LONDON ??The restaurateur Tom Aikens is opening a sustainable fish and chips restaurant this month in London?™s trendy South Kensington. Diners at Tom?™s Place will be able to fulfill their consumer desires and be environmentally correct, too, but at a price.
His travails to guarantee a fish supply for his restaurant show how hard it is to find fish that is sustainably and legally caught.
Mr. Aikens spent most of last year learning about fish and developing recipes around fish species that he knows are not overexploited. ?œI wanted to change the tradition where you order turbot or salmon from a dealer at Billingsgate and know
little about its origins,??he said in a recent interview at another upscale restaurant he owns, called Tom Aikens. ?œWith meat, I pat the cows, see the farm, meet the farmer. With fish, it takes an incredible amount of time and effort.??
He has consulted half a dozen environmental groups to decide ?œwhich fish I shouldn?™t be using??and to make sure the rest are sustainably fished. He will get most of his fish from 30 British fishermen whose practices he has studied.
Part of his mission is ?œto broaden fish tastes outside of cod.??lt;/STRONG> His fish and chips will be made from cod imported from countries where it is not overfished as well as from sustainable species like pollack, gunard, rays and sole. He said he hoped to ?œraise awareness??among the top chefs in London to help bring about self-imposed moratoriums on severely depleted stocks like North Sea cod or Mediterranean bluefin tuna. A portion of the cheapest
fish and chips at Tom?™s Place, ray for takeaway, will run about £10, or $20.
The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization has developed a coding system that explains where a meal was caught. That code often appears on fresh and frozen fish sold in the United States and Europe, but deciphering it requires specialized knowledge (FAO Zone 34 is Ghana, for example).
To make things simpler, a few private nonprofit groups, like the Marine Stewardship Council and the Seafood Choices Alliance, have programs to certify that fish is sustainable, but participation is low and almost all of it involves large commercial retailers.
For that reason, it is easiest for most consumers to get certified sustainable fish in the frozen food section of stores like Wal-Mart and
Carrefour, which sell Stewardship Council-approved products. Quick, a fast food chain based in Belgium, offers a fish sandwich approved by the council. But these programs have not extended to fish markets.
?œIf you?™re having a piler in Spain, it?™s probably coming from West Africa and may be illegal,??said Rupert Howes of the Marine Stewardship Council. ?œIf it?™s cod from the Baltic, there are huge problems with illegal fishing.??
Diners at Tom?™s Place will get to eat their fish in good conscience, but not without a dose of global reality: Cards will ask customers for donations to the Stewardship Council and ask, ?œWhere is your fish coming from???