Medium Raw

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 the 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.