Restaurants Navigate the Rough Waters Between Sourcing and the Seafood Industry
Photo Caption: New York City's Seamore's serves fish that make sense: Atlantic-caught species that are sometimes uncommon on restaurant menus.
Skift Take
As mounting issues surround seafood traceability and overfishing, sourcing sustainably caught fish and responsibly farmed shellfish is more important (and challenging) than ever for restaurateurs.
The way chef Michael Cimarusti sees it, everyone should be eating vermillion rockfish. Caught in the waters around Santa Barbara, the fish with bright red skin and flaky, flavorful flesh is a great sustainable and wild-caught alternative to farmed branzino, one of the most popular seafood options on menu today. But rockfish isn’t something many customers of his Los Angeles restaurants or fish market are familiar with.
“They’re super delicious, inexpensive, probably less so than branzino, and fully sustainable,” the chef said. “It’s just a pretty little wild fish eating good things and not sadly sitting swimming in a pen eating grains and soy. It’s a win-win. And it’s domestic and keeps American fisherman on the water, another big win.”
Knowing where his fish comes from, and who harvested it and how, has always been a point of pride for Cimarusti at his restaurants, whether it’s at the award-winning Providence, Connie & Ted’s , Il Pesce at Eataly L.A., or C
