On a cold, windy February morning in Shinnecock Bay on the South Fork of Long Island, New York, Ricky Sea Smoke was clamming from the back of his 24-foot boat. The angler, whose real name is Rick Stevens, deftly sorted haul after haul as they were tossed into the sorting rack.
Among the usual small necks and cherry pits were delicacies that would make chefs swoon: sweet, plump razor clams; vermillion-fleshed red clams; and delicate limpets (also known as slipper snails) with their inimitable saline and buttery flavor. Depending on the season, anglers like Mr. Stevens can bring in even more treasures, including scallops, squid, blue crabs, striped bass, mackerel and skate.
But almost none of them are available locally.
Instead, at restaurants in nearby East Hampton you’ll find pasta topped with Manila clams from the West Coast and shrimp cocktail with red shrimp from Argentina. At Long Island fish counters, imported salmon fillets shine more profusely than local mackerel and black sea bass.
Just a year ago, Mr. Stevens would have thrown those pristine clams and limpets into the sea. “Nobody wanted them,” he said.
The most popular parts of this catch (smallnecks, cherry pits, black sea bass) were trucked to distributors at Hunts Point Wholesale Market in the Bronx, then shipped for processing (often overseas) and They sold all over the world. Perhaps a week or more later, an even smaller, much less fresh portion could return to Long Island stores and restaurants. (Or so one hopes. What is labeled as Long Island seafood can come from a number of places. Seafood from large merchants like those in Hunts Point are notoriously difficult to track down.)
This shockingly inefficient path seems like it should be an aberration, but it’s standard in the United States, where seafood is routinely trucked hundreds of miles to centralized distributors, changing hands four or five times before ending up in a warehouse. fish counter or local restaurant. in much worse conditions for daily travel.
But late last year, Stevens found a solution by sending his clams to Dock to Dish, one of a growing number of small businesses across the country (including suppliers to restaurants, grocery stores, farmers markets and community-supported fisheries). who are dedicated to helping fishing communities sell their catch directly to local markets.
For chefs and home cooks, this means finding truly fresh local wild seafood is getting a little easier, at least for anyone willing to wade through the onslaught of imported farmed salmon to find it.
Dock to Dish is committed to purchasing whatever seafood fishing boats bring in, limpets and all, and then selling it directly to nearby customers, often within 24 to 48 hours. Chefs at New York City restaurants, including ILIS, M. Wells and Houseman, offer local specialties such as exceptionally fresh king red shrimp and red clams.
“We want to wage war on branzino and Chilean bass,” said KC Boyle, who owns Dock to Dish along with seven Montauk fishing families. “We have flounder and black sea bass,” he said, “which are infinitely better and more sustainable.”
Shoppers at fish markets like Mermaid’s Garden in Brooklyn can purchase sustainable, easy-to-cook fillets, such as hake and golden tilefish. And by cutting out the middlemen, fishermen get more money (an average of about 20 percent more) for their catch, which sustains their community.
“Every year we lose more fishing families because of the economy,” Boyle said. “The children feel like they have to leave because they can’t make a living.”
Between 65 and 80 percent of seafood consumed in the United States is imported, while the country exports much of its seafood (worth about $5 billion in 2023), Joshua said. Stoll, associate professor of marine policy at the University of Maine and founder of Local Catch Network. Shipping seafood overseas diverts a significant portion of profits from fishing communities that desperately need it.
All of this means that the supply chains needed to support local seafood products have long been neglected. But there are people working to rebuild them. And thanks to their work, finding local seafood is getting easier. The Local Catch Network website, which supports community seafood systems, allows consumers to search for local sources. And even some large retailers like Whole Foods Market have started programs in coastal areas, where they buy a portion of their seafood directly from fishing boats without going through middlemen.
In New Orleans, Porgy’s Seafood Market purchases all of its seafood (to sell at its retail counter and serve at an adjacent restaurant) from local fishing boats. In a town surrounded by water, Porgy’s is one of the only stores dedicated to buying directly from local fishermen.
Porgy’s commitment to local fishing is inherent in its name itself. Although snapper are abundant and sweet tasting, they are small and difficult to fillet, so most fishing boats consider them unmarketable.
“There are a lot of great fish that are underutilized because customers aren’t familiar with them, like blackfin tuna and rainbow runner,” said Dana Honn, founder of Porgy’s. “But the fishermen know that we will take everything they have.”
For those wary of unfamiliar fish, the restaurant’s deep fryer comes in handy, said Marcus Jacobs, co-owner. “People will try anything with a po’ boy,” he said.
However, while that may work for restaurants, getting home cooks to try something new is another matter entirely.
At Mermaid’s Garden, which sources its seafood from domestic small-boat fisheries, persuading customers to choose lesser-known species, such as pompano and snapper, is a daily challenge, said Bianca Piccillo, owner of the store in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn. with her husband, Mark Usewicz.
“People are already afraid to cook fish at home, so they don’t want to deviate from the recipe,” Usewicz said.
After being in business for a decade, the couple has educated their customers, steering them away, for example, from farmed salmon (which they don’t even sell) to locally farmed rainbow trout, a more sustainable substitute.
“It would be much easier to sell farmed salmon and we would be financially rewarded for it,” Piccillo said. “But I wouldn’t eat it and I’m not going to sell something I wouldn’t eat.”
Finding reliable sources took several years for Piccillo and Usewicz, and can be even more difficult for a restaurant just starting out, even one as trendy as Place des Fêtes in nearby Clinton Hill.
“We didn’t want to rely on distributors, so we spent a lot of time banging our heads against the wall, asking people where to get things,” said chef and co-owner Nico Russell.
Due to its small size and flexible menu, the restaurant is able to personally sell extremely fresh seafood that is delicious but traditionally overlooked, such as mackerel and skate.
Like many upscale New York restaurants, Place des Fêtes sources much of its fish from small traders who work outside the mainstream, like Sue Buxton of Day Boat Fresh in Stonington, Maine.
Buxton has supplied chefs like Jean-Georges Vongerichten and Thomas Keller for more than 25 years, buying crabs, scallops and lobsters directly from local fishing boats and shipping them to restaurants overnight. For decades, Day Boat Fresh was one of the few options for chefs across the country who wanted this type of rarefied seafood. But, working largely alone, Buxton could only supply a few dozen chefs, and even they had to know someone to put on her list. Home cooks looking for the same quality had nowhere to turn.
A lot has changed since then. Ms Buxton recently expanded by starting Buxton Boats Home Edition, which she sells directly to the public.
Togue Brawn, which also sells fresh Maine seafood directly to consumers through two companies, Dayboat Blue and Downeast Dayboat, compares the growing demand to the growth of the farm-to-table movement.
Thirty years ago, you had to ask a lot of questions if you wanted to know where your vegetables came from, he said. Menus now regularly include farming partners.