![]()
Michael Chernow doesn’t want people to step inside Seamore’s, his fish-fixated restaurant on the rim of Little Italy, worrying that they’re about to get a heap of science homework dumped onto the table. “Our goal is not to say: ‘Welcome to Seamore’s School. We’re going to teach you all about sustainable fish,’” said Mr. Chernow, who is also one of the entrepreneurs behind the Meatball Shop chain. But there is a blackboard. Labeled “Daily Landings,” it covers a wall of the restaurant, operating as a shortcut syllabus for anyone who wants to learn not only what fish are being cooked in the kitchen at Seamore’s, but also what species have been deliciously available for human consumption for centuries: dogfish, tilefish, Acadian redfish, porgy, hake, cusk, striped black mullet. “Once they see the board, everybody gets pumped,” Mr. Chernow said. “‘Wow, look at all these fish, and I’ve never tasted them before.’” Over the last decade or so, restaurant diners in this country have become more sophisticated about, and open to, ingredients that used to throw them for a loop: bone marrow, pork belly, sunchokes, orange wine, the ubiquitous kale. But they’ve remained curiously conservative when it comes to seafood. Salmon, tuna, shrimp and cod, much of it endangered and the product of dubious (if not destructive) fishing practices, dominate one restaurant menu after another. That is changing, however. A growing cadre of chefs, restaurateurs and fishmongers in New York and around the country is taking on the mission of selling wild and local fish whose populations are not threatened with extinction — as well as the invasive species that threaten them. And the group has enlisted a special fleet of allies to the cause: the fish themselves. The way these specialists see it, you can lecture diners about the fate of the oceans, or you can open their minds by stuffing some sea robin into a taco or frying up some crevalle jack for a sandwich, and watching their consciousness shift with each bite. “What we’ve been trying to do is to take the familiar and infuse it with unfamiliar species,” said Vinny Milburn, an owner and fishmonger at Greenpoint Fish & Lobster Company in Brooklyn, where you won’t find cod but will encounter lionfish, wild blue catfish and almaco jack. “If we put it in tacos, people will buy it and they’ll say: ‘That’s a great fish. I’ve never heard of it.’” There are fringe benefits for the chefs, too: When an ingredient is less popular, that usually means that it’s less expensive. And figuring out how to conjure up something irresistible out of, say, a bluefish collar helps break cooks out of culinary ruts. “Yeah, it’s a challenge,” the chef Tom Colicchio said. “What do you do with it? I actually like that: It just forces you to be creative.” Anyone who has taken a beach vacation knows that clam shacks have been frying up the local catch for ages. At the fancier end of things, elite chefs like Mr. Colicchio, Dan Barber, Eric Ripert, Dave Pasternack, David Chang and Kerry Heffernan have made a point of letting people know that bluefin tuna is not the only fish in the sea. But lately, the idea of casting a wider net has begun spreading to neighborhood spots, diners and national chains like Slapfish, a growing West Coast enterprise that hopes to open a New York City outpost in 2016. Louis Rozzo, the president of the F. Rozzo & Sons wholesale distributor in New York and a fourth-generation fishmonger, remembers the sort of comments his family used to hear from chefs: “Who’s going to come to an expensive restaurant and order porgy?” Now, porgy, as well as local tilefile and hake, is in high demand. “I sell more porgies now by far than I ever have, because people are interested in using something different,” Mr. Rozzo said. There are many different ways of thinking differently, and locally. At Beachcraft, Mr. Colicchio’s new spot in Miami Beach, the menu makes room for wahoo, cobia, queen snapper, Florida clams and Key West shrimp. Change is not always easy, especially when customers are in vacation-relaxation mode. “It’s hard because you’re in a hotel and people want the usual things,” said Mr. Colicchio, who has resisted suggestions from the owners of the hotel, 1 Hotel South Beach, that he make room on the menu for a safe bet like salmon. At Rose’s Fine Food in Detroit, the traditional Great Lakes fish fry is given its due with the Wild Man Breakfast, which pairs a pan-fried lobe of brook trout with a plate-blanketing blueberry pancake. Lucy de Parry, who owns the diner with a cousin, the chef Molly Mitchell, can’t imagine serving industrially harvested tuna or salmon or cod. “You can’t really eat that stuff anymore,” she said. “It’s destroying the environment.” Sticking to local traditions makes sense in the kitchen, since Rose’s Fine Food is meant to celebrate what is grown and fished around Michigan. “We grew up eating brook trout and bluegill and all these little lake fish that our grandpa would catch,” she said. “They’re just there. We kind of roll with what we’ve got.” Still, many people aren’t even aware that many of these fish exist, or that they are thoroughly edible. Shrimp, salmon and canned tuna alone make up 60 percent of the seafood Americans eat, according to the National Fisheries Institute. (Add the next four species on its list — all usual suspects like tilapia and pollock — and you hit 85 percent.) Even top chefs find themselves making discoveries that alter the way they think about cooking and nature. At N/naka, in Los Angeles, the chef Niki Nakayama dreamed of putting together an explicitly Californian rendition of a Japanese kaiseki menu. “The whole philosophy is about showcasing what is close to us,” she said. Much of the produce wound up coming from her own garden, but as she scouted around for seafood that embodied the region’s essence, she came up short. “I kept hitting dead ends,” she said.
