When it comes to seafood, what does ‘local and sustainable’ really mean?

The trendiest addition to a seafood restaurant isn’t a coveted oyster or a sought-after filet; it’s the words “sustainable” and “local” printed at the bottom of menus and on “about” pages on websites. More and more chefs in Santa Cruz County, particularly at higher-end restaurants, are choosing to focus on seafood menus that are considered environmentally friendly, motivated by a desire to use the freshest, highest-quality ingredients and a sense of ocean stewardship, they say. 

But what do those words really mean? Ask 10 chefs how they define “sustainable” and “local,” and you’ll get 10 different answers. This shift toward environmental consciousness is a good thing for the ocean and for diners, but without a standard definition, these terms can be nebulous at best and deceptive at worst. Is there a way for diners to make informed decisions about the environmental footprint of their tuna or trout without resorting to the unappetizing task of Googling every item on the menu?  

“When you talk about sustainability, you’re just going to end up greenwashing. There’s just no way around it,” said Ian Cole, owner of Ocean2Table, a Santa Cruz-based distributor that works with responsible producers and fishers in California. 

He said the first step is to stop using the words “sustainable” and “local.” While it might be comforting to rely on those terms, “they can mean whatever the person trying to sell something wants them to mean,” said Cole.

Ocean2Table sources fish, as well as organic produce and wild-foraged goods like mushrooms, and distributes them to restaurants in the San Francisco and Monterey Bay areas. Instead of touting sustainability, Cole discusses traceability: where the fish came from, how it was caught, who caught it, and where it was landed. “Don’t tell me it’s local; tell me exactly where it came from. Don’t tell me it’s sustainable; tell me about the stock status of the species, and how removing one individual might impact generations to come,” he said. 

The environmental systems surrounding seafood are enormously complex, said Cole, and there isn’t a single easy answer to what is OK to eat versus what should be avoided. In the end, anyone eating seafood needs to get their hands a little dirty, information-wise. “You have to constantly stay on top of these things, asking hard questions and reviewing things that you thought were the truth,” he said. 

That might sound like a lot of homework just to order dinner, but Cole said in his experience, customers care and are open-minded about changing their habits. The best thing they can do long-term is cultivate a relationship of trust with a supplier, be it a restaurant, grocery store or seafood retailer, and continuously ask questions. “It will never be a perfect system. All we can do is just play a small part in pushing things gently in the right direction,” said Cole.

Monterey Bay Fisheries Trust (MBFT), a nonprofit organization that champions and protects the local ocean economy, defines “local” by where the fish is landed, not by where it was caught. It considers any fish brought into one of Monterey Bay’s three commercial harbors – Monterey, Moss Landing and Santa Cruz – to be “local” even if it was caught in another area. “It might have been albacore tuna that was caught a hundred miles north up off Oregon, but they blast-froze it and they’re a home-ported vessel in Santa Cruz,” said Executive Director Melissa Mahoney. “To me, that’s local, because they’re coming in and they’re offloading it locally, and the local economy is getting that input and value.”

She acknowledges that restaurants and suppliers like H&H Fresh Fish Co. in Santa Cruz, Real Good Fish in Monterey and Ocean2Table might consider this “hyper-local,” and widen the definition of “local” to include anything caught off the coast of California or even the West Coast. But it’s important to consider the carbon footprint of anything landed outside of the county’s home ports, she said. 

“There are gradients of locality,” said Mahoney. “It’s hard at the local level, because you don’t want to penalize the restaurants who are trying to do the right thing, but they just can’t get it all the time. They have to source wider and it just gets complicated to tell that story.”

Despite the challenges, she is seeing a “local revival” of regional fish getting their moment in the spotlight on restaurant menus, including rockfish, black cod and halibut, prepared in creative ways, like crudo and ceviche. These fish are generally good choices, as well as sablefish, which is only caught in commercial quantities only on the West Coast. 

California oysters grown in Tomales Bay and Humboldt County, while not local by MBFT’s definition, are a sustainable choice because of how environmentally friendly the species is and how they’re grown. Other, more niche items, including spiny lobster from Southern California and local rock crab, a smaller cousin to the large but heavily restricted Dungeness crab, are also “green flags” on menus, depending on the season, said Mahoney. 

She also suggests snapping up coonstripe shrimp and spot prawns when they’re in season, but to avoid imported shrimp due to poor or unenforced environmental regulations. “Domestic shrimp is definitely a better choice, even if it’s from the Gulf of Mexico, because they’ve done a lot to clean up their fishery,” said Mahoney. “It’s not local, but it’s better than imported.”

Albacore and bluefin tuna are also available seasonally – a fact that Mahoney is still trying to get used to. “Twenty years ago, bluefin were like the last buffaloes on the plains. They were off limits,” she said. But due to successful conservation efforts, these prized fish are being brought in from the southern regions of the state and are occasionally caught off the coast of Santa Cruz. “It’s a very bright light in a very dim industry,” she said. 

With hundreds of micro and macro agriculture operations in the area, many Santa Cruz County restaurants source at least some of their produce locally, but purchasing local seafood has its own set of challenges. Depending on the season, some chefs complain about a lack of variety, especially with severely restricted fishing seasons for Dungeness crab and salmon, two of the region’s most prized fish, due to environmental concerns. The availability of wild-caught fish, generally regarded to be less environmentally impactful than farmed fish, changes with the seasons. Leaning on these products requires chefs to change their menus more frequently, which can be difficult.  

Cole at Ocean2Table sympathizes with the restaurants that are trying to purchase seafood conscientiously. He distributes to about 20 restaurants in Santa Cruz County, and while there are no local restaurants that purchase traceable seafood exclusively from California, it might not be from lack of trying. “It would be so hard and so expensive, it’s essentially impossible,” he said. 

“It’s tricky, because restaurants aren’t successful if they don’t make money, and local and sustainable don’t come hand in hand with affordable, unfortunately,” said Trent Lidgey, chef and co-owner of Dos Pescados, a Mexican seafood restaurant in Aptos. 

At Dos Pescados, Lidgey uses a mix of domestic and imported fish through Four Star Seafood and Provisions, a distributor he started using back when he worked at two-Michelin-starred Atelier Crenn in San Francisco, as well as fish sourced from Ocean2Table. This gives him more versatility and variety on his menu, he said. 

Aside from cost, one of the barriers to including more regional fish is customer tastes. “Rockfish can be a little tough. I really enjoy them, but I don’t think they’re a crowd-pleaser. … I love mackerel, but it can be a very challenging fish for a lot of people” due to its strong flavor, said Lidgey.  

But sustainability is about more than just where fish come from; it’s also about utilizing as much of the fish as possible and respecting the ingredient, said Lidgey. “We get whole fish, and we use the whole thing. We scrape the bones, cure the meat, smoke the fish, and use the collars, belly and loins. Respecting the product is another level of sustainability.”

“We try to be as careful as possible when it comes to sourcing and it’s very challenging,” said chef Santos Majano of Hook & Line in Santa Cruz. Majano works directly with both Real Good Fish and Ocean2Table to source fish for his seafood-focused menu, and purchases a small amount of farmed fish from Mt. Lassen California Trout & Steelhead in Northern California. “Farmed fish doesn’t mean that it’s bad. You’ve just got to know what kind of method they use,” he said. 

But Majano tries to stick to wild-caught fish from California as much as possible. “We feel that we have plenty of choices around, especially local. We try to stay as local as possible, that way we know the people that we are working with,” he said. 

Majano believes in cultivating strong relationships with trusted providers and fishers. It’s easy to be misled by larger distribution companies that get products from all over the world, he said: “We’d rather pay a little extra if we need to in order to make sure that we get the product that we feel proud of, and then we know that we’re doing the right thing.” 

Like Lidgey at Dos Pescados, Majano purchases whole fish and uses every part of the animal, even using bones and heads to create layered broths for soups and sauces. 

He occasionally gets pushback from customers who expect to see salmon on the menu, which isn’t available locally, or would prefer a center cut of filet over a whole mackerel or rockfish. But those aren’t strong enough reasons for him to adjust his priorities, he said. 

“There are plenty of other fish out there that we can use while we wait for our salmon season to open,” said Majano. Even a shortened Dungeness crab season can’t dim his optimism. “Sometimes it’s delayed because of the migration of the whale. We respect that, you know? We need every single creature in the ocean because they play a part in the whole sustainable environment.”

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