Maybe the fastest way of getting over a fear of a shark swimming up and taking a bite out of you is to take a bite out of a shark first.
Yup, Jaws makes for good eating and has been on menus here for years — although to really sample what can be done with shark, one has to go out of town.
“It’s a lot like swordfish,” says Dave Pasternack, chef of Esca and Barchetta. “It’s tender, it’s meaty . . . I’ve been catching them my whole life and eating them my whole life. When I was a kid I was catching a lot of makos” off the Long Island coast.
In fact, for Restaurant Week, Pasternack put “Squalo alla Siciliana” on the menu at Esca — grilled thresher shark served Sicilian-style, with a thin coat of bread crumbs and a marinated five bean salad on the side.
To get a good Sicilian shark from the source, Pasternack recommends traveling around the coastal towns like Termini Imerese or Licata.
“It’s something great to cook at home — and great to barbecue, because it takes five minutes and it’s done,” says Charlie Marshall, chef and owner of the farm-to-table restaurant called the Marshal, which opened last September in Hell’s Kitchen. Marshall grew up on Lummi Island in Washington, catching small dogfish sharks (which he usually threw back — too small) and mako, which makes a fairly regular appearance on his menu.
“You really want to make sure it’s fresh,” says Marshall. “When you smell it [at the fishmonger] you’ll smell a hint of ammonia — that’s not a bad thing. It has to be completely bled when it’s caught and the ammonia smell is a byproduct of that process. It has to be fully cooked but not overdone, just like swordfish. You can roast it — 10 minutes at 450 degrees for each inch thick your shark is.”
Other NYC menus (particularly a lot of Mediterranean menus) put shark on the menu. If you go out to Telly’s Taverna, a Greek restaurant in Astoria, the fried shark is served in tiny gold disks, with a ring of cartilage in the center. It comes with a side of garlic dip.
This year, New York banned one of the staples of the Chinese food diet: shark fin soup. (A lot of sharks are hunted strictly for the fins, then thrown back in the ocean, and while certain species like mako and dogfish are quite common, others are endangered.) But a traveler to China will not encounter too many problems finding it on menus.
At T’ang Court at the Langham Hotel in Shanghai, for example, the menu does not include a simple shark fin soup — it contains a whole page of different kinds of shark fin soups, and a serving of double-boiled shark’s fin soup with bird’s nest and crab roe goes for 780 yuan (roughly $126).
But shark preparation and consumption can be even more daring.
“I ate shark at the source,” says Andrew Zimmern, host of “Bizarre Foods America.”
“I traveled to Bjarnhofen, a farm run for generations by the same family” in western Iceland. In addition to a shark museum, Bjarnhofen makes hákarl — fermented shark (which nearly caused Gordon Ramsey to retch on an episode of “The F Word.”)
“They have a huge fishing business and make their own hákarl from scratch. I watched the whole process and pigged out on the wretchedly ammoniated fatty spoiled meat.”
Zimmern adds: “I liked it with butter and dark bread!”
Is shark versatile enough to make it onto a dessert menu?
Well, Cold Stone Creamery is making a (sort of) good faith effort. In honor of Shark Week, the ice cream maker has put on its menu, for a limited time, a combo called “Shark Week Frenzy” — consisting of blue “sweet cream” ice cream, crumbled graham crackers and gummy sharks. It’s tasty — but it doesn’t taste much like swordfish.