Fish Charcuterie Is Putting Seafood Boards on the Menu

There’s nothing quite like Spain’s famous jamón Ibérico carved tableside — except, maybe, tuna prepared and served the same way at Ilis, the Brooklyn restaurant from Noma co-founder Mads Refslund. He salt-cures the fish for one day per kilo of weight, then ages it for four to six months “until it develops a deep, meaty flavor and firm texture.” At that point, the funky tuna ham is sliced thinly at your table and “served simply with extra virgin olive oil and a touch of black pepper, allowing the pure flavor of the fish to shine.”

You might call it fish charcuterie, and it’s rooted in ancient practices like the curing of Japanese katsuobushi or the smoking of salmon by Native Americans, using techniques that both preserve and flavor precious ingredients. “Aging and curing amplify the depth and complexity of the fish, while also helping us use more of each catch — minimizing waste,” says Refslund. And these techniques are having a moment in the U.S.

What is fish charcuterie?

Just as meat-based charcuterie has a fluid modern definition, fish charcuterie is mostly what you make of it. For Refslund, fish charcuterie “means applying traditional preservation and curing techniques to seafood — whether that’s dry-aging tuna like ham, making fish sausages, or creating something like a seafood board.” Tinned sardines and caviar are fish charcuterie and also crucial components of seafood charcuterie boards at restaurants like Saltie Girl in Boston and Los Angeles and Wild Child Wines in Lafayette, Louisiana, served with accoutrements like bread and pickled vegetables. “Aging and curing amplify the depth and complexity of the fish, while also helping us use more of each catch — minimizing waste,” Refslund explains.

Why is fish charcuterie having a moment?

A hunger for bold flavors, more experimentation with fermentation, and a broader conversation around obscure fish, and underutilized cuts as part of “fin-to-gill cooking” all contribute to fish charcuterie’s popularity, says Refslund. Platforms like TikTok play their viral part, too. Sometimes familiar items like smoked oysters are the goal; other times they’re thoughtful reuse, like the fresh oyster leftovers from an event that were smoked and emulsified to be served fresh or with fried oysters at Aragosta in Deer Isle, Maine. West Seattle’s Driftwood cures steelhead salmon roe with local Highside Distilling gin to serve with smoked salmon rillette and salmon belly tartare of king salmon from the Makah Tribe.

Playful subversions of expectations are becoming more common, too, like a fried tuna bologna sandwich at Good Hot Fish in Asheville, North Carolina, or spicy capocollo combined with octopus carpaccio at San Sabino in Manhattan. Oakland’s hot new Sirene makes the humble hot dog from royal red shrimp and scallops, while The Alna Store in Alna, Maine, uses actual red snapper fish for a delicious play on the state’s iconic red snapper hot dogs.

“I think of fish charcuterie not just as a culinary trend but as part of a broader movement toward craft, sustainability, and storytelling through food,” Refslund says.

To help you embrace the movement, here are some additional restaurants preserving their own unique fish charcuterie throughout the U.S.

Meyhouse (Palo Alto and Sunnyvale, California)

“Lakerda is one of the oldest fish preservation techniques we still have as it dates back over a thousand years to the Byzantine Empire,” says Omer Artun, chef and owner of Meyhouse. “You’ll still find it today in the meyhanes [traditional restaurants] of Istanbul, especially in Greek, Armenian, and Jewish communities.” It’s not that common a sight in the U.S., though, so many diners haven’t tried this salt-cured Atlantic bonito sliced and laid over thick red onion with olive oil, fresh dill, and lemon.

“In a traditional meyhane, lakerda is the first meze on the table, and the one everyone pays the most attention to,” Artun says. “You eat it slowly, usually with raki, often in silence during the first bite. It teaches you patience and restraint. And in places that still care about tradition, the quality of the lakerda tells you everything you need to know about the rest of the meal.”

GW Fins (New Orleans)

Chef Michael Nelson is renowned for his skill with fish butchery, filleting in ways that he says yield 40% more meat than average. He was also an early pioneer of dry-aging, breaking down thousands of pounds of tuna and swordfish from local fishing boats at a time to cure like steak. Byproducts go into “seacuterie,” as he calls his fish charcuterie program at GW Fins. Swordfish scraps become Swordella (swordfish mortadella), pepperoni, andouille, and bacon. Yellowfin tuna bellies become pastrami; the bloodline goes into blood sausage; and cracklins’ come from a variety of fish skins. “Any meat left behind on the bones, tough tail, or head cuts, are cured and preserved in various ways. Most of the techniques are very traditional other than substituting fish for pork or beef.”

PB Catch Seafood & Raw Bar (Palm Springs, Florida)

Many people use the term seacuterie these days, though PB Catch Seafood & Raw Bar actually trademarked it in 2013. (The trademark expired in 2014 and no one holds it now.) PB Catch Chef de Cuisine Kevin Sawyer focuses on local fish and sustainability with his seacuterie boards, filled with house preserves like Korean barbecue-flavored mero sea bass jerky, scallop mortadella, and salmon pastrami served with a crostini of swirled rye and pumpernickel, sauerkraut, and Thousand Island aioli.

Larder Delicatessen & Bakery (Cleveland, Ohio)

Why fish charcuterie? “Why not?” asks Larder Chef and Owner Jeremy Umansky, who calls himself the creative deli’s microbe shepherd. “Why not make bottarga out of crustacean eggs? Why not cure a hunk of tuna in the style of bresaola? Why wouldn’t I make a carp mortadella? There’s something fascinating about swapping the proteins and seeing what happens.” With Rich Shih, Umansky co-authored the book Koji Alchemy, so of course koji and its powerful enzymes play a large role in his experiments with seafood and freshwater fish. The rotating Lake Erie Lunchables selection, for example, might feature smoked carp breast, whitefish bottarga, koji fish salad, gefilte fish bologna, or koji walleye caviar.

“In the coming years I fully expect many different types of charcuterie made from fish and other aquatic life forms to skyrocket,” he says. “My hope is to help steward methodologies, techniques, and technologies that can be widely adapted into any cuisine in any location.”

The Port of Call (Mystic, Connecticut)

Like Refslund at Ilis, chef Renée Touponce dry-ages tuna to create a product similar to jamón Ibérico, though her scale at The Port of Call is small enough at the moment that the coveted preserve only shows up on the specials menu or for occasions like a dinner in honor of legendary chef Jacques Pépin or a pop-up with fellow seafood expert Jordan Rubin of Mr. Tuna in Portland, Maine.

“It definitely has a following — people on social media are always asking me, ‘When are you cutting into the ham?’ It goes so quickly,” she says. Other examples of fish charcuterie she makes include sausages like smoked fish kielbasa, chorizo, and merguez, which rescue what Touponce calls “good waste,” and house-cured smelt boquerones, a menu fixture. Fish charcuterie seems to be “trending in that way where everybody's starting to amplify or really show off” in part thanks to Australian chef Josh Niland, Touponce says, “but I'm not doing it because it's a trend, right? I'm doing it because of the purpose behind it, utilizing the whole animal.”