San Francisco sustainable restaurants have a blind spot for seafood

from the Ethicurean:




San Francisco sustainable restaurants have a blind spot for seafood
By Marc R. aka Mental Masala @ 12:50 pm on 1 February 2011.


In an ideal world, when a restaurant tells you that it serves “sustainable seafood,” you could have some faith that the claim is true, that the chefs and buyers know exactly what they are getting and the issues around how it was caught.

The seafood situation in the famously eco-friendly San Francisco Bay Area is a far cry from this ideal, according to a superb new article in San Francisco magazine by Berkeley-based Erik Vance.

Vance and the "star" of the article, Kenny Belov, co-owner of Fish in Sausalito, go up and down the seafood supply chain, asking tough questions at restaurants, sending servers back to the kitchen again and again to find out exactly how and where that night’s seafood was caught. They pester wholesalers and talk to the people that actually catch fish along the California coast. His interviewees claim to have seen menus that list farmed salmon as “wild,” that local fishermen are given credit on menus for fish that actually came from another source, and that many chefs seem to have given up pressing their wholesalers about the products. And then there’s the bigger question of what is "sustainable," something that people in the industry can’t even agree on.

Trust and complexity

The chefs and owners of Berkeley’s Chez Panisse and other top restaurants know the farms and ranches and many of the farmers personally who provide their meat and produce, and perhaps even visit them from time to time to see how they operate. But for seafood, it seems to be all about trust: “We’ve had a relationship with Monterey Fish for a really long time,” says Beth Wells, co-chef at Chez Panisse Café, “We trust what they tell us.” A sidebar that rates a handful of Bay Area restaurants on seafood sustainability notes that Judy Rodgers of Zuni Café assumes that when she buys from Ports Seafood and Monterey Fish, that "it’s gone through a filter (of sustainability)." (In another infobox, Kenny Belov praises five restaurants that he thinks are paragons of seafood, and, it must be noted, sometimes buy products from Belov's company: The Basin, Flea St. Cafe, Nettie's Crab Shack, Nopa, Revival Bar and Kitchen, Tataki Sushi and Sake Bar, and Zazu.) ............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.ethicurean.com/2011/02/01/san-francisco-seafood/