Medium Raw

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.”