Freshness off the hook at Fork feast

No one had counted on the fluke. The fluke was a bonus.

The real target was the good-eating black sea bass known to be biting off Atlantic City. They congregate over the old shipwrecks five or six miles offshore - easy, almost-guaranteed pickings, which is important if you've promised the freshest fish dinner in the city.

That was the hook that Fork, the top-rated Old City bistro, used to reel in a charter boat's worth of customers for its $200 all-inclusive Fisherman's Dinner on Saturday evening.

The catch was that the catch-of-the-day was what they'd catch. So returning from the day of deep-sea fishing empty-handed was not an option - although, as Fork's owner Ellen Yin put it, "We're Fork. Of course there's a Plan B."

Still, neither plan quite envisioned what really went down.

Who'd have figured that it would be a big-time Hollywood sound man - taking a break from work on the Jack Nicholson-Reese Witherspoon comedy being shot in Center City - who'd be the unlikely star?

Or that the wife of Fork's storied fishmonger would land the only fish weighty enough to require a net . . . and good-looking enough to inspire a change in the menu?

You can only take precautions. Aboard the 64-foot Capt. Collett when it slipped away from the modest Atlantic City Fishing Center at 10 on the sparkling Saturday morning was "Fork Fishmonger" Tony McCarthy, a sort of Clint Eastwood of the sea, legendary for fishing with poles in both hands, skimming through Barnegat Bay on his Wave Runner.

Sitting second chair: Fork chef Terence Feury, the former top toque at Striped Bass and arguably the finest seafood chef in town, no slouch with a rod himself. He'd lived at the Shore in his student days at Atlantic Community College's Academy of Culinary Arts.

Feury's brother Patrick, head chef at Nectar in Berwyn, had his back. And Yin's boyfriend Wayne Aretz, a "wreck fishing" enthusiast, was fitted out to the gills, a battle-tested fishing machine, from his personal pole to his broad-brimmed, crushable hat.

The paying customers were a bit less practiced - a couple whose sons had given them the trip for their 40th wedding anniversary, a pair of Old City foodies who'd signed up just the morning before, and, among others, the sound man, Carl Fisher, and his colleague, Mitch Dubin, a noted cinematographer also in town for the still-nameless Nicholson feature, whose working title had once been How Do You Know?

Boy, how do you? No one knew what lurked in the deep.