From drunken Italian fishermen, a seafood main to call your own.
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Turns out the best way to make fish is also the easiest — a lesson celebrated chef Paul Bartolotta learned many years ago off the coast of Tuscany.

“We boarded the fishing boat late, maybe midnight,” says Bartolotta, talking about the long-ago night when he fell in love with Italian fisherman’s stew. Bartolotta was a young Milwaukee native apprenticing in Italy. One of his mentors had invited him out with a few Italian salts — fishermen Bartolotta remembers as wearing “wool caps, coats…missing teeth, unshaven.” The drinking started with coffee and Sambuca; by sunrise, when they hauled in the nets, Bartolotta was halfway drunk.

Once the catch was on ice, the crew scaled and gutted a few extra and rinsed them in ocean water. “Then we went into the captain’s kitchen, and he sautéed onion, garlic, and chiles and threw in some crushed tomatoes and herbs, white wine, and all that fish cut up in chunks, still on the bone,” Bartolotta says. “He boiled spaghetti and put it in bowls and then ladled on a big helping of stew. There we were on this boat at sunup, eating seafood stew. I think we drank nine bottles of wine.”

Fast-forward 26 years and Bartolotta is one of the top Italian chefs in the U.S., winner of two James Beard Awards, and part owner of Bartolotta, Ristorante di Mare, a palatial AAA Four Diamond Award–winning seafood joint at the Wynn hotel and casino in Las Vegas. Sometimes flying in more than a ton of Mediterranean seafood a week — “all of it is untouched by man, not gutted or cleaned, so no bacteria has ever touched my product” — Bartolotta offers 40 different species every night, from octopus to langoustine, cuttlefish to amberjack.

But that stew, half-remembered from that wine-soaked journey, still stands out.

“It didn’t matter what fish was in it, and whether you ladled it over spaghetti,” Bartolotta says. “It wasn’t a pasta dish. It was just a seafood stew and a loaf of bread the captain kept in the engine room, which smelled like diesel but was still warm and moist.”

How do you replicate a dish without a recipe? Bartolotta gives us the gist. The fishing trip is on you.

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The Knife

A lot of wholesale-level pros use cheap fillet knives and sharpen them until they vanish; top-tier chefs tend to own a stash of Japanese knives. The rest of us should own a Zwilling J.A. Henckels Twin Cuisine seven-inch fillet knife. Its high-carbon blade flexes perfectly as you slide it along the spine, separating a fillet in one clean cut ($130; amazon.com).

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Bartolotta’s Cheat Sheet

The key is finding a good fishmonger. How? Ask to smell a piece of fish before you buy it, and if it smells like fish, go elsewhere — it should smell like the sea. Stick with any white-fleshed fish with a little structural integrity: monk, hake, pollack, dorade, branzino, red rockfish, even plaice or flounder. Pick up a few shrimp or langoustines, too. Once you’re ready, here’s the drill: To make four servings, (1) sauté a single sliced onion in a few tablespoons of olive oil, toss in a pinch of red chile flakes and a couple of cloves of garlic, (2) add a pound or two of good Italian canned tomatoes (preferably marked San Marzano, specifying the variety), and pour in a half-cup or so of dry white wine, like pinot grigio. (3) Add some chopped fresh parsley, thyme, or oregano, and let it simmer a few minutes before adding two pounds of fish cut into rough, two-inch chunks. “Stir a little, but don’t break the fish,” says Bartolotta. (4) Once the fish flakes under pressure from a fork, it’s done. It won’t take more than four to five minutes, depending on how thick the fish is.

To complete the stew, make a world-class version of garlic bread by toasting a thick slice of country-style bread. Remove it from the toaster, peel and halve a garlic clove, and then rub the bread gently with the clove’s cut end, swiping the garlic back and forth. Then drizzle the best olive oil you can afford onto the slice and season with a pinch of salt. Now pour the stew right on top.

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This article first appeared in the April 2010 issue of Men’s Journal.