Medium Raw

It’s seven a.m. in the chilly, white-tiled bowels of Le Bernardin in New York City, where the language is also Spanish, and Justo Thomas is looking at seven hundred pounds of fish. A stack of Styrofoam crates packed with halibut, white tuna, black sea bass, mahimahi, red snapper, skate, cod, monkfish, or salmon, mostly unscaled, on the bone, guts still in, reaches halfway up the wall of his tiny workspace.

“The way they catch,” he explains—meaning, on the bone, the way God made them, the way they came out of the ocean and the way that Le Bernardin insists on receiving them. Shiny, clear-eyed, pink-gilled, still stiff with rigor, and smelling of nothing but seawater. Everybody from outside the restaurant—the constant procession of deliverymen who bring cases of wine, vegetables, langoustines, octopus, uni, dry goods—they call him “Primo” (“first” or “number one”). Which seems to please Justo.

Le Bernardin is probably the best seafood restaurant in America. It’s certainly the most celebrated: three consecutive four-star reviews from the New York Times, two-time winner of three Michelin stars, Zagat’s best-rated restaurant in New York—every honor, award you could imagine—the best by any measure of assessing such things. Which means they don’t cut fish at Le Bernardin like other restaurants. The standards are—to say the least—different. Expectations for a hunk of protein are…higher.

Justo is from the rural Dominican Republic. He was the middle brother of three in a family of eight kids (five sisters). His father was a farmer—growing coffee and coconuts. The family raised a few pigs for sale—and chickens for the table. As a child, Justo went to school, then helped on the farm after. His first job was as counter help at his uncle’s pastry shop—six a.m. until ten p.m., every day. He never learned to bake.

He’s now forty-seven years old, and he’s been working in New York City restaurants for twenty years—first under conditions of questionable legality but quickly thereafter, as a permanent resident and then as a citizen. He’s got three kids; the eldest, a twenty-year-old, in college. At Le Bernardin, he makes a flat salary that would be considered spectacular by industry standards—an amount in the neighborhood of what I made in my best years as a chef. Like all employees of the restaurant, he has full medical coverage. Once a year, he takes a four-week vacation back in the DR. Unusually for the restaurant business, Justo has no set hours. He leaves whenever he feels like it—which is when he’s done.

He came to Le Bernadin six years ago, having heard good things about it when he worked across the street at Palio. “They didn’t even say ‘Good morning,’” he says, shaking his head.

“The chef treat everybody the same,” he says, proudly, adding that he’d been looking for someplace with job security. “I don’t like to jump around.” And at Le Bernardin, unlike almost every other job in the restaurant industry, “I work by myself.” In fact, Justo Thomas enjoys a degree of autonomy unheard of by his peers.

The room where he works is actually a ten-foot-by-five-foot dogleg off the hallway through which deliveries are dragged or wheeled from the underground loading dock of the Prudential building on Fifty-first Street. Justo works right next to the steward’s, Fernando’s, tiny office, a few feet from the service elevator to the upstairs kitchen. He’s got one worktable covered with cutting boards, a shelf stacked with clear plastic Lexan storage trays, a child-size overhead shelf where he keeps a small electronic scale and some needle-nose pliers. At the other end of the room is a two-basin sink. The walls, curiously, have been carefully covered with fresh plastic cling wrap—like a serial killer would prepare his basement—to catch flying fish scales and for faster, easier cleanup. The plastic will come down, of course, at the end of the shift. Justo likes things clean and organized.

Each pre-positioned plastic tray has been fitted with a drainage rack—so that the fish are raised up out of any liquid—and each rack additionally wrapped in cling wrap. Justo’s knives—a not particularly expensive slicing knife (usually intended for carving roasts), a cheap stainless steel chef ’s knife, a severely ground-down flexible filet knife (barely a half inch left of blade), and another personally customized mutation with a serpentine edge—are laid out in a row at knee level on a clean side towel. Hanging on a nail behind him, there’s a roll of bright red labels reading WEDNESDAY, which he will use on each and every tray of fish he cuts today—so the cooks upstairs know at a glance which portions to use first and from whence they came. He wears a bright yellow dishwashing glove on his left hand, as he doesn’t like to actually touch the fish. Justo Thomas, one notices quickly when observing him, is something of a germophobe.