We are rescuing fish. Giorgio Locatelli, his head chef Federico Sali and I are at the back of the trawler, elbow-deep in slime and scales, picking among the discards from the just-hauled net. We work fast: fish are dying here! A cascade of the unsellable and undersized – dogfish, baby sole and plaice, shad and whiting – is flying off the back of the boat into the water. Things the Italians can see good uses for – a lone scallop, a few ink-stained cuttlefish, a big red crab – go in a fish box. "We could have a fantastic meal with this lot right now," says Giorgio. "If only we'd brought a pan."
The squadrons of gulls feasting in our wake show how useless the rescue efforts were: only the dogfish, shark-like things as long as a forearm, are escaping the stabbing yellow beaks.
Giorgio, the Michelin-starred apostle of the New Italian restaurant movement, has come to the south Cornish port of Looe to see where and how the fish he serves at his Marylebone restaurant are caught. "Telling the story of where the fish come from is so important. It adds to the value of the fish for the customer, it gets tips for the waiters and helps us and the fishermen make our living," he says. The trip has been an eye-opener, literally, with a 4am start in the dawn glimmer of what will turn out to be the hottest day of the year so far. Now it's 9.30am and we're sorting through the contents of a net dragged for three hours along the seabed just west of the eroded lollipop that is the Eddystone lighthouse.
"It's shocking how much has to go back," says Giorgio. "And all the delicate fish are dead. We must find something to do about it." But what would you do, we wonder. Set up a quayside bouillabaisse factory? Out of the haul, perhaps enough to fill a wheelie bin, a good 20% turned out to be unusable, too small or just lacking in a market. What was sellable amounted to not very much – 10 kilos of lemon sole, about the same of plaice, and whiting, a few John Dory and four monkfish tails. You could see from Neil Murray's face that it wasn't going to pay his bills.
Neil is the owner-skipper of Our Boy Andrew, a snub-nosed 10-metre trawler coloured more by seagull droppings and rust than anything else. He explains in his mild-mannered way that his form of trawling is quite efficient, in terms of discards. Other fisheries, like, say, the trawling for Atlantic prawn, can throw away 80% of what comes up in their nets. Any trawling system will catch unneeded fish. But, working on a small boat in waters he has known all his life, Neil can target species that are outside the quota system, and that he knows there's a market for. So he's able to keep waste to a minimum, not least because he has the time and patience to sell a variety of different species.
Some of those we sampled the night before. Giorgio and Federico took over the prep area of a local seafood supplier, Jefferson's, and set about showing what they do to Looe fish that can turn them into £25 dishes at Locanda Locatelli. Neil, his wife Sheryll, and other fish-trade locals came along: they were most impressed initially by the sight of two large Italians turning out dinner for nine on a Russell Hobbs counter-top two-ring burner with a very dodgy oven. The fact that a Michelin-starred chef was peeling his own potatoes made less of a mark. Sheryll is immune to celebrity glamour, having just spent her first week at Westminster as the new Conservative MP for south-east Cornwall. "A month ago I was a doctor's receptionist," she said. "Today I was judging a dog show." It was years of campaigning for fishermen's rights that set her on the path to becoming a councillor and then an MP; the fishing vote helped her take the seat on one of the biggest swings in the country.
While the Italians cooked we set up one of the factory workbenches on the quay, and borrowed some chairs from a pub. What followed was surely the most remarkable feast Looe harbour has ever seen. First Giorgio and Federico gave us a salad of local squid, rocket and celery. The fish they cut into bishop's copes, scored into diamonds, and gently fried in garlic and chilli: the Murrays said they had never eaten anything like it. The cooks were pleased: "We're Italians. That's what we do: feed people."
They sat to eat and drink with us, then disappeared briefly to finish and serve up a gorgeous spicy sauce of melting red mullet fillet, black Taggiasche olives, tomato and parsley. This was all jumbled into garganelli pasta. "Olives and fish – there's something unlikely, something from north and south, but they really complement each other," said Giorgio as he seasoned the dish. This turned out to be Neil Murray's favourite – even though, as Sheryll confessed, they do not often eat fish. The only thing the Murrays are really keen on is crab: Neil boils the ones that come up in his nets, and puts them in the freezer.
Giorgio took them up on this, gently, as we ate: "It's weird, the English – being on an island, but not having a great culture of fish – you let so much that's good – the sea bass, the shellfish – go abroad." We all acknowledge this to be the case – most of the fishermen I know in the west of Scotland would not dream of eating a lobster, or a mackerel. Are there any Cornish fisherman's recipes – other than fish pie – that are still practised? No one can think of one.
The spring sky was turning at last to a huge dark velvet as the main event arrived: great slabs of Cornish turbot cooked according to a Neapolitan fisherman's recipe – all'acqua pazza, "crazy water". Putting the ingredients – huge green olives, potatoes, tomatoes, passata, lemon and parsley into the broth, Giorgio explains: "These are what the fishermen can take to sea, and the water is salty because they would use sea water – then simply bake the fish in the sauce on a stove." You wonder if these sort of skills were ever in the gamut of a Cornish fisherman's abilities: but the tender, aromatic fish works beautifully, and we all drink a lot of chilled Chianti with it, the red wine suiting the meaty flavour of the turbot. "That was absolutely extraordinary," said Sheryll, proud for the fishermen she has championed.
After the blowout on the quayside it's unsurprising that we're a little subdued at dawn on the boat. We're in awe too of Neil's energy and the unending labour of running a one-man trawler: that he's alone appals us, given all the whirring fly-wheels and wires of the deck machinery. Neil explains that, though this boat once had three crew, you can't now find anyone who wants to work a small boat and share the small profits. But the risks of going alone are terribly obvious; Neil is missing part of one foot from an accident with a winch and a hawser. "I wear a lifejacket and I take my time," he says, going aft to hitch a huge plate of steel – the trawl door – to the taut trawl line.
"We've forgotten how to work like this," says Giorgio in admiration. Cooks are necessarily team players and Neil's long solitary hours set him thinking. A boat, 15 miles offshore on a glassy calm sea, is a good place for doing that.
As we talk the sun turns into a great golden plate over the Channel. We've dropped the nets for the second three-hour trawl. Giorgio watches Neil at the wheel, following the onscreen chart carefully to ensure the trawl doesn't snag the many marked obstructions and wrecks on the seabed. Hitting an obstacle would end the trip, and destroy £1,000 of uninsurable gear.
"You can't play at fishing," says Neil. "You've got to go out and earn money." Our Boy Andrew takes to the sea in all possible weather conditions, up to a near gale – doing about 250 days at sea a year. Neil and Giorgio settle over mugs of coffee into a discussion of what the Locatelli restaurants can take from the Looe boats and their fish dealer, Jefferson's. Already Federico – who is opening a restaurant next month in Pimlico on the site of the old L'Incontro – and Giorgio have discussed using more of the little red gurnard that come up in the trawl. "They are a delicious fish, and we waste it by only using it for stocks and soups." Federico wants to make better use of the undervalued lemon sole. "Why does it have to be always Dover sole? These are beautiful," he says, turning one of the orange-spotted flatfish in his hands, "and the taste is super."
At Locanda Locatelli, fish from Looe are turned into entrées ranging from £25-£29. The price amazed the Murrays, but they agreed that if you can sell fish at those rates, everyone will be better off. And so will the fish stocks. "If you can make a living out of small boats, then you won't do the damage to the stocks, because you don't do so many days at sea," says Neil. "The big boys can take a month's quota in a day."
Many of Looe's fishermen are members of Seafish's Responsible Fishing Scheme: from the conversations on the boat and the quayside, you believe that they are deeply serious about taking all the measures – from reducing by-catch to preventing pollution – necessary to keep the Cornish stocks healthy "Everyone's going on about sustainability," says Neil. "Of course we're trying not to self-destruct."
But is there a living for him? As we steam back into harbour in mid-afternoon, we are all uncomfortably aware that the catch was not great. The 10 kilos each of whiting, plaice and lemon sole we've caught in 11 hours, plus the odd monkfish, red gurnard and cuttlefish, will sell at tonight's market for not much over £150. That is little more than the fuel bill for the day. "It's so tough," says Giorgio. "He says he can make a living if he catches £200 to £300-worth, but what happens if he's ill? Or something breaks?"
One resolution that comes out of the trip is to get "the boys", waiters and chefs, on to the boats. "They were jealous that we were going," says Federico. "Yeah – they should see this," agrees Giorgio. "If they can tell the story of the fish, that is good. We have to be passionate about where our ingredients come from because that adds to its value to the customer. And that comes back in what we pay to the fisherman."
Neil Murray waves the Italians off. He likes them and their desire to work on deck and he enjoys the fishing, even on a poor day. "Some blokes have been asking, 'Now your wife's got a good job, you'll be stopping the fishing?' But no. No way. Once you're into it, it's a job to get out. At least now, when she says, 'Boat! You're always on that bloody boat!' I can say, 'London! You're always in that bloody London.' We'll get by."
Federico, who has cooked with Giorgio for 10 years, tells me the skipper and the chef have more than a little in common. "You can see he just loves it. Like Giorgio, he just wants to be in the kitchen: he doesn't want to go away, he doesn't go home. It's their life. They couldn't be without it."
