top called waterproof sleeves, some giant gloves (wet inside), and an extra-thick wool hat (also wet). But the bib pants were uncomfortably snug—I learned later that Osinski had grabbed the wrong pair and given me a pair belonging to Isabel, his wife, not a small woman but much, much smaller than me—and my breakfast constricted alarmingly when I walked outside, tipping side to side like a moonwalker, because I couldn’t bend my knees.
I didn’t know what it meant to harvest an oyster. I had images, probably from books, of people standing in a skiff, raking the bottom and lifting dislodged shellfish with “tongs,” deftly maneuvered like giant chopsticks. My suspicion is that, in earlier times, everyone knew where and how they got their oysters, because in earlier times everyone seemed to eat them. The mystery of oysters today is why people stopped.
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