The Third Plate: Field Notes on the Future of Food (28 page)

Ángel discovered tonaso, and many of the other fish on his menu that I didn’t recognize, by getting onto the larger boats that supplanted the small-scale fishing vessels he grew up knowing so well. These weren’t the largest of the industrial fleet boats, the bottom trawlers that wreak havoc on the ocean’s floor. Their methods were slightly more humane. Nevertheless, in them Ángel saw a level of destruction and wastefulness that haunts him to this day.

“I remember how excited I was to finally get on my first boat,” he told me as the empty plates of tonaso were cleared. “I had tried for months, but these fishermen don’t want to fish with strangers. I kept asking and pleading, and then finally I was allowed on. And what I saw from the second day horrified me. Can you guess out of every tonne of fish caught how much is kept on board?” He didn’t wait for me to guess. “Six hundred kilos! The rest—either dead or damaged—are dumped right back in.” He lit another cigarette. “I decided, at the moment, that whatever I ended up doing with my life, even if it was on the smallest scale, it would have to include being the caretaker for the other four hundred kilos.”

He convinced the fishing captain to hire him for a stint as the boat’s chef. One day he asked if he might cook with some of the catch they were going to
discard overboard. “They were really impressed with how delicious it all was, but not that surprised—they’d been saying the same thing, only no one would buy it.” Ángel was hired as a chef on different boats over several years, learning more about the industry.

It’s tempting to look at Ángel’s motivations through the lens of that young boy who witnessed his father risking both their lives to free fish from human greed; instead of direct confrontation, Ángel infiltrates the boats and changes the crewmembers’ attitudes from within. But that’s a thin read of his philosophy. Born and raised in El Puerto de Santa María, Ángel is the fishermen’s greatest defender.

“I’m much more pro-fisherman than I am fish,” he told me. When I asked if he had a guiding principle for his work, he waved his hand across the table. “It comes from a feeling,” he said, and then, as if to correct a drift toward self-involvement, he added, “It comes from watching fishermen cry as they throw fish back into the sea because they know they can’t sell it.”

Ángel has become something of a hero to the fishermen. After Aponiente first opened, word spread about a townie turned world-famous chef willing to pay for damaged and unwanted fish, for fish so obscure they were nameless. That was when Ángel set about convincing diners to pay for these fish, which has proven to be more difficult.

“Because of the way we’re socialized about fish eating, we want to eat glamorous fish—the ones with names,” he said. “They might not even be the real names of the fish—they’re names that were created for marketing. Oceans cover 70 percent of the planet, and yet we eat like there are only about twenty kinds of fish out there. I want to change that.”

I headed to the bathroom before the next course and came across a Photoshopped picture of Ángel, his hulking frame emerging, merman-like, from the body of a squid. Ángel was smiling joyfully. Just opposite the photo, to
the left of the entrance of the kitchen, was a small silver plaque. It read,
WHEN
THERE
’
S
A
CAPTA
IN
,
THE
SAILORS
ARE
N
OT
IN
CHARGE
.
You could interpret this as Ángel’s credo on the hierarchy of the kitchen. The chef is in control; the lowly line cooks are there to obey. But perhaps Ángel wants it applied to the diners as well. And why not? He placed it at the entrance to the kitchen, for everyone to read.

It occurred to me that Ángel saw his diners as sailors, along for a ride. Eating at Aponiente means a kind of surrender to the sea, the way I’d hoped that, in doing away with menus, we had made eating at Blue Hill at Stone Barns feel like a kind of surrender to what a landscape can provide. Just as nouvelle cuisine chefs broke apart the traditional recipes and conventions of fine dining—the “it is prohibited to prohibit” school of cooking—Ángel was doing the same through the ocean’s vast offerings. As a sailor on his boat, you are prohibited from expecting one of the twenty fish you associate with the sea.

The waiter announced the next course as “a little nose-to-tail eating.” It was three small prawns, floating in a bisque of shellfish, with the shells of the prawns lightly smoked and then fried. A phytoplankton cracker topped with a spoonful of aioli accented the side of the bowl.

This was a calculated, ironic dish—“nose to tail” referring to eating all the parts of an animal, a buzz phrase for sustainable cooking—and I smiled at the oddity of it. The prawns, normally hulking in size, were small and, to be frank about it, unattractive, as were the fried shells (what I surmised were the “tail” equivalent). It looked more like an attempt at a political statement than a tasty dish.

But then Ángel started talking. The prawns were in fact bycatch, decapitated by the netting process. Ángel said he refused to cook with head-on shrimp, the way it’s traditionally served in Spain, the head supposedly being one of the best indicators of quality. His own research with the laboratory at
the University of Cádiz confirmed what he’d suspected. More than 80 percent of the shellfish in Spain, he learned, comes with boric acid on it. The chemical preserves the bright red color of the shrimp, providing the illusion of freshness.

“Who needs the head if it’s marinated in boric acid?” he said to me. Instead, for a fraction of the price, he buys decapitated shrimp, which would otherwise, like the damaged mackerel, be ground for fishmeal.

“Most of the ingredients I cook with are too ugly to show in their entirety. I’ve stopped caring about that. I still want them to be pretty and look nice, but it’s not important to me that a dish be more beautiful than it tastes.”

We both ate the prawns. “Delicious, no?” he said. And they were. “Every nine days or so, I get a delivery of decapitated shrimp and a mixed bag of other shellfish from one particular boat that’s been supplying me since I opened. A lot of it we can’t use, it’s really beat-up, but those go into the bisque.”

“Bisque” doesn’t do justice to the sophisticated soup. Actually, I don’t know that “soup” does, either. “Velouté” comes to mind, because it was thick and richly satisfying in a way that reminds me of what the best veloutés are all about. It was redolent of Ángel’s skills as a chef, coaxing flavors out of seafood that I didn’t think possible to express, and creating something smooth and unctuous without butter or cream.

Again I asked Ángel if the broth was thickened with his famous fish eyeball puree. “You know, that idea also came from the laboratory. I learned fish eyes are about 67 percent protein. So, yes, I used it as a thickener,” he said, in a tone that suggested
If you knew what I knew, wouldn’t you do the same thing?
“It got a lot of media attention, which was nice, but I stopped doing it, because in order for it to work, you really had to use the eyes within the first few hours after the fish were caught. When the delivery arrived, all the cooks were racing for the eyeballs. It was ridiculous,” he said, and added, “Look, in the end I’m a pragmatist.” His bisque is thickened now with the protein from the bycatch, which he said is just as delicious.

Ángel told me he used to dream of dishes like that soup. “I was always given to fantasy—I had a very strong fantasy life as a kid. I was in my head so much of the time, imagining things, then getting into a lot of trouble. I caused my parents a lot of hardship. I didn’t do well in school, for example, because I hated sitting still—actually, I just really
couldn’t
sit still. My father would tie me to the dining table chair in exasperation and say, ‘Okay, fine, you’re not going to study, but you’re going to sit still.’”

Then one day, when he was ten years old, he set up a
chiringuito
, a beachside clam shack, outside his home. He cooked with different fish and shellfish, selling them to anyone who passed by. Ángel’s version of a lemonade stand.

“That’s how the world of cooking saved me,” he said. “It gave me a place where I could put that imagination. For a little while, anyway.”

It wasn’t until he was twenty years old that he was diagnosed with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). “Things got a lot better after that. My parents, they’re both pathologists, which means they needed empirical evidence to prove I wasn’t just an asshole. And it worked. They finally understood what it was with me, and I felt liberated to be myself, because I wasn’t acting. This is who I was.”

The last course, arresting in its simplicity, was sea bream: two small fillets, with skin so perfectly grill-marked it looked as if it had been branded, and a small pool of phytoplankton cream. The waiter said the bream had been “perfumed with olive oil.”

Sea bream is a popular fish in Europe, sought after for its mild, white meat. It is one of the few species not threatened by overfishing, and when I suggested that this might be the reason it was on the menu, Ángel shrugged. “Bream remind me of my dad,” he said. “We used to fish for them. They’re a smart fish, very sensitive. So when we fished for bream, my father had all
these rules, like you couldn’t talk on the boat—you couldn’t make a sound, actually—and when you cast your line, it had to go out 150 meters, not a meter less. He was so particular about it because he knew the bream were just too smart.”

I asked him about the perfumed bream, which tasted like it had once swum in an ocean of olive oil. He explained that the bream were grilled over olive-pit charcoal. For Spaniards, olives are just behind ham as one of the most basic products of the culture. “And do you know what that means?” he asked, again without allowing me to hazard a guess. “It means a table full of pits.”

Ángel carbonizes olive pits like you might carbonize wood to make charcoal. He said he’s perfected the charcoal to the point that it burns much hotter than wood—he usually brings it to 750 to 1,000 degrees Celsius, using a hair dryer to activate the heat. The fish cooks quickly. “You want crackling skin, but you also want the fish to gently confit,” he said, which is why for the bream he only brings the temperature to 75 degrees. “It’s a tricky balance, infusing the flavor of the delicate oil and the flavor of the smoke.”

Ángel sat back as the plates were cleared and lit a final cigarette. I asked him if eating sea bream reminded him of fishing with his dad. “Everything I’m doing lately is reminding me of my dad,” he said. “My very first memory of my dad is a heroic one. My father is deaf in one ear, and so as a result of that he never got seasick. We would go out in horrible seas, and my father would be fine. I remember one time in particular, a really rough trip out at sea, when everyone on the boat—there must have been ten of us—we were all throwing up all over the place. Nonstop vomiting. I looked over at my dad, and he was slowly sipping his beer and smiling at the sea. This happened several times when I was growing up. As a boy I didn’t understand why that was. I didn’t know that liquid in eardrums controls the sense of balance. All I thought was,
This guy is Superman.
”