Category Archives: Fisheries Update

Recipe for Sustainability: While Michael Cures Sierra Mackerel for Solutions in Monterey Bay, We Watch the Seafood at Home

Posted on May 17, 2012 | Leave a comment

Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch program is helping all of us help the oceans.

Michael’s headed to California today on an invitation from the Monterey Bay Aquarium to attend its annual Cooking for Solutions event where he will be honored with a distinguished group of chefs as a Seafood Ambassador.

The focus of Cooking for Solutions is to help people connect their individual buying decisions to the health of the oceans and the soil.  The events support the aquarium’s Seafood Watch program, helping consumers make informed seafood choices while dining out or in the grocery store through pocket guides, website, mobile applications and outreach efforts.   Since 1999, it has distributed tens of millions of pocket guides, had more than 240,000 iPhone app downloads, and cultivated close to 200 partners across North America, including the two largest food service companies in the U.S.

Seafood Watch is also a resource for the decision makers on the supply side of the marketplace — restaurateurs, food service companies and retailers like us.  In fact, we recently called on their help with a question about grouper.  Our sourcing decisions are made based on longtime relationships with trusted local suppliers, first and foremost.  So when fisherman George Figueroa from Trigger Seafood came to us wanting to offer spear caught black grouper in the area of the Florida Keys, and because of the particular stigma attached to grouper, we made sure to check with Seafood Watch, too.

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Posted in Local Ingredient, Special Event, Away Game, On the Menu Now, Fisheries Update, Wild Things

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[UPDATE] What’s in the Walk-in: Selles-sur-Cher & 400 Pounds of Fish

Posted on January 26, 2012 | 1 Comment

New cheese of the week hitting the menu tonight.

Here’s how many of these items arrived to the table last week! We’ve got golden heirloom tomato chutney with the Selles-sur-Cher, a fregola, orange, and radish salad with the African Pompano, and housemade organic ricotta with meyer lemon jam. Heard that food porn Monday!

Selles-sur-Cher from fromagier P. Jacquin & Fils Depuis 1947  in France’s Loire Valley has an ash-covered rind that develops blotches of gray and blue molds as it ages.  The cheese is sweet, nutty, and peppery with mildly tangy acidity. The texture varies depending on ripeness, but it is typically dense and chewy. Bradley’s got it coming on as the cheese of the week  tonight. A first for us!

Like many goat cheeses from the Loire Valley, the outside of Selle-sur-Cher is coated in edible ash. The ash is flavorless but adds a stunning visual contrast against the stark white goat cheese.

So much fish came in yesterday that Bradley had to get cutting before he could store it all.

Line cook Trevor shows off the biggest pompano I've ever seen. Trevor is tall, too!

Our walk-in fish drawer couldn’t accommodate all 400 pounds of whole fish!  Three sources all came in with a variety of beauties, the most stunning being African Pompano from George Figueroa at Trigger Seafood.

“It’s a pelagic fish that migrates southern waters of the gulf stream in winter,” he explained via text yesterday.  ”It falls into the jack and pompano family. Very cool looking. Mostly seen during this time of year.”

Pelagic fish live in open oceans rather than shallow, inland waters.  We also received cobia, myriad snappers, and yellow-dappled golden tilefish.

For more photos of what the kitchen was working on yesterday, see our set on Flickr. TBD on what accompaniment Bradley’s got up his sleeve for the cheese of the week and how the fish will become dinner…  We’ll tweet what we find out later this afternoon!

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Posted in Cheese of the Week, Fisheries Update, Local Ingredient, MGFD_MIA, On the Menu Now

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Bringing the Farm to Brunch with Maws, Reusing & Cushman at #SOBEWFF

Posted on December 20, 2011 | 1 Comment

Who loves conference calls? We do! It helps when you have four of the best chefs in the country on the line, all in good spirits despite the temptation of what we around these parts like to call Grinchmas, and willing to tackle what isn’t the easiest of event formats — but easily the most fulfilling.

It’s called the Farm-to-Table Brunch, and Michael is hosting it for the first year at the 2012 South Beach Wine & Food Festival with guest chefs Tim Cushman (o ya restaurant, Boston, MA,) Tony Maws (Craigie on Main, Cambridge, MA,) and Andrea Reusing (Lantern, Chapel Hill, NC.) The event will be held on Saturday, February 25 at noon at the Miami Beach Botanical Garden.

We’re doing things a bit different, not unlike our first annual Slow Food Day Grand Cayman.  Instead of the chefs determining what they want to make and us finding the product for them, the food and beverage will come together like it does each day at MGFD, starting with what’s fresh and available.  We have supplied the chefs with a list of our favorite local suppliers and have asked them to decide who they want to work with for their dishes, which will each include a passed hors d’oeuvre and two stationed plates — one savory and one sweet — like our Sunday Brunch menu.

Tickets are now on sale for a steal ($175,) so please join us for what will be a fun and delicious afternoon in good company!  For a list of participating farmers, who will all try to be present at the event, follow the jump.  We’ll keep you posted here as we continue to plan this and our other events including Hedy Goldsmith’s home run at the Miami Marlins Ballpark, Diamond Dishes.

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Posted in Farmer Update, Fisheries Update, Local Ingredient, MGFD_MIA, South Beach Wine & Food, Special Event

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