It’s been a cliche for a while (I think from the book, Kitchen Confidential) that you should never order a fish dish on a Monday - it will be almost a week old by then because of how fish deliveries are scheduled.
Still a valid rule or now outdated? I would imagine the supply chain has become more sophisticated since the book was written.
Rather than not ordering that particular dish because it’s a week old, if this were the case I’d use it as a reason not to order anything at all at that restaurant.
I saw Bourdain live a couple years ago. He said the “fish on Mondays” thing is completely outdated and doesn’t matter anymore.
Most of the fish you’re getting at a restaurant is frozen anyways. In fact, it was probably still in the freezer when you ordered it.
I wouldn’t worry about it.
As for fresh fish, it’s going to depend on the vendor’s delivery date. We’ve had vendors tell us that if we want a certain item, we have to order on (for example) Monday, it’ll be plucked from the water on Tuesday, Fedexed to their warehouse on ice by Wednesday and we’ll have it Wednesday afternoon/Thursday morning (depending on what it was). But that’s for one type of item, maybe Oysters. If you want Smoked Salmon, that might come in on Fridays, Live Lobsters…might be Monday afternoon, Clams could be Tuesdays. Assuming everything shows up on the same day for every restaurant everywhere in the country isn’t correct.
Short of knowing people that work in the food service industry in the area, I wouldn’t be to worried about it.
Also, there’s going to be bit of a lag between how long things take to get to Wisconsin and how long they take to get to Maine. Fresh seafood gets overnighted all over the country, but you’ve already lost a day.
It has been a long time since I read Kitchen Confidential,but I seem to recall than the rule had to do with buying fresh fish in New York and the fish market not being open over the weekend, so the fish the restaurant was serving on Sunday was probably caught on Thursday and delivered Friday. And that since Monday was a slow day in restaurants , an ordinary non-chain, not-expensive restaurant with only a few seafood dishes probably wouldn’t get a delivery on Monday. It may not be valid now, but even then, it only applied to certain restaurants in certain areas.
I’ve always heard that ocean-going fishing ships spend months at sea and freeze everything they catch. if this is true, I seriously doubt that your Monday order will be any more recent than 3 months ago, and a month of that will be on a train or truck. Dream on, fresh seafood lovers.
By law, fresh fish is never frozen. If you give me a few minutes I’ll dig up a cite.
Well, the closest thing I could find was an article from 2000 discussing a code change. It seems, based on the article, that the code existed in 1993, but I can’t find it now, I couldn’t find it in the 1997 edition either.
Odd. I’m nearly positive that you can’t sell something as “Fresh” if it’s been frozen, but the FDA doesn’t even seem to have a definition of Fresh.
So, um, nevermind.
Thanks, so I can fearlessly order fish tomorrow night. If I do it and get ill, I’ll report back.
Maybe it’s a lot like “fresh squeezed” orange juice that says, in small letters, “from concentrate.”
While it’s possible that freezing changes the taste, if safety and biological contamination is the main factor, I’d rather have something frozen within minutes of catch and thawed before cooking than something “fresh” that took a week to get to the table under questionable refrigeration levels.
IIRC, Consumer Reports once reported on the “fresh” deliveries, and the level of contamination they detected suggested that some samples were left on a loading dock for a long time.
“Fresh” *chicken *can be cooled and stored at 26 °F. This is supposed to be greater in Truthiness than the pre1997 regulations, which didn’t define a temperature for “fresh” poultry at all, and allowed for birds frozen as hard a bowling balls to be sold as “fresh”. http://www.fsis.usda.gov/factsheets/Poultry_Label_Says_Fresh/index.asp
Don’t know if similar numbers apply to fish or not. Seems to me like fish is still akin to pre1997 poultry with an undefined “fresh” term, 'cause I can’t find an FDA guideline for it. This page suggests that retailers keep “fresh fish” at 29-32°F. This article, written in 2005, mentions that “Fresh vs. Frozen” is “Not part of the new law, although you’ll find this information in many stores.”
For boats that are out months at a time, the catch is either frozen on the boat, offloaded to another boat that returns to shore or kept alive in holding tanks on the fishing vessel. If you scroll down at that ucdavis page, you’ll see an interesting chart of how storage temperature affects shelf life; at 32°F, fish has a shelf life of 8 days for “high quality” fish, and an extra almost 6 days for probably won’t kill ya.
My fishmonger is closed on Mondays because the day boats don’t go out on Sunday. So it’s still true here, in a way, though anyone who tried to sell me “fresh” fish that was a week old would not succeed, so that part mystifies me.
Well this is why fish in Asia are in the tank when you enter the restaurant.