Taking his cut at Insta fame
Fish cutter reels in fans by slicing up big fish, with some big personality
BOSTON— At 5 a.m. on a windy winter morning, in a cold, harshly lit warehouse in Boston’s seaport district, Baracat Paiva stared down at the 200pound bigeye tuna before him and reached for his knives.
Paiva, as tall and imposing as the dead fish before him, dipped his cloth-gloved hand in warm water, to keep his fingers from numbing. He deftly sharpened an 8-inch knife against a water stone before plunging it into the silver-scaled fish and sawing off the collar, using another, bigger knife to lop off the bone. A few bits of tuna sprayed off his knife and stuck to his hooded sweatshirt and flatbrimmed baseball cap, but he didn’t seem to notice.
Then, in a single motion, he slid the knife down the length of the fish on one side, then made another slice on the other. After a few more strokes, he carefully peeled away the rib cage and splayed open the fish, which split into four neat sections. He picked up one of the fillets, brimming with burgundy-hued flesh, and bounced it around in his arms like a baby. “Beautiful,” he said. Paiva, the highest-volume fish cutter at the popular Boston wholesaler Wulf’s Fish, has become something of a celebrity at a job that normally doesn’t attract much attention.
The videos of his cutting skills that he regularly posts on In- stagram have drawn hundreds of thousands of views, and comments from admirers around the world who are mesmerized by his swift, graceful motions and the sheer size of the fish he breaks down.
Paiva’s bravura personality is big, too. He often adds urgent background music, or shouts out his slogan: “Boom!” Occasionally, he will lick or kiss the fish, or cut out a small piece and eat it — theatrics that have won him comparisons to Salt Bae, the Turkish chef (real name: Nusret Gokce) famed online for playfully salting steaks. Some fans call Paiva “Fillet Bae.”
Many of those followers might be surprised to know that little over a decade ago, Paiva (had never even touched a knife.
Paiva, 37, grew up in Brazil surrounded by seafood; his hometown, Ilheus, is on Brazil’s eastern coastline. But he was most interested in playing soccer. “Eighty per cent of Brazilians are raised with a ball in their hands,” he said.
At age 17, in 1998, Paiva was spotted by a talent scout and invited to become a goalie for Colo Colo de Futebol e Regatas.
But a few years later, in the prime of his career, he cracked his ribs trying to catch a ball, and a doctor told him he couldn’t play soccer anymore. “I was devastated,” Paiva said.
In 2004, his father sent him to Norwich, Connecticut, to live with family friends and get his mind off soccer. Paiva found a job as a dishwasher at Jasper White’s Summer Shack in the nearby Mohegan Sun casino. He worked his way up to shucking oysters. Then one day, his boss threw 100 pounds of bluefish onto the counter and showed him how to break them down into fillets.
The new job became an obsession. He practised constantly. He memorized each motion and cut. He studied the anatomy of countless species.
“Soccer is a skill I was born with,” he said, while fish cutting isn’t innate. “It takes a while to get better. You have to be really involved.”
In 2014, Paiva moved to Boston to work at the seafood wholesaler Georges Bank, which was acquired by Wulf’s two years later.
In early 2017, he posted a video to Instagram of himself breaking down a halibut, and it went viral. Now he is regularly filmed by Cristian Delgado, a fellow fish cutter at Wulf’s, or straps a GoPro camera to his head.
He operates on intuition: He can carve out a 50-pound fillet without using a scale. He knows exactly where to insert his knife to maximize the yield from each fish.
On a typical day, he will break down some 1,000 to 1,300 pounds of seafood.
Paiva’s dexterity with his knives seems almost effortless. It is a rare skill, said Richie Taylor, 68, who has been Wulf’s seafood buyer for more than 40 years. “A lot of people make a cut, then another cut, then another cut, and leave the rib bones in,” he said. Paiva “does everything in a single cut.”
“I literally got infatuated watching his videos,” said Drew Grosse, 35, the chef de cuisine at Little Donkey, a restaurant in Cambridge, Mass., that buys from Wulf’s. “He’s like Rocky Balboa, but he can break down a fluke in three minutes.”
It has been15 years since Paiva last touched a soccer ball, and though his injury has healed, he has no desire to play the sport again. He would prefer to spend the rest of his life cutting fish.
“I was in love, but that love ended,” he said. “I found another passion.”