Twain's Feast - Andrew Beahrs [99]
Among them is Tory McPhail. Tory is executive chef at Commander’s Palace in New Orleans’s Garden District; Paul Prudhomme and Emeril Lagasse each held the same job, in a restaurant that opened in 1880. Along with Antoine’s, Arnaud’s, and Galatoire’s, Commander’s is one of the grand Creole restaurants—the old guard, in a city that takes its old guard very, very seriously. The reopening of Commander’s after Katrina was one of the great post-storm reliefs, making the national news as a sign of the city’s recovery.
Tory is thus the obvious local favorite. He’s also an enormously friendly and welcoming guy, raised in a small town on the Puget Sound, with an obviously genuine love for Louisiana’s seafood—right down to the humble sheepshead. He loves sheepshead so much, in fact, that when we spoke on the phone, he decided on the spot to prepare it for the cook-off.
“Sheepshead—oh, my goodness, that is just out-of-this-world good,” he said. “It’s fun to catch, too, under trestles or next to pilings, wherever you have some good structure, especially in brackish water. It eats mostly crab, and that’s the scoop on its name—it has these big front teeth it uses to crunch through the shells and make it look kind of like a sheep.” Its diet, he says, is what makes it so delicious. “It’s clean, light, white, flaky meat, with nuances of fresh crab. In fact, if you steam it, flake it off, and serve it just with light salt and pepper, it’s sometimes called poor man’s crabmeat—it even looks like jumbo lump crab.”
Sheepshead is getting more popular, but it still isn’t often actively sought out by diners. At Commander’s, though, Tory says, “we buy absolutely as much as we can get—forty pounds, eighty pounds, whatever the Fish House has that day. We print our menu up to five times daily, so we can use what we want, then turn to another fish real quick when we run out. And we have a great relationship with the Fish House—we use about eighty thousand pounds of fish a year, so they’ll really try to help us out with what we need. I’ve had those guys leave their kids’ soccer games when we’re running low on oysters.”
That relationship is why he has sheepshead today to work with at all. Sheepsheads aren’t widely available until they school in the late autumn, right around the time that Pete Gerica starts taking them to pad out the end of the waning white-shrimp harvest. So Tory called Cliff Hall at the New Orleans Fish House, telling him he needed sheepshead for his cook-off entry.
“Wednesday, nothing,” Cliff tells me. “Thursday, nothing. I’m sweating bullets. I call a guy I know spearfishes, tell him I need the fish. I tell him I’ll give him two dollars a pound; he’s saying, ‘Man, I wouldn’t do that to you.’ I’m saying, ‘Look, no problem, two dollars a pound, I just need the fish.’ He calls me Friday noon, telling me Lake Pontchartrain is mud. I say, ‘No, wrong answer. You gotta find clear water.’ Finally he does, right there under the Fort Pike Bridge. He calls me and says he’s got the fish—biggest relief of my week. Tory calls from the airport a half hour later, just in from California. I tell him no problem.” Cliff laughs loudly. “He couldn’t believe the product. I’m thinking, yeah, well, it was swimming about three hours ago. But the prep cooks were asking why all the fish had holes in their heads.”
When Cliff fled the city during Katrina, he and his partners left behind some $2 million worth of fish. In the late summer. Without power. When they came back, they came with hip waders and heavily armed—shotguns, two pistols each—and started clearing out the rot as Black Hawk helicopters roared overhead and the occasional National Guard boat went patrolling by on the flooded street. I can’t get my head around what it must have been like, hauling nearly seven hundred pallets with hand trucks to dumpsters just outside the loading door. And once the fish was in the dumpsters, of