Grilled Fish With Salsetta Alla Minuta @ Andrea's
Chef Andrea Apuzzo crows maybe a bit too much about the fact that his fish comes swimming to the door, that he checks the eyes and gills, fillets the fish himself, etc. In fact, all of that is true. Beyond that, no restaurant buys more variety of fresh fish than Andrea does. He prepares it many different ways, quite a few of which are along these lines: the fish is baked or grilled, and moistened with an almost sloshy sauce made from fish stock, fresh herbs, wine, garlic, and perhaps a little tomato. One such sauce--called "salsetta alla minuta"--is the most elemental of these. It really is cooked for about a minute, and the deliberate undercooking gives it a great fresh taste. All of his other variations on that theme are also good, notably the fish basilico or aqua pazza ("crazy water"). The excellence of the fish comes through in all these.