Cooking With Gas
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I was driving my car to the Shelter Island ferry during the dying hours of a summertime Sunday when my phone lit up. “We’ll take care of breakfast, you get lunch.”
Well, shit.
The text was from Tom Colicchio, a five-time James Beard award-winning chef and the head judge on TV’s Top Chef who is as much known for his brusque and intimidating personality as he is for his impeccable culinary resume. The sun was setting in a sleepy and unfamiliar part of the world for me, and we had a 2 a.m. ship out time the following day to go tuna fishing in the chef’s new Regulator 31 off of Montauk. I could see the lights of an unassuming grocery store blinking in the middle distance, and my GPS confirmed that, at this hour, it was the only show in town. It was a little like being asked to find a baseball bat for Ted Williams at a hardware store.
Inside the grocery, I asked the woman behind the counter for a couple of Italian subs. She looked at me quizzically, and then cobbled together a few forlorn-looking sandwiches (I think it might have been her first day on the job.) With the sandwiches in a bag, I made my way to the beer section and picked up a twelver of Modelo, figuring the lager might help loosen up the chef’s tongue.
The following morning, I miraculously peeled myself out of bed at 1 a.m. and drove to Strong’s Marina on Long Island’s North Fork. As I pulled into the desolate parking lot, I saw a truck cruise past me kicking up a cloud of dust. Well, that’s gotta be him.
Colicchio is a household name, at least in my house. With two small children, my wife and I get about one hour every night to ourselves. And more often than not, we veg out and watch Top Chef, Colicchio’s ever-popular television show, now filming its 21st season.
So as I stepped out of my car and he stepped from his, it was a bit of a trippy moment for me, particularly on three hours of sleep. “Hi, I’m Tom,” he said cordially, shaking my hand. Then he glanced down at the case of Modelos I was holding. “Oh, we definitely won’t be drinking those.”
“You told me to bring lunch,” I retorted. Colicchio didn’t seem to hear me as he grabbed gear from the truck, but I did catch a snort of laughter from somewhere in the darkness. Kerry Heffernan stepped out of the shadows and into the glow of a streetlight and introduced himself. Heffernan is a heavyweight chef himself, and is in charge of cuisine at Grand Banks, the iconic restaurant situated on a historic cod schooner docked in Downtown Manhattan. Tall and affable, he is the perfect foil to Colicchio and the two friends fish together often.
We loaded our gear and bags onto the Regulator, making the only sounds in those quiet morning hours. It felt illicit—most things happening in parking lots at two in the morning do—as we packed the 31’s ample stowage space with duffel after duffel.
Soon Colicchio revved the twin 425-horsepower Yamahas, and we cast lines and were off. I made my way to the bow seating and sat next to the fourth member of our fishing party just as surreal moment number two unfolded. I had spent the weekend in the Hamptons with my good friend from childhood, the actor Gavin Bailey, whom I hadn’t seen in years. Years back, Gavin had a small but recurrent part on the hit CBS series The Good Wife. We had parted ways that morning, which is why I was shocked when I looked to my right and thought he was sitting right next to me.
In actuality, it was another actor by the name of Josh Charles, who played the lead in The Good Wife, and who looks so similar to my friend that the showrunners didn’t like having them in the same scene together (at least according to Bailey). I took a moment to chew over the absurdity. The wind picked up as the Regulator flew off into the abyssal embrace of the nighttime air.
With the noise of an open boat trucking along at 28 knots (roughly half the 31’s blistering top end) conversation became impossible. I walked to the cockpit and found a bean bag chair to get some rest, and marveled at the slime-green phosphorescent jellies flung into the air to either side of the transom as the vessel sluiced persistently through the salt.
We cruised for 40 miles into the fishing grounds off Montauk where mid-sized yellowfin tuna had been biting. Just as we arrived the sun peeked its bald pate over the horizon and the steel-gray Atlantic shimmered and danced, streaked with an orange glow. The last of the nighttime gray faded into a brilliant blue late-July sky as Colicchio relinquished the helm to Heffernan and made his way efficiently around the boat, readying rods and clearing space to work.
“We’re going to follow the whales,” he said to me.
“What whales?”
“Just wait.”
A few minutes later a massive humpback came up for air not 50 feet off our bow. The leviathan blew thick steam from its blowhole and, refracted in the low trajectory of the early-morning light, a rainbow appeared in the animal’s spray, hovering briefly over the surface before sliding back into the sea from whence it came. It was enough to make an atheist feel silly.
More whales soon showed up by the dozens. Pods of dolphins raced by our boat grating the water’s surface like a block of cheese. Gulls shouted and fussed overhead as we readied our lines to further our role in this relentless melt of life.
Colicchio was on it. He shut off the engines to let us drift. Known for a quiet intensity both in the kitchen and on the screen, he trained his piercing blue eyes intently on the fishfinder while the rest of us basked freeheartedly in the awe-inspiring natural beauty.
“There have to be fish here,” he said quietly. That was our cue to drop our jigs in the water. And while any reasonable person, observing the surrounding maelstrom, would have agreed with him, there were in fact, not fish there.
We bashed the bottom for a half hour or so, then moved spots chasing the whales, but again came up with nothing. We repeated this pattern a few times over before the energy expenditure of constant reeling began to gnaw at our stomachs.
“Anybody else hungry?” asked Heffernan, as he opened a cooler and produced tinfoil-wrapped eggy, cheesy sandwiches with fresh ingredients chopped from his Sag Harbor garden. “I have to apologize,” said one of New York City’s most respected chefs, “I think I oversalted them.” It was like Margot Robbie apologizing for not wearing her lipstick.
We went back to jigging and if the fish weren’t biting, at least the wit was. The three friends launched a volley of mob movie quotes. At points Heffernan and Colicchio were literally conversing in nothing but lines from Goodfellas.
“I thought you said I was alright, Spider.”
“Well you ain’t alright, Spider.”
Luckily, I was able to keep up with the code, because like Colicchio, I’m from New Jersey, where quoting Goodfellas is a rite of passage. He later told me with palpable regret in his voice that they almost filmed the final scene of Sopranos at one of his restaurants, but the producers decided last minute that they wanted to film it somewhere less fancy.
The chef grew up in the blue-collar port city of Elizabeth as part of a large Italian family. It informs nearly everything about him, from a legendary work ethic that had him in the kitchen 18 hours a day as a young man, to his political activism, to his love of simple, red-sauce Italian. For all his accolades, for all his travels around the world, and his mastery of and respect for vaunted French cooking techniques, he told me if he was given the chance to choose a final meal it would be Sunday gravy. (That’s meat and tomato sauce, for you non New Jerseyans.)
Finally, sometime during mid-morning, Heffernan’s rod dipped violently and his reel began to sing. A 50-pound yellowfin tuna was on the other end of it fighting with athletic but ultimately doomed grace. As the exhausted fish came to our starboard-side gunwale, Colicchio leapt forth with gaff in hand and punched the hook straight through the tuna, wielding its thrashing body up onto the deck in one smooth haul. This species notoriously bleeds a lot, and deep crimson spouted from the fish’s gills covering the deck in a film. “Tom,” began Charles, eying the carnage. “The way you gaffed that fish, man, maybe you’re the real Jersey gangster.”
As we moved to the next spot, I dug my suspect Italian subs out of the cooler and joined Colicchio at the helm, handing him one. I wanted to talk to him about his new Regulator—not his first from the builder. “What do you like about this boat?” I asked. The response came in an uncharacteristic deluge.
“Well, it’s built like a tank, for starters,” he began. “And it’s faster and more powerful than my last boat, but the ride is still very comfortable. The new electronics are amazing, XM Weather, XM Services; the captain’s seats are great, I’m used to having just a bench seat. And I like the forward seating because it’s more user-friendly for my family. The outriggers are great. They are Gemlux and you can run dredges off of them. If I had to change anything about it, I would have added a tower though.”
It occurred to me that I had struck on a real passion.
“And how’s the sandwich?”
Colicchio chewed heavily on the bread and swallowed before answering. “S’good.”
For the phalanx of lore surrounding the chef’s personality, I found him to be impeccably polite, even warm, and definitely funny. I asked him why all the entrants on his show—young chefs anointed into legitimacy with a victory on the season-long cooking competition—seem so terrified of him. “I suppose it’s because I’m the one with the expertise,” he said. “They know I know what I’m looking at.”
The parallels between the chef’s professional acumen and his boating style are plain if you’re feeling poetic. In the kitchen, Colicchio is known for producing spare, clean plates that rely heavily on the ingredients. A perfectly seared piece of fresh tuna, a vegetable at the height of its crispness. He doesn’t get lost in fancy sauces or a mélange of seasoning, much like his Regulator, what you see is what you get. And what you get is very, very good.
The water transforms Colicchio into something more primal, and something more complete, the way the alchemy of a heated pan turns raw protein into food. And out there floating just beyond the horizon, the chef has everything he needs to be nourished.
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