Medium Raw

What’s left of Justo’s work on the mountain of skate are two large piles of perfectly bone-free pieces of fish. One side, then another, Justo removes the skin with the flexible blade at a forty-five-degree angle, trims off any and all blood or pink color that remains, and evens off the shapes with the slicer into the appropriate thicknesses and dimensions. Most fish—like skate wing—naturally taper off and narrow at the outer edges and toward the tail. Which is fine for moving through the water. Not so good for even cooking. A chef or cook looks at that graceful decline and sees a piece of protein that will cook unevenly: will, when the center—or fattest part—is perfect, be overcooked at the edges. They see a piece of fish that does not look like you could charge $39 for it. Customers should understand that what they are paying for, in any restaurant situation, is not just what’s on the plate—but everything that’s not on the plate: all the bone, skin, fat, and waste product which the chef did pay for, by the pound. When Eric Ripert, for instance, pays $15 or $20 a pound for a piece of fish, you can be sure, the guy who sells it to him does not care that 70 percent of that fish is going in the garbage. It’s still the same price. Same principle applies to meat, poultry—or any other protein. The price of the protein on the market may be $10 per pound, but by the time you’re putting the cleaned, prepped piece of meat or fish on the plate, it can actually cost you $35 a pound. And that’s before paying the guy who cuts it for you. That disparity in purchase price and actual price becomes even more extreme at the top end of the dining spectrum. The famous French mantra of “Use Everything,” by which most chefs live, is not the operative phrase of a three-starred Michelin restaurant. Here, it’s “Use Only the Very Best.”

The rest? You do what you can.

Justo pairs off the last, irregular bits of skate, draping one atop the other. He catches one he doesn’t quite like—a nearly imperceptible flaw. Most prep cooks in this situation would instinctively tuck the less beautiful one underneath a perfect one. Food cost. Food cost. Food cost. Not him.

“It’s like wearing clean clothes with dirty underwear,” he says—without a trace of humor. The unacceptable piece goes in the trash.

It’s only eight forty-five and the skate are done. The table is washed again. Knives, too. The skate is brought upstairs. A large white tuna hits the cutting board next. He zips off the skin and shows me where there’s a single, very soft but hidden bone. “Your knife too sharp? You cut through—you don’t feel it.”

City Harvest is getting a lot of very expensive product off of this fish. Near the tail, Justo sees something he doesn’t like and quickly carves off about a quarter of it. The fish is butchered as if for a sushi bar. No dark membrane, no raggedy bits. Center-cut filet only. He quickly breaks the thing down into four pristine hunks of loin. Then, without hesitating, divides those pieces into appropriate shapes for further slicing into medallions. At no other point during the day does he look so much like a machine. Uniform pieces of identical-looking portions fall away from his knife like industrially sliced bread. Lined up in the tray, they are the same size, weight, and height. He’s almost apologetic about the huge pile of perfectly good tuna left on the board, rejected for its size rather than its quality. After trimming, it’s probably costing the restaurant about twenty-five dollars a pound.

“Hard to balance perfect—and waste,” he admits.

Nine fifteen, and Justo unloads an appalling heap of monkfish into the sink.

Monkfish are one of the slimiest, ugliest creatures you’ll find in the sea. They are also wonderfully tasty—once you slip off the slippery, membrane-like skin and trim away the pink and red.

“This knife only for monkfish,” says Justo, producing a long blade that might once have been a standard chef ’s knife but which has been, over the years, ground down into a thin, serpentine, almost double-teardrop edge. Once the monkfish meat is cut away from the bone, one loin at a time, he grabs the tail ends and runs the flexible blade down the body, pulling skin away. With a strange, flicking motion, he shaves off any pink or red.

The quiet in the room is noticeable—and I ask him if he ever listens to music while he works.

He shakes his head vigorously. “For me—I like to concentrate.” He says the distraction of music might cause him to cut himself, an outcome not so terrible for him, he suggests—but bad for the product: “I don’t want to get blood on the fish. I don’t play around. I work fast because I work relaxed. I got nothing else on my mind.”