GONE FISHING.(Esca's David Pasternack )

A poll that I recently conducted among several of David Pasternack's friends and colleagues yielded a nearly unanimous result. The question was: if Dave were a fish, what kind would he be? The answer was: a tuna. One respondent, Artie Hoernig, a commercial fisherman who also operates a retail fish market and restaurant in Island Park, New York, was more specific. "Absolutely a bluefin tuna," he said, referring to a species that I'd heard Pasternack characterize as "like a freight train swimming in the ocean." A minority opinion from his father, Mel ("striped bass--wild, big, good fighter"), dovetailed with Dave's own measured self-appraisal: "Half tuna, half striper, I guess. Tuna for the thrill of the chase, the hunt. I love to catch a tuna. And striped bass is the king of the fish inshore. It's our native fish, and I grew up catching 'em, you know." He went on, "Basically, I've fished my whole life. I started fishing with my father when I was about five, in Jamaica Bay, off of Floyd Bennett Field, in Brooklyn. Snapper, bluefish, blowfish, flounder. I fished regularly with a guy named Captain Lou. I always fished with older guys. It was, like, somebody would introduce me and they'd take me under their wing. People don't necessarily do that anymore, which is too bad, because that's how you learn--'You're tying it that way? No, you tie it that way.' If you wanna catch a lot of fish, you've gotta take an aggressive approach. And what's the point of fishing if you don't wanna catch 'em?"

Pasternack is the chef and co-creator of Esca, a five-year-old fish restaurant on West Forty-third Street, in Manhattan. His recipes are unaffectedly refined, and he defines his culinary creativity in elliptical, prosaic terms: "It's passion, plus knowing when something needs a little something"--the emblem of a cook, or, for that matter, any artist who knows what to put in and what to leave out. A focussed, sensible fellow, he understands the fish business better than just about anyone, in ways intuitive, visceral, and pragmatic. Before dawn one spring morning at the Fulton Fish Market, as we were admiring a machete-wielding Ecuadorean who, with the celerity of a Jedi, was quartering and trimming a mattress-sized yellowfin tuna, Pasternack noticed a neatly pressed silver-haired gent standing nearby. He said to me softly, "A good old-fashioned 'made' guy. Nice guy. But he's notorious. The market was run by 'em for years, until they passed the RICO laws and then these guys were supposed to be banned. I'm surprised to see him here, even though he owns the business. And if you print the name of the business I'll have no glass left in my windows."

Local climate and geography have surprisingly little bearing upon the experience of eating in New York. The foods most closely identified with the city at street level--pizza, pastrami, pretzel, dim sum, falafel--all made their way here on immigrant tides. And the past decade has witnessed an exoticism that often seems more than a little forced. When a phenomenon like Jean-Georges Vongerichten creates an empire in Manhattan, his ambition--which presumes, of course, that a critical mass of people will ante up the equivalent of a mortgage payment for a meal--reflects a high-wire determination to move far beyond his Alsatian roots. (French-Thai fusion! Malay-Thai street food!) Pasternack happens to be Jewish and Esca happens to be resolutely Italian (if unlike any other Italian restaurant in the city). Whatever. Compared with New York's other celebrated chefs, he has stayed unusually close to home; Esca is, among other things, the direct consequence of his years of experience with a rod and reel. Pasternack lives in Long Beach and, for a while, had a habit of schlepping to Esca, on the Long Island Rail Road, plastic garbage bags containing fish that he'd caught the previous day. "But I'd be exhausted by the time I made the walk from Penn Station," he said. So he persuaded his wife, Donna Peltz, to make deliveries in their 1988 Toyota sedan, which she did until two years ago, when he decided that he could justify investing in a truck. No other restaurant in the city--not now and presumably not ever--offers year-round wild game that has been personally bagged by the chef.

Before Esca ("bait," in Italian), Pasternack worked for two decades in a succession of mostly French-themed New York restaurants, bistros, and brasseries, and before that he attended culinary school at Johnson & Wales, in Providence, Rhode Island. During his year and a half in Providence, he drove every weekend to his home town, Rockville Centre, a Nassau County suburb only a few miles inland (or only a madeleine-like sea breeze) from the South Shore of Long Island. Then, after he found work and began living in Manhattan, he stayed connected to the old neighborhood by renting a room or an apartment close to the beach. As often as he could manage, he spent his days off fishing, in the bays and inlets and in the wide-open Atlantic, from the Rockaways to Montauk Point. He took stripers, tuna, flounder, fluke, sea bass, porgies, cod, weakfish, bluefish, mackerel, the inadvertent shark--in his concise inventory, "whatever swam." Though there's no mistaking Pasternack for a literary type, spending time with him got me thinking about the way a chef's evolution can mirror that of a novelist. In the same way that a fiction writer can rely upon the dictum "write about what you know," Pasternack, as much as a New York-born-and-bred chef can, has thrived by cooking best what he knows best.

In the differentiation between executive chefs, celebrity chefs, and working chefs, Pasternack is plainly in his element in the third category. He doesn't have a cell phone or respond to e-mail, but he's easy to get hold of. His office, in effect, is the same spot in the kitchen where he cuts fish, orders supplies, conceives menus, plates food, and supervises his staff. He's at Esca five, sometimes six days a week, typically from 10 a.m. to 11 p.m. Though he rents a pied-a-terre on the East Side, most nights he takes the train home to Long Beach, where he and Donna live with their year-old daughter, Ruby, in a red brick and rose stucco bungalow with a detached garage. My first glimpse inside the garage was a moment of recognition: suspended from the rafters were two punching bags. Days when Pasternack is neither working nor fishing, he likes to ride his bicycle along the Long Beach boardwalk--it extends nearly two and a half miles--and then spend a half hour thumping the heavy bags. On or off the job, whether he's giving instructions in Spanglish to a fish cleaner ("Antonio, you're gonna take this abajo and this abajo and you're gonna keep 'em separado, O.K.?") or butchering a side of veal or setting the hook in a fish that's on the ...