Macgregors Seafood Notes

One thing I've come to require when dining out is a suitable selection of raw or lightly cured fish and shellfish to start off a meal. It's light, invigorating and 100 times more romantic, or whatever you want to call it, than a salad. One thing that makes it an even better experience for me is knowing first hand where the fish came from. By where the fish came from I don't mean Joe's Fish Shop down the street, I mean physically where in the world that fish swam, especially when it's a fish like Tasmanian Ocean Trout.

Several years ago I started importing this fish into the Toronto marketplace with some skepticism. Ocean Trout is a saltwater Rainbow Trout, also known as Steelhead - and there is no shortage of Steelhead & Rainbow in this city. So why would we fly another Ocean Trout from Tasmania, quite literally the furthest you could possibly go to source fresh fish? Five years later, we're still doing it - and it's on the menu twice (!) at ONE - Mark McEwan's new restaurant in Yorkville. This is a fish that is close to my heart, so I get a sense of pride every time I see that we've had some influence on cutting edge culinary landscape of this city. A big part of my passion for what I do is challenging the old tried and true seafood business and injecting new species, with better quality, from less industrialized sources. Tasmanian Ocean Trout represents this better than any.

So when I tucked into the lightly cured Tasmanian Ocean Trout at ONE (after several top notch Oysters) I was brought back right to source & the people involved in producing this fish. Two years ago I was in Tasmania visiting Petuna, the company responsible for this fish. It was 4:30am and I was shivering on a dock getting ready to go out, by barge to harvest the Trout. We're in Southern Tasmania, in an inlet fed by the great Southern Ocean, not that far from Antarctica (yes there were Penguins). The surrounding area is a World Heritage Site, it's thoroughly rugged and mountainous and completely untouched. The ocean water is a deep dark red color - the runoff from the surrounding hills has stained it with mineral rich tannins. The cages are well out in the middle of the current heavy inlet, over extraordinarily deep sea water. What immediately strikes me is that everything is done by hand. There is no large floating feed house, firing pellets by compressed air into the cages. All the fish are hand-reared and monitored by divers. The fish are hand harvested with nets, slowly. They're not pumped into tanks. The harvests are small. By the end of day the Trout are on a ferry to Melbourne and on the red-eye to Los Angeles. They make a connection to Toronto same day and arrive in pristine, sashimi grade condition. They are stunningly beautiful Trout, and built quite differently than a typical Steelhead - a factor of the muscle conditioning from working in the strong, cold water currents of Southern Tasmania. The flesh is a well marbled, deep red color, consistently firm and extraordinarily clean tasting.

Petuna is a small family company that takes enormous pride in this 'boutique" Ocean Trout. They're like a band that cares more about the integrity in the music than selling millions of records. When I taste it at ONE, ever so lightly cured, so close to it's natural state, I wonder if the kitchen or server has any idea that I have actually harvested these fish from he cold ocean water of southern Tasmania. I also wonder if the table beside us has any inclination of the kind of special product they're eating. Probably not, other than the fact that the dish is phenomenal.

If anything else, ONE has made a great choice in menuing the Petuna Tasmanian Ocean Trout, amidst the plethora of choices they have. Toronto's restaurant scene is heavily scrutinized, especially when you're a prominent restaurateur like McEwan. When people review his menu and think that the Ocean Trout is just another Steelhead, it's their loss. Maybe they don't need to know the story, but what they can take away, at least, is the fact that there is someone out there making good choices about what fish to menu. At the end of the day, that's what separates the good from the great.