Medium Raw

It’s time for the skate, a fish he’s not so fond of. He empties a big bag of large wings into the sink, about thirty-five pounds in all, and immediately starts washing them with cold water. Skate are slimy, delicate, highly perishable, and loaded with transparent bits of cartilage, which, if left inadvertently inside, could do serious damage to the inside of your mouth or throat. Picture an airplane with fat wings. Top side of each wing is a thick filet. On the underside, another, thinner one. The perimeters of each wing bristle with little bones, and between the top and bottom filets is a barrier of thin, flexible, dangerously translucent, cartilagenous spokes, like the buttress of a church—and about as unpleasant to bite into.

Justo picks up the chef ’s knife. “I sharpen myself. Once a week.”

I can’t help asking, “Once a week?”

For a guy as scrupulous as Justo, that seems like a long time to go between sharpenings. Cooks much less conscientious than he labor over their blades on a daily basis. The very essence of knife maintenance—a notion inextricably tied up with one’s self-image as a cook—is that the sharper the knife, the better.

Not necessarily, explains Justo. “I like medium sharp,” he says, pointing out the cartilage of the skate as an extreme example of his principle. “Too sharp? You get part of the bone. When it’s sharpened correct, it passes over the bone.” With this, he grabs a large skate with his gloved hand, and, with the chef ’s knife, removes the fattest part of the flesh from the top of both wings. It looks like he’s savagely and indifferently hacking at the things. One skate after another, he quickly and brutally removes only the fattest part of the top of each wing. The rest, the two unexploited filets on the underside of each fish, go straight in the garbage—along with about 70 to 80 percent of the total body weight of the animal: skin, bone, and cartilage.

One could be forgiven for asking about City Harvest—an organization with whom Eric Ripert works very closely and actively raises a lot money. Why don’t they take that fish? It’s complicated, I gather. Simply put—and, I’m guessing, this is true across the board in similar fine-dining restaurants—there’s nobody and no place and no time to winnow out every scrap of fish from every carcass, or even most of them. Even the most good-hearted restaurants just can’t do it. City Harvest does not, it appears, have the facilities or the personnel to transport, hold, process, and prepare the more close-in leavings of New York’s seafood restaurants. Fish like skate are, in any case, so extremely perishable that they’d likely be spoiled by the time any secondary team could get a knife to them. The way things work now, they don’t even like to take the incredibly high-quality filet meat that Le Bernardin generates unless it’s fully cooked first. The restaurant boils or steams the stuff before City Harvest takes it away. (They claim it makes the trucks smell bad otherwise.)

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.)