How Chefs Are Turning Bycatch Into the Buzzy Main Event

Eating the same fish all the time isn’t just unsustainable. It’s boring. Diversifying our seafood diet reduces pressure on overfished species like salmon and shrimp, while also increasing the types of textures and flavors we experience.

“It's really up to restaurants to get obscure seafood on plates and in front of people to generate enough demand for the fisherman to bother with them,” says David Standridge, chef and partner at The Shipwright’s Daughter in Mystic, Connecticut, whose efforts to demystify local seafood like invasive European green crabs netted him a James Beard Award last year.

In a country where we’ve lost so many of our specialty fishmongers, chefs and restaurants have an outsized influence on the kind of seafood people eat. “Your local ShopRite is never going to sell limpets,” says Standridge, about the East Coast sea snails. “But some years ago they didn’t sell mussels either, until they were popularized in restaurants to the extent that people wanted to cook them at home.”

If Standridge and other chefs across the country have their way, here’s what you’ll order next.

Sea snails

Standridge is working to popularize native slipper limpets, East Coast sea snails that are available abundantly nearly year-round. They’re often found in such thick layers atop clam beds that clammers “haul them up just to dump them back overboard,” Standridge laments. This type of bycatch, or unintended haul, “is the perfect synergy of plentiful, delicious, and easy to harvest that we love when looking for sustainable options. Creating a market for them helps clammers diversify their income streams and can take pressure off of clam stocks.”

Deliciousness is key, of course; unappetizing ingredients don’t make the menu. Slipper limpets “are light and sweet raw picked out of the shell with a toothpick, and delightful steamed like mussels or prepared like escargot,” says Standridge, who also preserves the meat for pastas.

Slipper limpets also show up at forward-thinking restaurants like High Hope Tavern in Westerly, Rhode Island; The Cottage in Westport, Connecticut; and Honey Badger in New York City. Similarly, RAYA in Laguna Niguel, California, and Herb & Sea in San Diego love working with West Coast-native sea snails called whelks.

“If we can shift the mindset from ‘What do people want to eat?’ to ‘What does the ocean want to give us right now?’ says Aidan Owens, Herb & Sea culinary director. “That’s when the food system starts to become more resilient and more interesting.” 

Dogfish

Transforming “bycatch” to simply “catch” is a common refrain for thoughtful chefs. “I’ve been on boats with multiple commercial fishermen who literally kill Atlantic spiny dogfish and throw them back because they take bait intended for higher-value fish like striped bass,” says chef Kevin O’Donnell, whose stylish Italian restaurant, Giusto, has locations in Newport, Rhode Island, and in downtown Providence’s impressive new Track 15 food hall.

If it does get hauled in, the prolific shark is mostly frozen and shipped to places where its population has dwindled, such as England for fish and chips and German coastal cities like Hamburg, Kiel, and Bremerhaven to be smoked as schillerlocken. O’Donnell has grilled it and served it with an herbaceous dressing, made it into fish tacos, and even steamed it. “It's a very versatile fish,” he says.

Barracuda

Porgy’s Seafood Market in New Orleans is named after an underloved fish species, so it’s no surprise owner Caitlin Carney spends each morning texting her suppliers to find out how she can stock her hyperlocal fish shop with lesser-known species. One of her favorites is barracuda, an intimidating carnivore that her spearfisher couldn’t find anyone to buy, despite the risks of hunting it face-to-face. “The price was right because no one wants it,” she says. “And it’s a large, dramatic fish, just how we like it.”

She faced the expected challenge with an unfamiliar species: Customers weren’t interested in working it into their routines. The answer lay in defanging the fish, so to speak. “I came up with Crispy Cuda Bites, little barracuda nuggets deep-fried, tossed with blackening spice, and served with a bed of herbs for wrapping and our naam jim sauce for dipping,” she says. Now, “Guests are constantly asking for the Cuda Bites and are now slowly starting to bring the fish home to cook on their own.”

2022 F&W Best New Chef Ana Castro, owner of the New Orleans Mexican hotspot Acamaya, and her chef de cuisine Danny Levy like to work with barracuda, too. “It’s a mean-looking motherfucker,” Castro says with admiration. They’ve grilled the sharp-toothed predator and served it over a sauce made with guajillo and chilhuacle chiles, roasted tomato, and masa.

Grouper

The restaurant group Grassfed Culture Hospitality in Miami works with spearfishermen to feature uncommon snowy grouper, misty grouper, and yellowedge grouper — always at least 25 pounds each. Their deep-sea habitat lends their meat unique flavors while discouraging anything but small-scale fishing methods. Those techniques in turn limit physical damage to the fish and environment, reduce bycatch, and support coastal communities, says co-founder and executive chef Sebastián Vargas.

“It speaks to a different scale and potentially a different philosophy of fishing,” says Vargas. “One that emphasizes quality over quantity and a more direct connection to the marine environment.” The grouper of the day is served raw with seasonal accoutrements like artesia radish and lemongrass oil at their restaurant Krüs, and grilled with cherry tomatoes, oyster leaves, hazelnut emulsion, and crispy rice at Los Félix.

At the pioneering New Orleans seafood restaurant Pêche, 2024 F&W Best New Chef Nicole Cabrera Mills recently served spearfished gag grouper grilled as her fish of the day. Acamaya has also featured spear-caught scamp grouper in a dish “that’s like a meunière but Mexican, with epazote and tomatillo brunoise and some olives and capers,” says Castro.

Sand dabs

The working waterfront has always driven the menu at Scoma's in San Francisco, and under the guidance of culinary director Gordon Drysdale, the iconic restaurant’s Fisherman’s Wharf and Sausalito locations are committed to serving only sustainable seafood.

Drysdale points to the smallest member of the flounder family, the sand dab, as a local legend whose popularity is suppressed by two major issues: Only one boat, Steve Fitz’s, is set up to fish for them without destroying the ocean floor, and “the price per pound they get dockside is so inexplicably low that many don’t bother to sell them, never mind refitting their boats with the Scottish Seine equipment.”

Try Scoma’s preparation — sautéed simply and served sans easy-to-remove bones — and you’ll understand the injustice of such a low market price. “These little beauties are moist, mild, and to my mind the sweetest fish out there,” Drysdale says.

Sardines

Jun Takai — who apprenticed under Seattle’s godfather of sushi himself, Shiro Kashiba, before becoming partner and executive chef of acclaimed Takai by Kashiba in Bellevue, Washington — admits that the humble sardine isn’t exactly obscure. 

Despite sardines’ sustainability and versatility, though, “It has been relegated to a cheap, canned, and fishy food. To me, the sardine is a wonderful, beautiful, and tasty fish,” says Takai, who painstakingly removes every bone and delicately seasons the flesh to serve it as iwashi, a top-tier nigiri sushi in his omakase dinners.

As sustainable sushi slowly becomes status quo, Takai hopes sardines and other overlooked fish can “alleviate some pressure on the uber-popular and over-fished menu items to help with sustainability efforts from the demand curve.”