By Jacob Richler
Fishing for Dinner
26
CityBites
The best restaurant in Panama floats—and is at present semi-
A leg up: Oriol Serra Nadal and his pata negra; Michael Caballo and Jacob Richler.
permanently moored just off the coast of Isla del Rey, in the Pearl Islands, on a boat named the Pacific Provider. This much was already clear to me as I tucked into some housemade focaccia while sizing up the first course of my inaugural lunch on board. One might have called the dish a new, enriched take on a Caesar salad—but to me the sum of the new parts was something else and something more. The romaine hearts had been split—one half char-grilled, the other left raw and crisp, doubling their impact of taste and texture. The bacon had been supplanted by infinitely superior shards of oven-crisped jamón ibérico. The dressing was fortified with a robust dose of caper. And then there were the enrichments: a handful of warm, seared, plump local scallops, a scattering of intensely flavoured olive oil-preserved cherry tomatoes, and some halved, soft-boiled quails’ eggs. Old notes and new spoke together in enticing harmony.
And then came roast chicken—an exquisite chicken, indulgently fattened at an artisanal Florida farm called Pasture Prime on a poularde-diet of milk (and no, this does not involve a thick straw tightly clenched in a salivating beak, but rather, milk solids mixed into the customary grains). Flesh and skin had been cooked separately, so that neither was compromised by a cooking process better suited to the other. The slowcooked breast and thigh was exceptionally moist and tender, and the accompanying fried skin was as flawlessly crisp as, say, the Pommes Ana that were tucked beneath. The plate was finished with wilted greens and jus naturel. This is highly assured and sophisticated cooking, discreetly executed in the guise of simple concepts. And that to me is almost always the best sort of cuisine that there is. Which brings me to the strange part of this story: I had not come all this way for the food, but rather, for the fishing. Marlin
photo: Tobey Nemeth
Discovering friends and chefs in faraway places