Backstory: The cook has no beef with fish

On the banks of the mighty Parana River is an Argentine rarity – a fish restaurant.

By Richard O'Mara | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor

from the February 12, 2007 edition

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ARROYO LEYES, ARGENTINA - We are pressed by Herefords, surrounded by Holsteins, and from the shade beneath the roof of rushes and straw, we see Black Anguses grazing on the island across the wide arroyo. We are in Santa Fe Province, Argentina's cow country.

So where's the beef?

Well, out there on the hoof. In here, fish is the dish, and has been for the 40-odd years since Nidia Concepcion Centurion Uleriche collected the recipes from people who lived out on the island, the gauchos and others who worked the great estancias, and who ate beef when they could afford it, but also took their food from the waters around them. She and her husband opened a fish restaurant and named it after the knuckle of land jutting into the arroyo, La Vuelta del Pirata, the place of the pirate, once a depot for smugglers bringing contraband down from Paraguay.

One must live in Argentina awhile to appreciate the audacity of the Uleriche family. Fish is not common to Argentines. For most of them it's meat – meat from the cow here at the country's geographical center, meat from the goat in the Andean northwest, meat from the sheep down in Patagonia.

Argentina, with one of the longest coastlines in the world, spurns the sea, culinarily speaking. The fish of the South Atlantic are harvested by ships of other countries. Little of their catch comes ashore.

"We use only autochthonous fish," says Carlos Uleriche. He's the son of the founders and he runs this restaurant. "We cook the fish of the river."

And such a river it is. The Parana, second only to the Amazon, drains much of the South American continent. It is a river sea: That is what its name means in the Tupi language. It runs nearly 2,500 miles from its headwaters in Brazil and is so large in many place that one cannot easily define its dimensions, or tell where one bank stands with relation to the other, or even see the other side. Here, near the city of Santa Fe, the provincial capital, it unfolds into an immense water world, a green archipelago formed by a vast tangle of needle-thin streams, wide secondary rivers like the Colastine and Salado, small and large lakes, painted brown or silver by the sun and clouds, a riot of curving branches and tributaries, immense lagoons like Setubal and Rodeo. This maze of flowing water creates and erases islands, such as the Island of the Lioness that faces Arroyo Leyes.

The fish that live in this river are of Amazonian proportions – fish like the surubi and dorado, and a multitude of other species, most with Indian names. There are ray fish in the Parana that weigh hundreds of pounds. At one time you could sit in this restaurant and between courses watch these fish being brought up out of the river, each requiring a man with a wheelbarrow to deliver it to the kitchen.

Those days are gone, Mr. Uleriche says. The populations of the big fish have diminished. The Parana is overfished. Uleriche, who now gets his stock farther upriver, defines this inconvenience with one word. "Globalization," he says, "has encouraged large fishing companies to catch and export the smaller fish of the river, the sabalo in particular, to Brazil, South Africa." He's not sure where else or what they do with it.

The sabalo, important prey for larger fish, is on Uleriche's menu. He serves it grilled. We had just shaken hands, and that common gesture seemed so familiar. Didn't I shake hands with Carlos 32 years ago? Yes, but that was his father, husband to the late Nidia Concepcion, mother of the lean 37-year-old man who stood before me, who told me about the great flood in 1983, the dark year when his mother died and the family was driven from Arroyo Leyes.

"Has the menu changed?" I asked.

He must have sensed apprehension. His head moved slowly from side to side. He smiled. "Not really," he said, though he admitted that the dorado was missing. The fightingest fish in the river draws anglers from all over the world, and is now a prohibited catch for much of the year.

"Let's get to it," I said, and we did. Without fuss, ceremony, or even bothering to order, the panorama of Uleriche's kitchen, the fruit of his hot grill and caldrons of boiling oil, unfolded as two efficient waitresses started to deliver the nine courses, the way they always had.

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Pirates of the Parana: Children while away the austral summer along the pier at La Vuelta del Pirata restaurant.  LUIS CETRARO/SPECIAL TO THE CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR