According to Oceana, an advocacy group dedicated to ocean conservation, the U.S. imports more than 2,000 species of seafood from all over the world, to the tune of $25 billion last year. That’s out of a total of about 30,000 species of fish and shellfish in the world’s waters. Some, like bay scallops and shad, are seasonal, others, like sea cucumbers and barracuda, are regional.
Yet with so much to choose from, the offerings on U.S. restaurant menus—even those that call themselves seafood focused—the pickings are frustratingly few. There’s always salmon, almost always branzino, maybe halibut, and then mussels, shrimp, perhaps lobster.
Typical is the very popular Goode Company Seafood in Houston, whose menu list a dozen shrimp dishes, several crab, redfish, tuna, oysters, catfish, yellowfin and salmon. And that’s it. The historic Tadich Grill in San Francisco lists oysters, fried calamari, Dungeness crab, petrale sole, sand dabs, halibut, swordfish, Chilean sea bass and, of course, salmon. Even in New Orleans, an acclaimed place like Pêche offers five main courses, only three of them fish: drum, tuna and jumbo shrimp, along with fish sticks and seafood salad for starters.
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If you’re willing to pay $750 per person (before drinks, tax and tip) at a sushi restaurant like Masa in New York, you will certainly be served an array that may include stone crab, uni sea urchins, akamutsu seabass, bonito, Japanese sea perch, fatty tuna belly, amaebi sweet shrimp, golden eye snapper, striped jack, needle fish, sea water eel, smoked mackerel, abalone and more within the tasting menu, most imported. But such a selection is unimaginable elsewhere in American restaurants.
One exception is the venerable Grand Central Oyster Bar & Restaurant in New York, here since 1913, specializing in seasonal and day-to-day species that at the moment features Ipswich clams, Spanish octopus, bigeye tuna from Montauk, 20 different oysters, Chatham monkfish, Icelandic Artic char, rainbow trout, grouper, catfish, bream, scrod, New Zealand King salmon and much more on a menu the size of the New York Times front page.
The U.S. has plenty of seafood markets, though their selection wouldn’t make a dent in those 2,000 species. At Pike’s Market in Seattle, you’ll find Pacific Northwest species, and in Hawaii you’ll find wonderful Pacific seafood from ahi tuna and ōpakapaka, honu turtle, ula crayfish, ono, moana red mullet and mūhe’e squid.
So who’s buying those 2,000 species of seafood beyond the usual dozen? Some will be frozen or canned to serve specialty ethnic markets like Chinatown; some, like pollock, will be processed into surimi; others will be used as food for other species to eat.
The question is, why are restaurants not buying more than a handful of seafood species? The simple answer, culled from my asking several American chefs around the U.S., is that Americans are still squeamish about seafood and only order what they know, with shrimp and salmon the best sellers. That means mild flavored fish like sole, branzino and halibut. No chef in Phoenix, Arizona, Ames, Iowa, is going to take a chance air-freighting in stronger flavor fish like mackerel, mullet, bluefish, sardines, anchovies, herring, carp and bonito. Even swordfish is a rarity. If, out of those 2,000 species, an exotic fish with an odd name lands on a menu, what are the chances enough people will order it?
Also, for so long Americans preference for frozen fish that has been breaded and fried is still widespread; even people who don’t like fish will eat a fish stick. And still in the South, pompano (which Mark Twain described as being “as delicious as the less criminal forms of sin”) and catfish are almost always fried. No one in the South used to eat drum—long considered a trash fish—until the late Cajun chef Paul Prudhomme doused it with an snowfall of seasonings and sauteed it in an ocean of butter and called it “blackened redfish,” which became so popular at his New Orleans restaurant K-Paul’s Louisiana Kitchen that the wild species was banned by the federal fisheries.
One also has to remember that before the 1950s most of the world’s population lived on a meager diet of whatever was at hand, which encouraged coastline dwellers in China, Japan, Italy, Greece and Spain to eat just about everything and anything they could pull from the sea—the kind of thing TV celeb Andrew Zimmern would consume on his show “Bizarre Foods” and wrote about in Andrew Zimmern's Field Guide to Exceptionally Weird, Wild, and Wonderful Foods, gulping down grouper throats, mullet tail, grubs, live ants and the live beating heart of a frog—none likely to show up on menus here.
Americans wouldn’t touch such foods, not when chickens, pigs and beef were so readily available. In fact, when indentured slaves came to New England, their contracts demanded they did not have to eat lobster more than three times a week. Also, many Americans shy away from cooking seafood because it’s thought to be difficult to cook right.
We’ve been spoiled and for a very long time. Go to any supermarket—especially an Asian H Mart—and you may be overwhelmed by every imaginable kind of food, from ten kinds of Mexican tacos and twenty kinds of Chinese dumplings to fifty types of Korean kimchee. H Mart does have a seafood section, but the more unfamiliar species are not what most white Americans have much interest in, not when they can buy a nice piece of lemon sole and a slab of salmon every day of the year.
I know I’m spoiled: My fishmonger is Randazzo’s Seafood in the Little Italy section of the Bronx, run by two brothers, one of whom shops the early morning fish market six days a week while his brother mans the shop. And when I go, seeing twenty or more kinds of fish arrayed on ice, the live crabs in their stalls, and the eels and lobster in their tanks, it’s always difficult to choose among the myriad choices, from porgy to orata, from tuna belly to pink salmon whose flesh tastes like butter, the dried baccalà cod and the Montauk bluefish, the tins of preserved anchovies and the cartons of fresh jumbo blue crabmeat.
It’s what I buy and bring home and cook, and I buy by the seasons. Sadly, I don’t expect to find much of that in American restaurants.
