Twain's Feast - Andrew Beahrs [100]
The signs of Katrina are everywhere—rumpled pavement, lawns with three-foot-high grass, even the new wood in the walls of an Irish pub. But when I visited the New Orleans Fish House, I had to take Cliff’s word for how bad it got. Everything there was clean, fast, fresh, and cold. Knives flashed, gutting out fish; water splashed over cutting tables; hoses sprayed the fish clean. Cutters washed down their boards after every fish—and there were a lot of fish. Black drum fillets piled up; cutters broke down red snapper, mahi-mahi, pompano, and flounder. I shivered; it was New Orleans in July, but it seemed a minor wonder that the floor wasn’t a skating rink—I thought, inevitably, of Twain’s polar regions at the edge of the tropics. A man introducing himself as George W., who said that sheepshead is the best eating fish in the house, was filleting skipjack; the flesh was red as beef, fresh as though hauled from the Gulf a minute before. In the New Orleans Fish House, the cliché that a cook is only as good as his ingredients rang true. The fish there demanded respect.
The Fish House works on what seems an almost impossibly tight schedule. “Our clients have until nine A.M. to get their orders in,” Cliff says. “That’s for an eleven-o’clock delivery. They call at nine, we’ve got two hours to pull anything from the freezer they need, then sort, cut, and pack the fresh product. I don’t know any other city that has that kind of timing—usually it’s something like call by four o’clock the day before. And, man, our customers’ll let us know it if we’re five minutes late. We just can’t ever be wrong.” What sets Louisiana apart, Cliff says, what makes it so addicted to perfectly fresh fish, is its marriage of land and water. “Alabama, Florida, and them, they’ve all turned their wetlands over to mostly recreational use, beaches and such. But as long as our wetlands last, we’ve still got a perfect breeding ground out there.”
The cook-off starts are staggered to allow the judges to taste over the course of two hours; many of the cooks are already hard at work. It’s wonderful, especially if you imagine eating each dish in a chef’s own restaurant, close to the fish’s source: there’s Alaskan king salmon with low-bush cranberries, an Illinois fish stew with walleye, a curried striped bass from New Jersey served with crab-filled modak dumplings, and Mississippi shrimp and grits. John Varanese from Kentucky, Lord love him, cooks the ancient and seldom-eaten paddlefish. As a promotional event, it’s devilishly effective; if this were a restaurant, I’d live in it.
I’m an unabashed fan of Deadliest Catch, the documentary series about the Alaskan king and opilio crab fisheries. The fishermen will work for forty hours straight in freezing, murderous seas; when I watch it, I eat popcorn, then sleep really well. So it’s a minor thrill that one of the cook-off’s emcees is Sig Hansen, captain of the Northwestern, who on the show appears to be both incredibly competent and an awful boss. Now, in his role as emcee, Sig’s instincts kick in; he says literally nothing that would be out of place on the crab boat. “Gotta work fast here,” he’ll say. “They’re under the gun, so they gotta work fast. But they gotta do it right. Doing it fast and getting it all wrong just won’t do ’em any good.” He chides the chefs to do it right, asks them if they know what they’re doing, tells them to watch their fingers. But you have to be a smart guy to run a fishing boat, and when it comes to promoting sustainable seafood, he’s calmer and more comfortable. “Wild American seafood draws a premium price, sure,” he says. “But it’s a premium product. Some wild-caught fish is just more flavorful. Salmon, farmed salmon—well, it’s okay. But wild fish, that’s the real thing. Nothing in the world like it.”
Tory’s workspace is covered with vegetables