Last Tuesday night, I dined at a restaurant in the Old Downtown that arguably has one of the more talented chefs in Vero.
A review was planned for this issue, and based on his preparation of the dishes that evening, we would have given the restaurant a quite positive rating.
But I have decided not to write a regular review of this restaurant because the chef flat out lied to me about what I was eating.
Let me start from the beginning. As we were preparing to order entrées, I noticed one of the choices on the menu was “seared Atlantic salmon.”
Now, I like salmon. The great wild Pacific salmons that you see from time to time on menus here in the summer – king (or Chinook), sockeye and coho – are an incredible treat. But the window when those are available here each year is all too short, and Pacific salmon won’t be back in season for several months.
So from time to time, I order Atlantic salmon.
The first thing that is important to keep in mind is all of the Atlantic salmon you see in markets and restaurants – ALL of it – is farm raised.
Oh, sure. If you are an angler, you perhaps can book a fishing vacation to Newfoundland or Labrador, and catch your own wild Atlantic salmon. But wild Atlantic salmon population levels remain very low, and commercial fishing of salmon in the North Atlantic has been largely banned for more than two decades. Banned by the U.S. Banned by Canada. Banned by a variety of other countries that border the North Atlantic.
As a result, the farming of salmon has become a huge business. From China to Chile to Canada, over the past five years production of farmed salmon worldwide has soared. And like anything else, all farm-raised salmon are not created equal. Many farms that grow Atlantic salmon in high-density pens wind up using antibiotics to fight disease, pesticides to kill sea lice, and additives to give the farm-raised fish – which would otherwise be white – a salmon color.
I personally would not even think of eating farm raised salmon from China. But which of the many countries producing farm-raised salmon follow the best practices?
I like Scottish salmon, which you can find on the menu of several fine Vero Beach restaurants. I rate Atlantic salmon from Norway pretty high as well. Some of the best farm raised salmon, if you see it on a menu, comes from the Faroe Islands, located north of Scotland and east of Norway.
But all I want, when I visit a restaurant and see Atlantic salmon on the menu, is an honest answer. If I’m not enthused about where it comes from, hey, no problem. It’s easy enough for me to order something else. It’s not like I’m going to walk out of the restaurant.
Which brings me back to Tuesday night. We asked the server at this restaurant about the origin of the Atlantic salmon, and she quickly offered to go ask the chef. She returned with word it was wild Canadian salmon. “Wild?” we inquired. She replied: “The last time I asked the chef, he said: ‘Nothing’s farm raised.”
Really?
Toward the end of the meal, the chef was making the round of tables in the dining room, and we had a chance to put the question to him directly. Caught in the wild or farm raised? “Wild Atlantic salmon from Canada,” was his reply.
And who is the purveyor of this salmon? He muttered the name of one of the major seafood suppliers that serves the area. Follow-up phone calls to all the major local seafood purveyors confirmed that none sells commercially harvested wild Atlantic salmon.
One of them, with an audible sigh, said: “We try to encourage our restaurant customers not to misuse words like ‘wild’ and ‘local’ in describing fish dishes when they are neither.”
But I think my takeaway message here is: No matter how talented the chef, if you cannot trust a restaurant to be totally honest with you about the origins of the food they are serving, why would you want to eat there?
The reviewer dines anonymously at restaurants at the expense of Vero Beach 32963.
