How The John Dory Oyster Bar sources, prepares seafoodHow The John Dory Oyster Bar sources, prepares seafood

For the past dozen years, April Bloomfield has been delighting New Yorkers with the light-spirited, robust food at an array of restaurants.

A native of Birmingham, England, Bloomfield arrived in New York in 2003 to team up with restaurateur Ken Friedman — the two met through celebrity chef Jamie Oliver — to open The Spotted Pig in February 2004, helping to start a gastropub trend that swept food-forward American cities. The team went on to open The Breslin Bar & Dining room in 2009, The John Dory Oyster Bar in 2011 and Salvation Taco in 2012. Last year they opened Tosca Café in San Francisco.

Bloomfield has won many accolades, including Food & Wine Best New Chef and the James Beard Award for Best Chef in New York in 2014. Two of her restaurants, The Spotted Big and The Breslin, have a Michelin Star.

She recently discussed her strategies for sourcing and preparing fish at The John Dory with Nation’s Restaurant News.

How do you decide what seafood to use at The John Dory?

We do this amazing thing, and we’ve been doing it for a couple of years now. It’s a guy called Sean from Sea to Table. He has a bunch of fishermen who go out, and basically whatever they catch, that’s what the restaurant buys. It’s almost like a CSA [community supported agriculture] for the ocean. We’re not asking for specific fish from a market. They’re actually catching the fish and they dictate to you what they have, and it’s the freshest fish you’ll ever see. It’s delivered to our door within half a day to a day.

Is that where all your seafood comes from?

We get the majority of our fish from them, and it can range from anything from black sea bass to bluefish.

I bet it’s both fun and challenging for you and your cooks to decide what to do with it.

Right. It’s always a challenge to get a mystery bag of fish. They do call in advance, so we do get to plan. It’s fun.

Are there any fish that your customers ever balk at?

They come to the restaurant, hopefully, because we make delicious seafood and fish, so I’m sure they want it. We do tell them about Sea to Table — their philosophy and our philosophy. People are into it.

How would you describe that philosophy?

Be respectful to the ocean. Don’t be wasteful. We use everything. If we get a big fish we’ll dress the head up with some Asian flavors and sell that, and the collar. All that kind of stuff we’ll sell.

And your customers are into that?

Yeah, they love it. We’ll get a couple of large fish in and we’ll just roast [the head] up and that could be for two or three people, and people love digging in to those little nuggets of the cheek and eye.

With the trim from fillets do you make tartares and things like that?

We’ll do a little crudo or something. We do this dish if we get a bonito: We’ll scrape off the bones, and we’ll bake two sheets of carta di musica [paper-thin flatbread], and we’ll smear that bonito that’s mixed with some sesame and chile and a little bit of mayonnaise. And people love it. Those are the best bits, aren’t they — all of those scrapings. We’ll fry bones, too. If the bones are tender enough we’ll just flour them and fry them and put them in a dish. We really do use every part of the fish.

That’s an Asian technique, right? Do you do that in the U.K. at all?

I mean — you do if you’re a chef, but you wouldn’t find battered fish bones in a fish-and-chip shop.

Not yet.

Not yet, but maybe. You just gave me an idea.

The most substantial fish this season

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Do you have a particular type of fish that you like to cook?

I love bluefish, which is in season right now, straight from local waters, when it’s fresh. It’s the most substantial fish you’ll find [this season]. When you get it fresh, it’s very meaty and quite fleshy, but as it gets older it get a little more oily, and I kind of appreciate that, too. I love sardines and mackerel. Bluefish is a bit more like that when it’s been around a little bit longer. Or when the fish come bigger they’re a bit more like that. The smaller fish tend to be a little bit leaner and a bit more delicate in flavor.

It’s really an amazing fish, even more so to catch and take it home and cook it.

Yeah, chef Anita Lo [chef and owner of Annisa in New York City] is an angler, from what I understand.

Yeah, we go out together. We just went out. We didn’t catch any bluefish but we caught a lot of porgie, which is amazing. Obviously we can’t sell it in our restaurants because we caught it ourselves. But porgie’s still a delicious fish, even raw. It’s a little bit fatty.

How do you cook bluefish at the John Dory?

We’ll just lightly pan-fry it and do an escabeche.

Once it gets more oily, do you do a different preparation?

We usually sell out by then. We don’t keep our fish for that long, but bluefish in particular copes really well with brining and smoking. It cuts through that fattiness, a bit like mackerel, really.

How long do you brine it?

You can do a dry brine, just salt overnight — like 12 hours — and that’s usually a sufficient amount of salt to penetrate the fillets. If you’re doing it whole, you’ll have to do it a little longer.
 
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