guest blog: sustainability, and how one restaurant works with, and supports it, part two

The third post in a series of guest posts from the team at RIA and Balsan in the Elysian Hotel, Brian O'Connor gets down to the anatomy—sometimes hair pulling—of sourcing product, and specifically seafood, that's sustainably harvested. This blog exists because I wanted to know the stories behind where my food was coming from—and this post hits on that note, to the T. For more on Monday's dinner, go here.

The dining room at RIA.

OK, now that we’ve set the ground rules for sustainability, how do they translate into real dishes at a real restaurant? 

Yesterday I mentioned the challenge of a longer supply chain. At the restaurant we try to know everyone from whom we purchase product. We visit our local farms and hang out with the farmers at the market. Our Sommelier, Dan, gets regular visits from winemakers and makes his own way out to their properties as much as possible. While we’ve had a few chances to drop in on oyster farms in the northwest and we can work out a trip on a fishing boat now and then, it’s difficult in the middle of the country to build the kind of direct relationships we’re used to with the multitude of mariners who regularly catch our fish. 

So what can we do to make up for it? “We have to know, and trust, our purveyors,” says our Chef de Cuisine Danny Grant. He singles out a handful: Pierless Fish, Ingrid Bengis Seafood, and especially Mika Higurashi at SONA (which stands for Sustainability of Natures and Aquaculture). “I know I can tell Mika what I am looking for and she will find the highest quality and the best source.” It’s a lesson learned over and over in this business: personal relationships are the path to success.

So now that we’re more comfortable outsourcing our direct purchasing to a trusted wholesaler, what do we buy? Let’s walk through a dish we’ll be serving Monday night: Sea Scallop, Caviar, Octopus, Fumet Blanc.

A RIA dish: Scallop and Octopus. With
turnip, sturgeon caviar, fumet.

The above is a chilled appetizer of gently poached scallop and octopus with hakurei turnip, American sturgeon caviar and a classic fumet emulsified with a touch of crème fraîche. It features a variety of seafood, each of which can be sustainably sourced.

Ingrid’s Diver-Harvested Scallops 

Sea Scallops are a success story for sustainable seafood. In the 1970s industrial scallop capture nearly destroyed the natural population of Atlantic scallops. By the 80s the US began to restructure its scallop fisheries, introducing catch limits and rotational fishing and even closing off entire areas to harvest. The tenacious scallops showed their resilience and populations rebounded faster than anyone imagined.

Scallops have little inherent vulnerability. They are small, mature quickly and reproduce in large numbers (females produce 15-60 million eggs). Additionally, biomass has been closely watched since the 80s and populations are known to be large and strong. While East Coast US fishing regimes are not always thoroughly enforced, the fisheries have been managed reasonably well.

However, there remain concerns about by-catch and habitat damage due to the trawling used to capture the majority of commercial scallops. These trawls scrape along the ocean bottom, regularly upsetting the balance of the ecosystem and also capturing skate, flounder, sea turtles and other marine life.

From a diver's eyes via piggyhiggins' photostream.

Thankfully, a responsible alternative exists: scallops hand-harvested by divers. This less-invasive method avoids much of the ecosystem damage and by-catch while also functioning on a day-to-day basis. Instead of large ships dredging up scallops and then holding them aboard for a week or two before returning to land, the “diver” scallops are harvested in the morning and brought ashore in the afternoon. By the next day we have them in the kitchen.

When they come ashore, Ingrid Bengis-Palei or one of her employees is waiting for them. Ingrid Bengis Seafood was a pioneer in the Northeast quality and sustainability revolution of the 80s and 90s (she’s been called the Alice Waters of seafood for her role). She knows most of the Mainers who gather seafood in the icy waters around Deer Isle and she works with them to find the best of the best. As so often happens, the individual touch so important to sustainability also brings us product of the highest quality.

Wild Spanish Pot-Caught Octopus

Like lobster pots in New England, these pots help Spanish fisherman
 effectively catch wild octopus, via catrien's photostream.

Researching Octopus is a great way to dive into the complexities of sustainability. A variety of octopus fisheries exist worldwide, each of them managed differently. A quick glance at the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s seafood card finds international wild octopus listed as “avoid.” Uh oh. However, the Aquarium publishes more detailed Seafood Reports that approach the issue with an academic level of detail and flesh out more specifics for each fishery. The major reason octopus gets a red “avoid” is because it is nearly impossible, sitting at a sushi counter or browsing in a grocery store, to reliably tell the provenance of the product. With a bit of research, though, one can find sources of responsibly caught octopus.

Our relationships help us find these sources. We get our wild octopus from Spain, where fisherman head out daily to pull in their pot traps. The octopus has a relatively short lifecycle and produces hundreds of eggs, which means it has little inherent vulnerability. Overfishing does not occur and the inland pots catch mostly mature octopus with negligible by-catch. The true size of the stock is unknown, but fishing levels have remained constant for nearly 30 years in a well-watched regime. The remaining environmental concerns revolve around uncertainty: little is know about the octopus’s role in the larger food chain.

Additionally, Spanish fisheries have been remarkably creative in responding to the ecological and economic challenges of modern fishing. Spanish institutes often develop and fund those Sardine-counting studies I mentioned yesterday and the Spanish have been at the forefront of modernizing aquaculture to restore marine environments (more on that in my final post).

Petrossian American Sturgeon Caviar

Petrossian is a caviar staple, and a staple in our kitchen, too.

Unlike the scallop, the wild sturgeon is not a success story. Sturgeon are long-lived fish and they tend to reproduce rarely. They are inherently vulnerable to overfishing.

Worldwide stocks remain at levels so dangerously low that many governments have outlawed their capture. Black market fishing continues, often catching the fish only to open them and remove the gleaming black caviar inside. As stocks near extinction (and the remaining fish tend to be chock full of PCBs and Mercury), the US has banned the import of Caspian Sea sturgeon caviar.

In the US wild sturgeon are making a comeback and there is even one viable (and heavily regulated) commercial fishery in the Columbia River. The meat of these fish is delicious. For caviar, however, we turn to aquaculture—fish farming.

After years of research and failed experiments, in the 1980s scientists in California finally succeeded in raising sturgeon in captivity. Since then, commercial sturgeon aquaculture has taken off and currently exists in three states with plans to expand to others. As these operations improve, caviar packers have begun to partner with them to cure, pack and age the sturgeon roe in the quest to create a product comparable to the legendary Caspian caviar.

Petrossian has been selling caviar since the 1920’s, when they worked with Cesar Ritz to establish caviar as a symbol of luxury. While there is a certain status conveyed by the tiny eggs, we like them because they are delicious—well cared for, aged and packed.

Petrossian sources their sturgeon roe from Stolt Sea Farms in Sacremento, California. As might be imagined, aquaculture avoids the sustainability concerns of wild seafood such as population vulnerabilities and overfishing. By-catch isn’t really a problem when one is raising only fish for harvest.

There are, however, other environmental concerns associated with aquaculture (more on this in the next installment!) and Stolt does a fine job addressing them. The sturgeon are raised in water that is re-circulated, avoiding the escape of farmed fish or waste into natural ecosystems. The waste is processed and sold as fertilizer. The one remaining challenge in current sturgeon aquaculture is that the fish are carnivorous and eat more seafood than they produce.

One Dish, 1200 Words 

The heartbeat of the kitchen...

OK—I hope the anatomy of a single dish’s sourcing helps to illuminate some of the thought that goes into selecting our seafood. Are we perfectly sustainable? Of course not. Are there trade-offs and compromises involved in our decisions and sourcing? Certainly. But by utilizing the resources we have and cultivating relationships with like-minded people, we can take great steps toward operating a more responsible restaurant.

One of the most common refrains in discussions of sustainable seafood is that transparency is key. We need transparency from the folks catching the fish about their methods and the status of their fisheries. We need transparency from our purveyors regarding the provenance of the product. And we need to remember that our guests need transparency in order to make well-informed decisions. We don’t list every single purveyor on our menu, but we do our very best to ensure our team knows the source of every single item on the plate.

By the way, the hakurei turnips come from Heritage Prairie Farm in La Fox, Illinois.

guest blog: a contest!

This post is the second in what has now evolved to be four guest entries from my friends in the kitchen at the Elysian Hotel—and today we're hearing from Executive Chef Jason McLeod. On Monday night they're hosting a 'ocean-friendly' seafood dinner at RIA, in partnership with the Shedd Aquarium's Right Bite program. The dinner is $150 per person, so this is quite the bounty for whoever wins... but for me, I'm helping spread word of an issue I care deeply about.

Common in South America, this little guy will be spreading the
ocean-friendly message Monday at RIA, via Oleg Volkov's photostream.

It's official. Not only will we be cooking with some gorgeous sustainable seafood Monday night, but we just found out we'll have some very special friends visiting us throughout the dinner, too. Some, how do I say this, unique friends... and I think it's safe to say it'll be the first time either will have set foot in the Elysian. Actually, I doubt they get out much in Chicago at all.

Roll out the red carpet, people—we'll be joined by a Red Foot Tortoise and a Blue Tongue Skink. And I know, those names are great, aren't they?

I don't know about you guys, but this takes me way back to my childhood. We were lucky enough to have a zoo that made trips to our school with all sorts of cool stuff from the zoo and that day was always one of the best of the year. I mean, getting up close to animals and reptiles and birds I'd never seen before and skipping out on class? That's the real deal, man.

Needless to say, this news had the staff giddy with excitement—which got us thinking. We need to have some more fun with this. To spread the message to more people. So, because we're now on twitter and constantly plugged in to that always spinning network, we're gonna open up two seats to the Shedd Dinner via a little contest... and whoever comes out on top? Those seats are theirs, on us.

The Blue Tongue Skink will be there Monday night, too. Common
in the Land Down Under, we'll have one in the dinning room.
via floridanaturephotography's photostream.

And here's how it's gonna work...

Part 1. Correctly answer the following two questions in the comment section of this blog post (correct answers will be published on the blog upon receipt):

1) Our ocean-friendly dinner menu will be featuring sea scallops. This tasty seafood is considered what species? 

(*UPDATE* No need to go crazy specific here, just tell us if it's a bird or reptile or... you know.)

2) The ocean-friendly dinner menu will also include Dungeness crab. This crab is named after a region found where?

3) What luxurious seafood was once considered to be 'poverty food,' fed to prisoners and servants? Some servants even demanded contracts that they could be fed this food no more them three times per week.

Part 2. Post the following on twitter, tagging @riabalsanchefs in the post (tweets submitted before correct completion of Part 1 will not be accepted, first person to finish is dining with a plus one on us):

1) A photograph of any RIA dish featuring any of the above three types of seafood.

Follow the rules and finish first and you'll be hanging out with a Red Foot Tortoise and a Blue Tongue Skink, too—though, maybe don't dress like them?

And keep a look out for Brian's second post, following the first he posted the other day. He's been working his tail off on this project—and that's not easy when you have a restaurant to run!

guest blog: sustainability, and how one restaurant works with, and supports it

On Monday, November 15, Ria restaurant, one of my newest partners, will team up with the Shedd Aquarium to present an “Ocean Friendly” dinner featuring a sustainably-sourced menu.  For the next three days, Ria General Manager Brian O’Connor will discuss the complexities and concerns associated with sourcing sustainable seafood, a struggle difficult for restaurants, but one I hope more and more take on—and one I've written about at length in the past.

The Shedd Aquarium via setholiver1's photostream.

Hi there.  Thanks to Johnny Auer for providing this opportunity to think out loud (or in type) about some of the challenges and rewards involved with sustainable seafood.  I’ll be posting three times on the subject: today I’ll discuss the general goals and criteria of sustainable sourcing, tomorrow I’ll get into some examples we face each day in the restaurant, and then Friday I’ll do my best to describe the future direction I see the whole endeavor heading.

Sourcing sustainable seafood presents even more complex challenges than those associated with other sustainable food.  The usual concerns associated with sustainable sourcing are there: environmental impact, methods of production, and of course quality of the product.  Additionally, we have to worry about the uncertainty inherent in a longer supply chain, the stability of species populations and the length of their reproductive lifecycle, and even the effectiveness of public and private oversight. 

Investigating the sustainability of our seafood presents other problems.  We make it a point to regularly visit and communicate with our farmers, and we can see firsthand the methods used and even debate their effectiveness when necessary.  Getting out to the Alaskan seas three times a year, however, is prohibitively expensive.  If we were able, we’d still have a hard time tracking the vulnerability of population stock or seeing if the rest of the fleet fishing the species were as responsible as the boat we were on.  The issue is vast as—well—the ocean.

Thankfully, we have the work of the Monterey Bay and John G. Shedd Aquariums to guide us.  Through their Seafood Watch and Right Bite programs, they collect and distribute a wealth of information regarding wild and farmed seafood.  Monterey Bay has even established a set of guiding principles and criteria for objectively judging sustainability.  These criteria group fish into three categories: Best Choices (Green), Good Alternative (Yellow) and Avoid (Red).  These evaluations are invaluable to the chef or restaurateur interested in sourcing sustainable seafood.

Shedd's Right Bite wallet card, download it here.

There are five Seafood Watch criteria for evaluating the sustainability of wild-caught seafood.  They focus on the stability of the species itself, the effects of capture on the surrounding environment and the effectiveness of enforcing any necessary limits on catch.  Here they are:

•       Inherent vulnerability to fishing pressure

The more resilient a species, the less likely it is to be overfished.  For this criterion we consider the growth rate of the fish, its fecundity (a great term for reproductive capacity), and its maximum age. 

Compare a sardine and a coastal shark.  Sardines begin reproducing as young as two years old and live 5-10 years.  Additionally, they produce loads of offspring.  Sharks mature in 8-15 years (longer for females), can live 30+ years and produce only a handful of young.  The shark is inherently vulnerable to overfishing because it cannot reproduce as quickly as it can be caught.

Mediterranean sardines via anthony plewes' photostream.

•       Status of wild stocks

This criterion evaluates how “endangered” a species is.  We consider the overall biomass of the species and the rate at which it is captured.  This is surprisingly difficult to assess accurately. (Imagine trying to count all the sardines in the Mediterranean: How do you find them all?  How do you ensure you don’t count a sardine twice?  These are just the initial challenges.)

Because of the difficulty accurately assessing wild stocks, the Seafood Watch program adopts a conservative position: uncertainty is assumed unsustainable.  If we cannot be sure the health of a stock, it is considered unhealthy.  As we will see in the coming days, this leads to some of the most interesting questions in the evolution of the program.

•       Nature and extent of discarded by-catch

As anyone who has been fishing can attest, one can never be sure what is on the end of the line until it is reeled in.  As the scale of fishing increases from basic hook-and-line to longlines with hundreds of hooks to football-field-sized trawls dragged along the ocean floor, it becomes more difficult to catch only the intended fish.  Methods which reduce or eliminate by-catch are more sustainable.

We often look for hook-and-line caught fish as it not only limits by-catch (which is quickly thrown back), but also because the smaller scale tends to lead to better quality product.  Each fish pulled aboard is cared for properly: the body is not packed awkwardly, bending and denaturing the flesh; it is processed as necessary and sent to us as quickly as possible; also, it provides a more direct link between the source of the product and the final dish.  In addition to hook-and-line, diver-harvested and trapped seafood also tend to limit by-catch.

•       Effect of fishing practices on habitats and ecosystems

This criterion directly addresses the double-whammy of massive trawling operations.  As the anchors holding down the trawl net scrape along the ocean floor, entire ecosystems are disturbed and even destroyed.  The smaller-scale the operation and the less invasive the method, the smaller the footprint left behind.

Additionally, this section looks at the role the fish itself plays in the larger ecosystem.  Removing a creature that is a vital link in the food chain can have lasting consequences far beyond immediate physical damage.

What you might find when eating at Ria...

•       Effectiveness of the management regime

For the final standard we take a step back and investigate exactly how all of the above criteria are managed and enforced.  Many fisheries limit yields or methods of capture, but if there is no enforcement mechanism these limits are routinely ignored.  Additionally, the disincentives must be strong enough to stop the offending behavior but not so strong they discourage good fishing practices. 

Again, uncertainty is treated as unsustainable.  Without a certifiable metric for measuring effectiveness, management regimes are assumed to be “good alternatives” at best.  To address this challenge, a number of different operations have emerged, from completely government-controlled and operated to those formed by industry association and privately overseen.  In time, we will be able to better assess how each of these designs works and hopefully take the best of each to move forward.

So that’s a (somewhat) brief introduction to how we think about sustainable seafood.  The Seafood Watch guiding principles and criteria give us a great starting point to examine the product we are using in the kitchen.  Sometimes small changes can make huge improvements in practice: switching from Atlantic to Pacific Halibut or dropping Monkfish off a menu immediately make it more sustainable.

The real challenge is in the gray areas.  Should I use wild diver-caught scallops?  If I know the person fishing my black bass and I am certain she fishes it sustainably, am I right to use it?  These are the real questions we face each day in the restaurant and these are the questions I’ll address tomorrow.

See you then!

an 11 year old tells us what's wrong with our food system

birke baehr is eleven years old. and he knows more about our food systems than you do.

watch. and learn.



"think local. choose organic. know your farm. and know your food."

i want to be an organic farmer when i grow up too, birke. chase 'dem dreams, boy!