Upstream

by Langdon Cook

  The best piece of salmon Davis ever ate came from the Yukon River, where some king salmon swim two thousand miles to their spawning grounds. With such epic journeys against the current, they need heavy stores of fat. When Davis put it on the grill, the fillet burst into flames. He laughed at the memory. “It was like trying to grill a pound of butter!” But the salmon that changed his life was a Columbia River spring king. This was years ago, when he was a fledgling restaurant owner in Seattle. Up until then he’d never fully appreciated what a fresh thick cut of salmon could do in the kitchen. Comparing it to prime aged steak was an insult, he said, to the salmon.

  Davis lifted the first of his two handpicked twenty-four-pound Copper River kings out of its box and onto a large cutting board. Except for black spots dotting its back, the fish was metallic silver, every scale intact. He placed a metal sheet tray lined with wax paper next to it. I watched him carefully as he filleted the fish. It had been a while since I’d handled one of this size. Mostly I eat salmon that I catch myself, and if I buy salmon at the market it’s usually by the piece. The exception is Copper River sockeye, which I’ll buy as whole fish once the price drops, a few weeks into the run. I fillet the sockeye, cut them into grilling or roasting portions, and vacuum-seal them for the freezer. But those fish rarely exceed eight pounds. Filleting a twenty-four-pound king that costs more than $20 a pound wholesale is another skill altogether. On the one hand, you have more fish to work with, so it’s easier; on the other, you need the right assortment and sizes of knives, and in the case of a Copper River salmon, the fish is so expensive you don’t want to make a mistake that mars the presentation or detracts from the bottom line.

  Davis ran his hand over the king, approving of its taut muscle. “As a chef, my job is to not get stuck with a crappy piece of fish. My job is to get the best piece of fish they have.” To that end he works every day with Brian Hayes at Pacific Seafood. Davis tells him what he wants and the salesman picks it himself. Occasionally they haggle over the price, but this rarely happens now, because Davis and Hayes have reached a détente of sorts: The salesman respects that Davis knows what makes a good piece of fish and he also recognizes what Davis likes, the little quirks of taste that define his aesthetic. A deep belly, for instance. They work together and rarely have to argue over the price. It wasn’t always like this. Davis had to tutor Hayes in the early years, especially after his favorite picker was fired. “The guy was a fish maniac,” he said of the previous picker. “He loved good fish. I could always count on him finding me the best stuff. He got fired ten years ago for getting in a fight at work. The guy got in a fistfight over a piece of fish!”

  After years of working together, Davis’s directions to Hayes are simple and clear: “Put on your jacket and pick some fish.” They speak every day, seven days a week. “His wife doesn’t like me,” he added with an uncomfortable chuckle. “Every Saturday morning he’s on the phone with me. He could be at a soccer game with his kids.” Davis has two menus at Blueacre, lunch and dinner, and these menus change daily based on whatever is fresh and in season. This means being in constant contact with his fish picker. Dealing with a large wholesaler like Pacific Seafood is not for everyone. “If you have a forty-seat restaurant, they won’t give you the time of day.” Davis is buying thousands of pounds, not hundreds, every year. He buys only fish from U.S. waters, which makes his purchases tougher and more expensive. Though foreign-caught fish might be less regulated and cheaper, they come with environmental costs on the back end, costs that will have to be paid eventually, by someone. Davis believes in the importance of safeguarding the resource.

  At this point, he has his buying operation down to a science. Besides, he doesn’t need the aggravation. “I’m almost fifty. Yesterday, after dropping my boys at school, I was at the restaurant by eight-thirty and on my feet until ten at night.” Haggling over fish was not part of his day, and he was glad for that. Still, he wants the best. “What I’m talking about is the difference between ‘whoa, this is good’ and ‘this is the best piece of fish in my life.’ ” Even so, the fish-buying end of his operation doesn’t always go according to plan. Yesterday his regular picker, Brian Hayes, was unavailable. Davis received a box of small kings, unremarkable fish of about seven pounds apiece. “I call those jacks,” he said, referring to the precocious males that will try to spawn with adult females. A seven-pound fish is not the Platonic ideal of a Copper River king, nor does it boast the thick, fatty fillets Davis prefers to serve. Even worse, his order also contained a colored-up king with a seal bite taken out of it. “I was not happy,” he said. The fish was dark, as if ready to spawn. Though Davis didn’t fully understand the science, he thought the dark color might indicate a fish that would soon spawn in the lower river. He was after big, bright, sterling fish with every scale intact, salmon that had many miles of fast, turbulent river to navigate before they reached spawning grounds well upstream of the mouth. These are the fish with the highest fat content. A dark fish with a thin belly—and a seal bite, no less!—was not what he wanted to foist off on his customers.

  “Did you see the fish from the plane?” he asked me, referring to the forty-eight-pound ceremonial king that had kicked off the season a few days earlier. All the local TV news stations had covered its emergence from the Alaska Airlines cockpit. “I would have rejected that fish. It was colored up.” Davis wasn’t sure what was going on, because so much of the Copper River fishery was cloaked in mystery, but he thought something was amiss. There were rumors of low river flows and salmon milling around in the salt waiting for something to happen. A reliable source said the gillnetters were working out in the middle of the Gulf of Alaska rather than at the river mouth. If this were true, it would mean they were pulling up any salmon that happened to swim by, as opposed to targeting the early-running fat-laden fish with the most mileage to cover that got waylaid as they tried to enter the river in May. I told him about the large king I’d seen at Pike Place Market, the one with a slight blush. “Bullshit,” he said. “If they say that fish eats as well as a chrome-bright fish, they’re lying.”

  Davis pulled out a surprisingly small fillet knife—nine inches—and sharpened it up. Laying the fish on its side, he used his first cut to remove the right collar, one of those parts considered cut-rate in the past and now rightfully recognized as a delicacy because of its rich flavor. He counted on having a knowledgeable customer request a collar at some point during the night’s service, so it was the first piece to go on the tray. Next he ran his knife barely skin deep along the backbone, from adipose fin to neck, in order to get the fillet to lay down flat before cutting. After a quick slice to free the meat from the tail, he was ready to remove the entire fillet from the fish’s right side, a process that required three lateral cuts from neck to tail as he worked progressively through the flesh. “That’s what you want, right there,” he said, running his hand across the belly. “Feel how thick that is.” The fillet, weighing about nine pounds, got put aside on the tray, and next, without flipping the fish, Davis deftly removed the backbone and tail with his knife. He held them up in the light, showing how little meat was left on the bone. These got tossed in the trash. Davis doesn’t make stock from his salmon leftovers, finding it too overpowering. Some of the scraps he saves for smoking, but mostly he tries to fillet his fish as cleanly as possible. “This is a big restaurant,” he said. There’s a limit to how much time he can spend on any one task.

  Next he cut off the left collar and placed it beside the right one. Now he had two glistening fillets. He trimmed up the dorsal sides, then, switching to a longer knife, he made a series of shallow cuts to remove the rib bones from each. For the tedious chore of pulling the pin bones, he used a simple pair of hardware-store pliers, after which he switched to a large skinning knife—“Careful so I don’t eviscerate you,” he warned me—to separate the meat from its scaly coat. The skin peeled away easily, coiling into a long, thin strip. It was going into the garbage.

  Of all the salm
on’s parts, the skin might be the one that Jon Rowley, my dinner companion that night, would request. Rowley had been working with salmon most of his life, first as a fisherman and later as a restaurant consultant. These days he was working as an adviser for a variety of artisan food producers, from shellfish farmers to organic-fruit orchardists. His palate was respected from coast to coast. The first time I shared a meal of salmon with him was at a beach barbecue on Samish Island in northern Puget Sound. He walked around in dismay, picking discarded salmon skins off paper plates scattered atop the picnic tables. “Do you eat the skins?” he asked me, folding one up, popping it in his mouth like an oversize gumdrop, and admiring its flavor. “Sometimes,” I evaded. “You can tell a good salmon from its skin,” he said soberly.

  “A lot of my customers don’t know what to do with salmon skins,” Davis replied. “My restaurant is more geared to making people happy than educating them. Jon is a teacher. I’m in the business of making people happy.”

  The salmon was ready for apportioning. Returning to the nine-inch fillet knife, Davis removed the lower couple of inches of tail meat and then divided the fillet lengthwise and trimmed the bloodline, a thin, dark band of blood-rich meat that’s too fishy for many diners. Using his free hand as a caliper, he worked from back to front, carving off single servings, each of which got weighed to ensure a standard seven- to eight-ounce size. When he reached the thickest portions in the middle, he put one aside. “This is yours.” It was a beautiful piece of fish, perhaps three inches thick, deep red, the flesh marbled with white lines of fat. “That’s the piece of fish of a lifetime. You’ll remember that forever.” By the end he had thirty-two servings. Now it was time to repeat the process all over again with the second fish. You never see a fishmonger fillet a large fish this way at the market, where customers are waiting in line to get their orders. At my own local market, the well-regarded Mutual Fish in south Seattle, they wield enormous knives that look more like saw blades, and a fillet is removed in a single rapid cut. Though quick, this method leaves meat on the backbone even when performed expertly. Davis’s approach is designed to limit wastage. He needs to get the most out of his fillets. When I met him he had a family of five depending on his restaurant income, with a fourth child on the way.

  —

  KEVIN DAVIS INVITED ME into his kitchen because, like me, he’s an angler, and because he has an emotional attachment to salmon that is something nearly akin to love. I know the feeling. Ever since those months spent in the Rogue River wilderness of southwestern Oregon, I have been drawn to the wild as a source of rejuvenation and sustenance. I learned to fish for salmon and steelhead there—discovered the charms of many other foods produced only by nature, from huckleberries to miner’s lettuce to chanterelle mushrooms. Though I returned to the city after a year, the natural world continues to be my escape hatch, the place I go to think, to exercise my limbs, to get over disappointments and let my imagination wander. Learning how to find and prepare wild foods—salmon, in particular—has become a regular part of my life. In many ways salmon are the last great wild food. American bison, along with the cultures they supported, are basically finished, their days of roaming the continent over. The once-ubiquitous passenger pigeon: gone, driven to extinction by market hunters. Elsewhere around the world, the wild foods that formerly nurtured humanity have disappeared or are forgotten. Salmon remain. Catching, killing, and eating one is a reminder of our most basic connection to the natural world. People have been doing this in North America for thousands of years, in Asia for even longer. Yet salmon are becoming more abstracted by the day—as icons of a faded past or talking points on an environmental wish list. They’re dissolving into fable as we wring our hands and file our white papers—Exhibit A of a society that doesn’t understand the first thing about what sustains it.

  One afternoon, many years ago, I was hanging around a tackle shop, hoping to extract any information I could from the owner about sea-run cutthroat trout. Another customer in the store overheard our conversation. “You’re too late!” he said. “Should have been here in the eighties.” In some ways, he was right. Sea-run cutts had been badly depleted up and down the West Coast. In Puget Sound it was illegal to kill one. This was a species known to settlers as the harvest trout, because it returned from the salt to its natal rivers to spawn during the harvest months and also because it was a favorite for the frying pan. Until it was nearly wiped out. Now there’s just a catch-and-release sport fishery so the population can rebuild. One of the shop employees, over in the corner tying flies, jumped in. “The eighties?” he scoffed. “Try the seventies.” At which the owner, behind the cash register, adjusted his ratty old ball cap and twisted his white-bearded face into something that looked like a cross between a grin and a frown. “Children, children,” he chided us. “They say you weren’t really there if you can remember the sixties, but I’ll tell you what, the fishing was even better than the sex and the drugs.”

  Scientists would recognize this exchange as a form of something known as the Shifting Baseline Syndrome. Each generation has its own concept of abundance. Without concrete data on historical fish populations, fisheries managers rely on a hypothetical baseline. In the absence of institutional memory, this baseline tends to shift from one generation to the next, based on each generation’s perception of abundance. In a growing population, with increasingly more pressure on the resource, the trend is ever downward, until the resource is managed nearly to extinction.

  Even as a toddler, my son loved to fish. At the age of three he hooked (and lost) his first steelhead. At six he learned how to clean a brook trout and panfry it himself with a little butter. Will wild salmon still be on the menu when he becomes an adult?

  —

  AT 6:00 P.M. I GOT A MESSAGE from Jon Rowley. He was stuck in traffic. “I don’t want him in the kitchen,” Davis said, carving out the last servings from his second Copper River king. He told me Rowley had a way of pulling him aside when he was at his busiest, making suggestions or asking pointed questions. “I love the guy, I really do,” he added, “but sometimes he gets under my skin. It’s like the Japanese and apples. They don’t want any apple—they want the perfect apple. He’ll be telling me something, saying I should do this and do that, and I’ll find myself getting annoyed. Then later I’ll think about it and realize, The fucker is right!” I knew just what Davis was talking about.

  One time Rowley came over to my house for a party. Clad in his signature khakis and white sneakers, he shuffled outside to my back patio, where most of the food had already been devoured, and found a cold piece of salmon on a platter. After taking a bite he turned to me jovially. “You might want to lower the heat,” he said. Then he went back out to his Volkswagen van and returned with a produce box full of peaches from one of his clients. The assembled knew enough to put down their beers and dive in before the box was empty. Twenty different friends of mine spent the rest of the night telling me how they had just eaten the single best peach of their life. Rowley was the same way about salmon. Many would say he was the one who put the Copper River on the map.

  Kevin Davis got back to work, and the maître d’ led me to a booth near the kitchen. It was a quarter after six and Rowley was still MIA. I looked over tonight’s fare. A dozen varieties of West Coast oysters topped the menu. Every starter was a type of shellfish, except for the pickled herring. Under main courses I found the salmon, without any special typography or bold font to stand out. It was grilled and served with port-soaked cherries, smoked almonds, cracked rosemary, and brown butter—$45 for sockeye and $56 for king. A brief note below the description was the only tip-off for anyone wondering how a piece of salmon might approach filet mignon status: “This is the most sought-after fish on the planet.” I went ahead and ordered an appetizer.

  Rowley appeared just as the server delivered a plate of Stellar Bay oysters, a large, tumbled variety from Deep Bay on Vancouver Island’s east coast. Dressed as usual, Rowley was slightly disheveled, his bu
tton-down shirt partially untucked and his waxen bangs looking wind-tossed. “I couldn’t find a parking space,” he said. He ordered us each a glass of white wine to go with the oysters, waving away the mignonette and imploring me in his soft voice, barely audible over the hubbub of the restaurant, to “just chew the oyster and use the wine as an accompaniment.” I could see how Davis might get irked by our friend. Rowley was on another level. I simply couldn’t taste the things that he could.

  Rowley looked over the night’s fare and spotted his selection. He closed the menu. “Did I ever tell you my story about making a gill net in college? I was living in a girls’ dorm. Well, not really, but almost.” This was in Portland, Oregon, he said, in the sixties. He’d been hanging around the dorm because his own room was off campus. In fact, it was just a tent, stashed in a thicket of blackberry brambles down in a ravine. “I didn’t have any money,” he explained of his seriously off-campus housing. Eventually some administrators caught wind of their student’s situation and remedied it, but not before Rowley spent a few weeks in the girls’ dorm, where he passed the time showing some of his classmates how to construct a gill net with nylon and other household objects. He tied a bunch of mason jars to it for floats, and one moonlit night during a party on the banks of the Sandy River, he deployed the net. Minutes later there was “a great commotion.” Two or three big kings migrating upstream had gotten caught and were thrashing around. “It was crazy,” he told me. “The net was moving all over the place and there was this wild party going on under the stars.” Eventually he and some others managed to haul the net in, along with the catch. “That was a good meal,” Rowley said with typical understatement.