3 
FISH
The chosen bait with which to troll for salmon in the frigid waters of the northern Haida Gwaii is the indigenous herring. And so at a fishing camp like The Clubhouse, the premier Langara Island outpost of the West Coast Fishing Club, each morning when you pack up your boat at the docks for a run to the fishing grounds, you are allotted a cooler full of the oily fish. And these herring are not alive but very much dead, the ice in their veins laced with mysterious preservatives that help keep them looking fresh, firm, and perky even as they endure the posthumous indignity of being dragged about under water at speed with a pair of hooks shoved through them.
Chef David Hawksworth, of the eponymous Hawksworth Restaurant at the Rosewood Hotel Georgia, in Vancouver, showed me the routine on my first day out on the water. To begin, you plunge your already chilly hand into the cooler of fish-bloodtinged slush and extract one ice-cold, slippery herring. Next, using a sharp knife, you decapitate it—but on an angle sufficiently sharp as to induce spin as the little fish is pulled through the water. Use the point of your knife to extract its frozen guts, and then mount the modified fish onto a pair of hooks. At this point a personal flourish may enter into the equation. Some anglers have a way of threading the length of leader between the hooks inside the belly of the herring rather than wrapping it around the outside, with a view to added stealth. Others cut a fresh wedge into the fish where its anus used to be, to improve water flow through the belly cavity. One Haida dockworker had a unique and absurdly complicated technique that after much fanfare appeared to make his herring spin twice as fast as anyone else’s—but what with the preference of the salmon being unknown, none of us even bothered to attempt to replicate it.
“We give these salmon too much credit anyway,” announced one of my fishing partners, Mark Davidson, a long-time Vancouver sommelier who now works for Wine Australia, shrugging off the demonstration as we pulled away in the boat. “All this fussing about how your herring spins is ridiculous. When they’re in a biting mood, they’ll take anything you put in front of them.”
I was with him on this. And our basic approach proved perfectly acceptable to the big fish whenever they were in a suicidal mood. Better yet, it kept the manhandling routine with the slimy, cold herring down to a minimum. This was important not just for the obvious reasons but because of a story I had been told on my first day at camp. The tale was doubtlessly exaggerated in the telling, but no matter. Apparently, a few years previous, some unilingual Japanese had come to stay there, and whether as a product of rampant bravado—or just chauvinism trumping their lack of experience—they had declined a local fishing guide so that they could instead fish the tricky waters all by themselves. So off they went into the unknown, and after a time, they got peckish.
Alas, as they spoke no English they had missed a few important points in their pre-fishing briefing. For example, they did not know that even in the most insalubrious conditions, the highly civilized West Coast Fishing Club regularly dispatches crew in a Zodiac to hunt down chilly fishermen and offer them sustenance. Seriously: out there amidst the driving rain and the churning surf, they pull up alongside your fishing boat and lob various packages and snacks your way, all of them plucked directly from the Zodiac’s electrically warmed storage bins. Say, a hot croissant packed full of scrambled eggs and bacon, a Thermos of hot coffee or tea, you name it.
Not knowing that, and lost and hungry, and clueless as to what to do with their fishing rods, the Japanese had taken matters into their own hands. So when the Zodiac driver approached their boat, the first thing he noticed was that none of them were fishing. And then as he pulled up alongside, worried, he saw that all the Japanese were seated cross-legged on the floor, gathered in a tight circle around their bait cooler, having a nibble. Now every time I selected a slimy herring from our cooler, I pictured those unfortunate Japanese tucking in for a snack, and could not stop myself from trying to imagine their conversation.
“Does anyone have any wasabi? This B.C. sushi is awful.”
“It really stinks!”
“Shut up and eat. You must keep up your strength so that we can get out of here.”
Thinking about it made me giggle, but it also made me feel mildly seasick. I persevered, and having baited another set of hooks, I clipped the line to the downrigger (a softball-sized metal ball that drags the bait down low, to where the salmon lurk and feed), let it go, clamped the rod into the trolling bracket, set the drag, and kicked back to watch tip and line. You might think that when a muscular chinook salmon has decided to make your herring its next snack, the good news would be telegraphed up from the depths loud and clear—that your rod would take a sudden and violent bow. But when trolling it cannot, for it is already bent back on itself nearly double from the drag of your trailing tackle and downrigger. The strike of a good fish can get easily lost in the mix. You must watch for signs very closely.
In fact you need to watch with all the vigilance of those circling eagles and hawks that now and then swoop low to take away discarded bait—or a tired salmon, just released and too exhausted and stunned to dive to safety. You need to focus without letting your eyes stray to the rugged beauty of the coastline, to the pillars of rock that rise from the water so dramatically, with their odd caps of moss and clinging, scraggly trees. Because if you look away too long you’ll never know if you just missed your bait being discreetly stripped from your line by a cunning coho, leaving you trolling a useless, empty pair of hooks. If that were so, it would be time to reel in and reload. But what if you guessed wrong, your bait was still there, and at that very moment the largest, fiercest tyee to ever work the coast was sizing it up, gnashing his cruel, hard piscine lips and all set to pounce—only to back off, confused, because you reeled in too soon?
Some are a lot better at this fishing game than others. When I first visited Langara, in July 2011, I was a novice at trolling for Pacific salmon—although a couple of decades earlier, on the opposite coast, I used to go fly-fishing with my father for their Atlantic brethren, and between us we reeled in quite a few. Hawksworth, meanwhile, was an old hand. He had been fishing at the West Coast Fishing Club for a decade. And he was enjoying his seventh consecutive season there as the featured guest chef for their annual culinary retreat, a one-of-a-kind fishing trip wherein each evening features a gastronomic tasting menu helped along by a bottle-toting sommelier (usually the aforementioned Mark Davidson). Hawksworth certainly knew the ropes, and all that practice had obviously helped. As the affable, long-time Clubhouse manager Terry Cowan confided to me over a malt whisky late one night, Hawksworth had been a lousy fishermen when he first came to them. But somewhere along the learning journey he had acquired a new fishing-camp nickname: Killer.
It did not take long out on the water with Hawksworth to clock that his fishing reflexes were quick and his focus intense. One tap on a rod and he was on it as if putting out a grease fire in his restaurant kitchen in the middle of a dinner rush. In a flash he would have the rod out of its bracket, yank it hard to rip the line from its clamp on the downrigger down below, reel in fast to take back the fresh slack in the line, whip the rod back hard to set the hook in the fish, and resume reeling as furiously as he could. The fish tend to submit to this at first, but when they catch a first glimpse of the boat, their mood changes, and they turn around fast, flashing a long, broad silvery flank in the sunlight before running off again the other way against the drag. Play them right and they will tire and submit to the net. Play it wrong and they will shake the unbarbed hook from their mouth and return unharmed to the depths. Hawksworth won far more of these battles than he lost, and invariably, it was not long before another fish was in the boat, pinned down by netting as Hawksworth clobbered him on the head with a steel pipe.
Killer Hawksworth is in his forties now, but despite a working life spent sleeping too little and working excessive hours in the pallor-inducing setting of fluorescent-lit kitchens, he maintains boyish looks and could easily pass for younger. Some find him shy, even aloof; I would instead describe him as reticent. All the same, when out on the water, consumed by the relaxing distraction of good fishing, wry asides escaped him unchecked. Speaking of life at home with his four-year-old son, he said to me: “It’s like having a member of al Qaeda living in your house—you have to be on guard all the time. Anything can happen. He has no remorse.” One day we watched an angler on a boat nearby release a chinook that must have weighed over sixty pounds. As it disappeared back into the depths, Hawksworth said, “Now he’s telling his friends, ‘You wouldn’t believe what just happened to me … I was abducted by aliens … ’”
Another time he inadvertently revealed that once you have been trained to look at things from the perspective of a chef, it never quite goes away. “Do you know how much food that is?” he complained to me as we watched another angler pose for pictures with a forty-five-pounder he had elected to kill rather than to release. “They’ll never eat that. That’s one hundred meals.” As we fished on, I worked through the math. From forty-five pounds, take away head, fins, and guts, get twenty-five pounds of salmon fillets. At a restaurant-standard five to six ounces per serving, I arrived at about eighty portions. Close enough.
One day the fishing was uncharacteristically slow and I got skunked—the only salmon I hooked got scoffed by a sea lion before I could reel him home. Come late afternoon, Hawksworth was in the Clubhouse kitchen working on the evening’s fivecourse dinner when word came down that a guide on a boat being tossed about on the distant stormy waters off the northern tip of the island had just radioed in that he had picked up numerous sonar images of large bait balls in the waters between the reefs that straddle the Langara lighthouse. Clusters of bait—like herring—always attract larger fish to feed on them, and the word was that the salmon were there, and biting enthusiastically. Dinner for forty was still a couple of hours off. And what are sous-chefs for, anyway? Hawksworth laid down his chef’s knife, I downed my whisky, and we made a dash for it.
We arrived at the lighthouse half an hour later in waters so rough that we could not stand up in the boat without holding on to something. Two other boats from our camp were fishing alongside us, but the waves were surging so high that we could seldom see them until they were all but on top of us. Then Hawksworth would fire the throttle and move off, with our lines trailing us in the chaos. After fifteen minutes we had two small chinook in the boat and called it a day. The ride back to camp was insane. We were airborne a good part of the time, as if riding on a Sea-Doo rather than in a nineteen-foot Boston Whaler. The outboards screamed as they churned air instead of water, and the ride was far too rough to enable sitting down. We rode standing—just—to better absorb the shocks of the ride, and clutched the poles to either side of the windscreen for balance.
“Has a chef ever put you in this much danger?” Hawksworth yelled over the din as we crashed from wave to wave through the surging, freezing spray.
“Sure!” I yelled back. “Fugu!”
He looked impressed. So impressed that I had to come clean and admit that I had never in fact eaten poisonous puffer fish, and was having him on. Back on shore, Hawksworth finished putting his meal together in a frenzy. It had a theme, and he called it “Bistro Classics.” But it was clearly a very English bistro that he had in mind, and it had one foot in the past, the other in the present. We would begin with a truffled velouté of English peas, and follow with chinook tartare, a summer vegetable salad with Salt Spring Island goat’s cheese, and finally a beef Wellington with puréed shallot red wine jus. Even his Italian dessert—vanilla panna cotta—got an English lift with some champagne-poached strawberries.
Hawksworth’s guest-chef gig also involved cooking demonstrations. He did two while I was there, and unsurprisingly both involved fish, and both handily demonstrated his new, more accessible and casual approach to cooking. The finesse with which he made his name in Canada, at the Vancouver restaurant West, was still much in evidence, and so too the highly developed sense of colours on the plate. But the compositions were less subtle and more playful. For his first dish he lightly poached skinless fillets of chinook salmon belly in olive oil, then placed them over a South Asian–flavoured cucumber salad, against the stark black backdrop of a smear of squid-ink-dyed purée of eggplant. The second was a Japanese-Mexican-Italian concoction lifted from the opening menu at Hawksworth Restaurant: a carpaccio of tuna dressed with yuzu and soy and draped over lime-spiked avocado purée, sprinkled with batonettes of jicama and cucumber for crunch.
“Maybe I should try that with salmon instead?” Hawksworth said to me, when he was done.
It would work, of course. But to my taste dishes conceived with tuna in mind never taste as good when executed with salmon. The proposed change was as much about taste and texture as it was about sustainable, local sourcing. If you consult the Ocean Wise website, where marine biologists from the Vancouver Aquarium rate fish on their appropriateness for the plate based on the health of their stocks, the methods by which they are fished, and so on, you will find that chinook from northern B.C. get an unqualified recommendation for consumption, while yellowfin tuna comes with caveats. They are generally fine to eat if they are caught by pole fishing or trolling—unless they come from the Indian Ocean. And one is also supposed to avoid those harvested by long line or purse seine nets. Alas, all yellowfin look pretty much the same on ice.
The name of the centuries-old Spanish dish of escabèche—inspiration for the Belgian escavèche, the Italian escabecio, and the North African scabetche, among others—is thought to be derived from the Spanish word cabeza, which means “head.” So it is not surprising that the culinary process behind it begins with summary decapitation—just like preparing herring for trolling bait. Then you fillet the fish, lightly sear them, and marinate them for a day or so in a fragrant and mildly spicy brew rich in aromatics and heavily spiked with vinegar. If you were a sensible chef with one foot planted solidly in the Old World and an eye keenly fixed on the trends of the New, you might well one day turn your mind to applying this ancient technique to one of its most typical victims, the common sardine, but in the process, seek to give it a modern twist. And that was exactly what was sitting on a plate in front of me, as prepared by executive chef Frank Pabst of the Blue Water Café in Vancouver: a pair of sardine fillets, properly browned but barely cooked through, tangy with marinade, warm to the touch, and draped prettily—as prettily as a headless sardine can manage—over a bed of lightly pickled onion, with a little purée of sweet apple to one side and crème fraîche laced with caviar dabbed all around.
Chef’s thinking struck me as just right. For his light touch—undercooked sardine, mild marinade—amounted to an acknowledgment that a dish conceived as a method of preservation in those terrible days before the refrigerator, or even the icebox, still features flavours that work well together, as long as you turn their intensity down a level, from cover-up to enhancement. Second, adding a lofty ingredient like caviar to pretty much anything is generally a good idea. And doing so with a pedestrian peasant dish like escabèche was very much attuned to the culinary thinking of the times (think Daniel Boulud’s truffle-and-foie-gras-enhanced hamburger or, closer to home, Martin Picard’s foie-gras-topped poutine). The dish was further helped by the fact that it was early November, and so prime season for sardines. (Eat them raw at a Japanese restaurant in the fall and you cannot fail to notice the thick layer of fat that their summer diet piles on beneath the skin for the long winter ahead, just as we would do, if we were not beset with the fear and hope that potential sex partners were watching.) The mild pickling in a red vinegar marinade handily offset that oiliness, the lightly pickled onion cozies up with it just as comfortably as happens in a jar of herring, and the caviar elevated the sum of the parts from bistro cooking to unpretentious fine dining.
The escabèche in question was the opening salvo in a menu conceived to celebrate a selection of abundant but admittedly unglamorous fish-next-door that Pabst, in a culinary nod to seafood sustainability and the environment at large, terms his “unsung heroes.” Item number two was pan-seared mackerel, served crispyskin side up on a bed of beet brunoise, dressed up with elderberry sauce and shavings of a surprisingly potent early-winter truffle. Next came mild-cured herring—skinned, cross-hatched on the grill, and placed atop sliced fingerling potatoes and onions, with a warm cream sauce laced with a little more caviar. Then there was white sturgeon, pan-roasted and then balanced on two shoots of salsify, with a smudge of cauliflower purée, sautéed chanterelles, stewed lentils, and a sprinkling of julienned red cabbage. The fish was succulent and meaty, and a good reminder that even fish-farm by-product can be a lovely thing. (It is caviar that justifies the sturgeon farm; the fish that create it are little more than a necessary inconvenience.) Last came sablefish, its marinade of sake and brown sugar bronzed from the grill, with an enticingly buttery potato purée to one side and an array of slender French green beans to the other, with a drizzle of rich veal jus all around.
Pabst likes robust flavours. His cooking strikes big, deep notes. These dishes all reference a youth spent immersed in the flavours of Germany and Belgium. His sardines with crème fraîche, lightly seasoned with coriander seed, make me think of the flavour profile of that classic German street food, herring on a bun. And his semi-cured grilled mackerel on fingerling potatoes brought to mind that classic French bistro dish salade hareng-pommes à l’huile. I put this to the chef when he came over to say hello and goodnight as I was on my way out the door.
“I can’t help it,” Pabst said, with a smile and a shrug. “That’s the only way my fingers know how to dance!”
It was a good line but not quite true. For it was also evident that he enjoys playing out a bit of class war on the plate (pedestrian sardines and herring both plated with caviar, mackerel with truffles, and so on). On other nights he has prepared dishes that were purely Asian in nature (say, jellyfish seasoned with toasted sesame seeds, sesame oil, soy sauce, chili flakes, pink peppercorns, and julienned green onion). Another time he applied the Spanish accent of chopped chorizo to some sautéed flying squid, and then made a culinary excursion to Tunisia to fetch some harissa for some local Humboldt squid. Pabst’s fingers may be in their comfort zone in central Europe, but they are convincingly multilingual.
The Blue Water Café anchors a five-block strip of restaurants, bars, and cafés clustered along Hamilton Street that, over the past decade, have together managed to make old Yaletown new again. Young and trendy, anyway. Step inside the Blue Water and settle in at the bar at happy hour and you will see that the restaurant was conceived with the philosophy that sustenance includes entertainment. There are always at least four bartenders rushing this way and that, working blenders, filling ice buckets, and performing an occasional percussive dance with their cocktail shakers, in a well-orchestrated assault on the impressive local thirst. Farther down the bar the grey-haired Yoshihiro Tabo works a less frenetic but equally productive pace, turning out platter after platter of sushi, sashimi, and nigiri rolls. And directly opposite, across the 170-seat dining room, which is filling fast, Pabst can be found directing his front kitchen crew of seven, already pumping out plates in a steady rhythm. And if, like the contemporary sports fan or concertgoer, you prefer your action enlarged and once removed on the JumboTron instead of live and real, flat-screen televisions mounted around the room run closed-circuit broadcasts from each workstation.
Since the day it opened in 2003, the Blue Water has been a perennial favourite in the seafood category in all of the Vancouver restaurant rankings. Even today it remains entrenched at the top, whether you consult the establishment press (Vancouver Magazine), the alternative media (Georgia Straight), or even the mouthpiece of the more-expensive-the-better Americans (Robb Report). And this has been accomplished above all else by virtue of culinary merit in a place of a scale that dictates you should least expect it. Add the seats on the terrace, the private rooms, and the bar to those in the main dining room and the tally can reach three hundred diners at one seating. There is no confusing the place with a seafood shrine like Éric Ripert’s three-Michelin-starred Le Bernardin in Manhattan, but the Blue Water aims for a broader significance. In short, they are constantly trying to solve the riddle of how to properly select seafood on the basis of its sustainability without letting all this environmental due diligence get in the way of a good nosh-up.
All good contemporary chefs and restaurateurs must wrestle with the same conundrum. But smaller, chef-driven haute cuisine restaurants have a far easier job of it. They attract a trusting clientele, eager to learn and be led someplace new. That experience is part of what the customer is paying for. So too is the idea that the expensive day-boat Chatham cod or Ipswich clams they are eating taste better and more exclusive only when they inconveniently run out mid-service. More than one old Montreal waiter has told me a story—regrettably impossible to confirm—that back in the eighties, in the early days of the wonderful and ridiculously expensive seafood emporium Milos, on Avenue du Parc, that they used to pretend to run out of things all the time, and then whip the customers into an ordering frenzy by having a waiter yell out from the kitchen door, “The truck from Fulton’s finally here! We’ve got more swordfish!” They would capitalize on the ensuing excitement by swiftly selling out a big fish that had been sitting on ice in the kitchen all day.
Times change, and big, smooth-running showpiece restaurants like Blue Water are not supposed to run out of things nowadays. Their varied selection of irreproachably fresh seafood is expected to be immune to the vagaries of supply. And in B.C., where conservationism runs relatively strong, and they are all too aware of what happened to the east coast fisheries for Atlantic cod, bluefin tuna, Atlantic salmon, and skate—to name just a few—customers also expect that every wild fish on the menu be conscientiously sourced and the cultivated ones be responsibly farmed. These guidelines are tricky in a place where the occasionally myopic local outlook has it that even farmed fish such as nice, nutritious, and inexpensive Atlantic salmon is a strike against the planet rather than for it. So out of necessity, the Blue Water plays it safe: every type of fish, shellfish, and mollusc that makes an appearance on its long menus—from the raw bar to the sushi bar to the main dining room—comes with a stamp of approval for consumption from Ocean Wise, the conservation program launched by the Vancouver Aquarium, or Seafood Watch, the Monterey Aquarium’s program that inspired it, or Sea Choice, or some other similarly respected watchdog.
Commendable as that is, it does not always make for the most exciting dining choices. Start your dinner there with oysters and you will find that although the list is twenty-strong, all of them are farmed and most are west coast sourced. Over at the sushi bar, Tabo is licensed in Japan to slice and serve the highly poisonous fugu, but hereabouts he focuses his lovely knifework and restrained inventiveness on benign local species like salmon and tuna, along with a few predictable farmed imports like hamachi. Pabst, meanwhile, works largely with local Dungeness crab, trap-caught (never dredged) prawns, ahi, and albacore (but never bluefin or even yellowfin) tuna, local halibut, local scallops, all varieties of wild local salmon, farmed (inland) white sturgeon, and of course wild sablefish (aka Alaskan black cod) from B.C. and Alaska.
The last is so popular now, and its market penetration so entrenched across North America, that it is difficult to remember that it was largely unheard of here not so long ago. In early 2001, I was in Boston to attend a James Beard dinner with Susur Lee at Ken Oringer’s excellent restaurant Clio, which is in the Eliot Hotel, alongside the Harvard Club on Commonwealth Avenue. The evening before the event, starting around midnight, Oringer and his chefs put on a post-service dinner for all the visiting chefs—such as Lee, Doug Rodriguez, Julian Serrano, and many others. And at about 2 a.m., when we were about halfway through his twenty-five-odd courses, Ming Tsai turned up from his restaurant Blue Ginger, in Wellesley, and announced he had a problem that he needed help with. “I need a new fish,” he said. Blue Ginger Sea Bass had been the number-one-selling item on his menu since the day he opened four years previous. But the signature fish for his signature dish was fast being eaten into extinction; Chilean sea bass that used to be delivered to him in twenty-five-pound fillets were now turning up at ten pounds whole. “We have a duty as chefs not to sell endangered fish,” Tsai told me. The consensus at the table that night was that he should try substituting Alaskan black cod. That dish became so ubiquitous within the next five years that it is almost impossible to imagine how dubious Tsai was. Especially given that the highly original Japanese chef Nobuyuki Matsuhisa—of the twenty-two-restaurant Nobu chain—had introduced miso to black cod a decade earlier. All the same, when Tsai got back to Wellesley he gave it a try. Ten years on it is still on the menu, still a bestseller, and stocks of black cod remain sound.
Things do not usually work out so well. It is easy to think of other fish like the Chilean sea bass whose popularity on the plate made them so scarce in the ocean that chefs stopped putting them on their menus altogether (invariably attempting to get good media coverage out of the decision by cloaking in freshly acquired environmental principles their refusal to pay the elevated, scarcitydriven prices). The beleaguered swordfish and bluefin tuna come readily to mind. And the last time I visited Michael Stadtländer at his Eigensinn Farm restaurant, in Singhampton, Ontario, no sooner had the champion of locavorism given me a tour of his trout pond than he disconsolately confided how much he missed cooking skate. The list of goners goes on and on. But it is harder to come up with even a handful of fish that emerged from nowhere to capture the culinary imagination quite so quickly and enduringly as the Alaskan black cod—and survived their new popularity to boot. Most trendy, freshly discovered fish turn out to be a flash in the pan. Tasmania’s Petuna Seafoods, and the exceptional ocean trout they farm in the clean, brackish waters of the Southern Ocean, got off to a roaring start in Toronto in 2006. Then just as quickly it fell off the map, probably because locavores could not stand to eat a fish with a better air-miles account than they had. Keith Froggett, at Scaramouche, introduced me that same year to an excellent farmed Atlantic cod produced by Johnson Seafarms, off Scotland’s Shetland Isles, but despite the quality of the product, the operation went dramatically bankrupt in 2008.
Other neglected curiosities such as escolar come and go, but few enjoy enduring popularity in the North American skillet.
Which is why I so like that at a mainstream, popular, and risk-averse restaurant like Blue Water, Pabst fields an entire menu of “unsung” options for those who cannot take another plate of salmon or tuna. And that furthermore, the fish featured there—from jellyfish to giant Pacific octopus, mackerel, flying squid, and sea urchin to the common sardine—are often in even better shape as a species than his mainstream offerings. Even the pleasant caviar with which he enhances some of those dishes is harvested from farm-raised shortnose sturgeon in faraway New Brunswick. That “unsung” menu may never account for more than five percent of total covers, but it plays a disproportionate role in diversifying the public taste, is good for generating media coverage, and is offered up without any objectionable environmental proselytizing. You can enjoy your meal instead of feeling worthy and dutiful and having to eat it off reclaimed wood like, say, at Eigensinn Farm. Or having to read about carbon footprints in the margin of the menu, like at others restaurants sadly too numerous to list.
Intriguingly, Pabst hails from Bavaria, where they eat wild boar for breakfast and fish usually means smoked eel or rollmops and is just a snack. He is the first chef in his family. His career began when as a teenager he took a job at a modest bistro just across the Belgian border and there, despite the simple oeuvre (chicken, sausages, frites), discovered both interest and promise. Moving up, after his German military service was complete, he decamped to Aachen, resting place of Charlemagne, to serve an apprenticeship under Christof Lang at his elegant French restaurant,
Cured Herring Tartare with Apple, Onion, and Coriander
Chef Frank Pabst
Serves 4
1/4 cup (60 mL) kosher salt
2 tbsp (30 mL) granulated sugar
4 B.C. herring, frozen, then thawed, scaled, and filleted*
1 Granny Smith apple, peeled and diced
1/4 cup (60 mL) minced red onion
2 tbsp (30 mL) sour cream
1 tbsp (15 mL) yogurt
1 tbsp (15 mL) mayonnaise
Juice of 1 lemon
1 tbsp (15 mL) coriander seeds, toasted and crushed
1 tbsp (15 mL) minced dill
1 tbsp (15 mL) minced chives
Salt and pepper
1 Granny Smith apple, julienned
1 large bunch young watercress, picked over
4 slices pumpernickel
Combine the salt and sugar with 2 cups (500 mL) cold water and bring to a boil, stirring until solids are completely dissolved. Chill the brine thoroughly. Place herring fillets in a snug container, cover with the brine, and transfer to the refrigerator for 1 hour.
Place the fillets flesh side down on a dry kitchen towel and with a very sharp knife scrape away as much of their skin as possible. Then cut the fillets into 1/4-inch (5 mm) dice and transfer to a large bowl. Add the diced apple, onion, sour cream, yogurt, mayonnaise, lemon juice, coriander, dill, and chives; mix well. Season with salt and pepper, mix again, and adjust seasonings.
Toss together the julienned apple and watercress. Divide the salad among 4 chilled plates, mound the tartare on top of the salad, and serve with a piece of pumpernickel on the side.
*It is advisable to freeze the herring to kill any parasites that might be present. You can save yourself some trouble by simply purchasing frozen fish or even frozen fillets.
La Becasse, where the cuisine was classically inspired but mildly inventive, with a solid nod to the more robust German appetite (think seared foie gras with a salad of warm potatoes and young garlic). French cuisine inspired Pabst, so when the apprenticeship was done, he headed for the south of France, where he served under such culinary luminaries as Dominique Le Stanc (when he had two Michelin stars at Chantecler, in the Hôtel Negresco in Nice), Serge Philippin (Restaurant de Bacon, one Michelin star, Antibes), Daniel Ettlinger (Le Diamant Rose, Colle-sur-Loup), and finally Jacques Chibois (La Bastide Saint-Antoine, two Michelin stars, Grasse). Each of these coastal or near-coastal restaurants specializes in the preparation of fish. The path was set.
After four years in the south of France, Pabst quit Europe for North America, heading first to San Francisco, where he knocked on doors from Chez Panisse on down, to no avail. The noted Alsatian chef Hubert Keller (Fleur de Lys) was the only patron to even ask Pabst for his CV, and in the end he did not offer a job, just some advice on which work papers he was missing. In 1994 Pabst finally ended up with a gig at the old Chartwell restaurant in the Four Seasons Vancouver. Two years later, he moved to join chef Rob Feenie at Lumière in those early, exciting days when it was first making the transition to tasting-menu-only format. Feenie made him sous-chef, and then chef de cuisine, and then in 1999, Pabst set out with front-of-house business partner John Blakely to open Bistro Pastis. It promptly collected the gold award for best new restaurant in the annual Vancouver Magazine restaurant awards. But the partnership with Blakely was not destined to last. With children on the horizon, Pabst next moved to the relative economic security of Jack Evrensel’s Top Table restaurant group, whose number includes an enviable list of the best restaurants in B.C.: West and CinCin, in Vancouver, and Araxi, in Whistler.
Pabst has been executive chef at the Blue Water Café since 2003. It was his first big restaurant, and he admits that he initially found its scale daunting. So he simplified his ideas a little until he found a comfort zone where he could once again add complexity to his plates. A decade has passed. And with that, as he concluded his story over a lunch of hand-cut noodles at the Sha Lin Noodle House on West Broadway, he laid down his chopsticks and we set off for his car. For Pabst had offered to take me to see his main fish supplier, Albion Fisheries, on Great Northern Way. There are no small day-boat fish markets in Vancouver; the best fish comes from too far afield. Big restaurants all order from big suppliers like this one.
“Albion is such a big supplier. They’re interested in sustainability because they want to sell and keep selling,” Pabst said on the drive there. As he explained, the process of selecting fish responsibly has been made relatively easy, courtesy of the readily accessible research from organizations like Ocean Wise. “Whenever we see a new product, we just give them a call. But it’s not like there are that many new products out there, and it’s not like it used to be. Now, when a supplier brings me something new, they want me to know exactly where it comes from, and how they get it, so along with the sample, they hand me a CD-ROM.”
The scale of Albion was shocking. The tour began in a corporate boardroom where we were equipped with hairnets, hard hats, white coats, and a twenty-seven-page product list. And then via a circuitous route across the order floor, we made our way downstairs to the processing plant, entering through the shellfish section, where tubs of Atlantic lobsters and blue crabs were stacked twenty or thirty feet high. Next we came across a series of rooms where elderly Chinese workers sat hunched over tables shelling freshly boiled shrimp. Then we passed stacked boxes of ahi tuna, mako shark, and escolar, that virtual tub of butter with fins (the fish so oily that its consumption is banned in some countries, its portion size limited in others, for fear of its lubricating effect on the digestive system). Next we came upon towers of boxes of black cod and Arctic char. Everything was frozen or cooked or both.
Our last stop, beyond an ice-encased doorway, was a freezer room that stood four storeys tall. Here was the previous summer’s salmon run—sockeye, chinook, and coho, filleted, skinned, and crusted with ice. The storage boxes were stacked to the ceiling and went off in every which direction, like a deep-freeze version of the government warehouse in the closing sequence of Raiders of the Lost Ark. Reading about quota numbers of thousand of tonnes of fish in the newspaper is one thing; seeing some large part of it stacked up neatly in boxes is quite another. The scale of the kill is awesome. And it made me think that whatever Ocean Wise says, I had better take my son Max fishing out in the Queen Charlottes sooner rather than later. I would have preferred to take him fly-fishing on the east coast like my father did with me—but of course, those salmon are gone.