On a recent trip to Monterey, CA, I ate at a local eafood restaurant. I noticed that most of the items on the menue were not native-outside of squid and sand dabs,most was from the east coast. I did manage to find some local scallops (very good), but very expensive and limited in supply. So, why is this? Has the local seafood been overfished? Or is the coast just not conducive to lots of fish (deep offshore waters, limited river estuaries)? At any rate, there seems to be plenty of squid-except I don’t find squid all that flavorful. Anyone notice the same thing?
Being in Houston, I’m not up to speed on their local seafood issue but recall stories a while back that tied some of the problems to the sea otter population which has grown due to the rules protecting it.
On a side note, I really looked forward to the fresh seafood when I moved to Washington. My best fiend, the guy I bought my house from, suggested a few places. One (now closed) restaurant he said was especially good. Every place we went the food was… brown. Everyone had deep-fried cod/deep-fried halibut/deep-fried salmon, deep-fried oysters, deep-fried clams and deep-fried shrimp served with French fries. Oy veh. The fish was better prepared in SoCal! I’m sure there are places here that have non-deep-fried seafood. There was a DopeFest in Seattle at a place that had alder planked salmon. But for the most part if I want non-deep-fried seafood I have to cook it myself. Fortunately excellent fresh seafood is abundant here.
Tuna season doesn’t start until December, and even then tuna in the area has declined. Until 1980, tuna accounted for upwards of 70% of California’s industrial fishing revenue sup[/sup] but no longer. This has led a steep decline in the number of fishing vessels since then. The total number of vessels and fishermen dropped by nearly half by 1998 sup[/sup].
This pdf chart from the California Department of Fish and Game is non-sortable data from 2006.
It looks like the best commercial fishing is for things that aren’t normally found in restaraunts. Sea urchin is big, but that’s all exported to Asia. The anchovie and sardine catches, I suspect, are dwarfed by other regions, and is unlikely to be identified in a restaurant to be of local origin. Spiny lobster just came into season, but they can only be hand-caught by divers.
Squid, as you saw, is still a big part, too.
Man, I’d love me some Pacific Spiny Lobster! So much better than Maine lobster! [drool]
The population has increased, but the total number of seas otters seen in the state is still barely over 3,000 (from a historic low of 50, that’s right, 50). They live close to shore and only really affect the sea urchin industry (that being their primary food source).
I noticed this when I went to McCormick & Schmicks’ seafood place in Sacramento. They had about 40 fish dinners and the menu indicated where each fish was from. Of the 40 items on the regular menu, only 1 was from California… tiger shark from Catalina. I think they had some Sturgeon from Sacramento on a special menu.
All the other items were from the Pacific Northwest, Florida, Ecuador, Alaska, Hawaii, Canada, Costa Rica, and the Eastern Seaboard.
With the huge coastline in California, you’d think I could order from a huge selection of California fish. I guess not.
I remember going to Scott’s in downtown SF in the 1970’s? Did I eat abalone there?
It’s not just California. It can be hard to fine fresh seafood in restaurants in coastal Georgia and Florida as well. For example, on St. Simon’s Island in Florida, when we used to vacation there several years ago, the only place where you could reliably find blue crab was “The Crab Shack” where they served crabs by the dozen or half dozen and gave you pliers and butter and let you have at it.
But mostly, it was king crab, king crab, king crab everywhere. Or sometimes there were crab cakes of no known provenance.
And Florida was something else again. In the Clearwater/Tampa/St. Pete area, it was hard to find local seafood. I blame all the retirees who would rather go to Captain D’s for fried fish sticks because they’re only $3.99, and that’s when they really wanted to go out and splurge. And of course, there’s the matter of all that Florida grouper that isn’t Florida grouper – more like tilapia.
I don’t think there’s a lot of demand for local seafood in restaurants. The people that really care probably just go to local fish markets. Or maybe the Japanese are buying it all.
When I visit my mom in the DC area, I go out in the summer and get soft shell crabs that I hope came from the Chesapeake region. Or I get crabmeat stuffed flounder, and think the crabmeat is from blue crabs caught in the local area, and stuffed into a flounder that was caught locally. And the oysters I eat are from the same region. Or am I being fooled?
I don’t know if you’re being fooled, but there was a thread here on the Dope about some huge percentage of the “red snapper” served in Florida restaurants was another, much less expensive kind of fish, like tilapia. Kinda makes you think …