ISSUES & ANSWERS

Stock enhancement may be key to future supply

By Dick Gutting
It was a strange sight: a prominent seafood restaurateur and a commercial fisherman standing in a basement laboratory in Baltimore filled with tanks of tiny crabs. It was impressive.

Steve Phillips, CEO of Phillips Seafood Restaurants, and Larry Simns, president of the Maryland Watermen’s Association, have teamed up with the University of Maryland to find out whether seafood processors and fishermen can help replenish blue crabs in Chesapeake Bay.

With a $300,000 commitment from Phillips Foods and a promise from the watermen, biotechnologists are busily growing baby crabs for release into the bay this summer.

Growing millions of crabs in the lab is easy. Keeping them from eating each other is not. Nor is anyone sure they can protect the small crabs from predators when they are released into the bay. But an international team of scientists is working on the project and making steady progress.

Phillips and Simns are hopeful. Their vision is a network of small backyard hatcheries and crab-habitat areas maintained by seafood processors and fishermen throughout the bay. They have formed a foundation, Crab Restoration on the Bay (C.R.A.B.), to guide the hatchery and habitat research.

And already they are thinking about the DNA testing of the crab catch that will be needed to measure the success of the prototype systems they plan to test next year.

Whether they will succeed in replenishing the bay remains to be seen. But you can hear the passion in their voices. Both feel an obligation "to give something back" to a fishery that has sustained their families for generations.

I have seen this passion before: in Texas, where shrimp processors and fishermen have helped bring sea turtles back from the threat of extinction; in the Pacific Northwest, where hatcheries and habitat protection have sustained salmon for decades; and in New England, where scientists and fish farmers are growing cod and haddock to replenish near-shore stocks.

The synergy between committed fishery scientists and businessmen can be powerful. So, too, can be the debates over harvest limits.

There is no consensus as to why Chesapeake Bay crabs have declined, nor on what the solution might be. Officials and fishermen are arguing over the accuracy of stock assessments and catch limits for both the crabs and the voracious striped bass that prey upon them. Until now, however, enhancement options had not been considered.

Several months ago, a delegation of fishery scientists visited the National Fisheries Institute. They noted that aquaculture technology was advancing rapidly and suggested that the lessons being learned by fish farmers could be applied to the task of replenishing ocean stocks.

All of us in the seafood business have an obligation to think long-term, both for ourselves and for the resources we depend upon.

If the aquaculture scientists are correct, perhaps it’s time we broaden the debate about how to manage ocean fisheries and in-clude a serious consideration of enhancement. Repeated harvest cutbacks and marine protected areas may not be the only means of conserving fisheries.

Dick Gutting is president of the National Fisheries Institute in Arlington, Va. – www.nfi.org.

BACK TO TOP

ONE ON ONE

Talking To

Anthony Arbeeny
Executive chef, Grand Hyatt New York

With Peter Redmayne
Imagine that 1,500 of the fattest cats on Wall Street are attending a $1,000-a-plate charity dinner in your biggest ballroom. It’s 7:30, and in just 10 minutes, you’ll be ready to serve 1,500 Chilean sea bass dinners. But the welcoming speeches are running over by almost half an hour. What do you? Replate the dinners? Hope the fish hasn’t dried out in the hotbox?

Being an executive chef at a big convention hotel is not a job for the faint of heart. To see how a chef can stay in the kitchen and keep out of the fire, I talked to Anthony Arbeeny, who oversees a $40-million-a-year food operation in one of the biggest hotels in the Big Apple.

Redmayne: How did you get started?

"People judge you on the quality of your fish. When it comes out just perfect, it shows your professionalism."

Arbeeny: I was unique. I hadn’t been cooking in the real world that long, so I really didn’t have much in the way of practical skills. I felt I needed to learn how to cook. So after graduating from the Culinary Institute of America, I did a three-year apprenticeship at the Hyatt Grand Cypress in Orlando. In the three years I was there, I worked in every single part of that operation. It had five restaurants and made everything it could from scratch, so I learned a lot. My first executive-chef position was at the Park Hyatt Bellevue in Philadelphia. I was 27 years old at the time, the youngest executive chef in the company.

What is the executive chef’s job description?

The main responsibility is to keep the working parts working in a direction that is positive. By positive, I mean having the creativity to be the leading edge in your market for food, being financially responsible with costs and doing product development and training – training of your cooks, your waitstaff, your sous chefs and the catering department.

That’s what an executive chef does. And in my case, I’ve made it a point to still cook. You have to be smart about what you do to achieve personal satisfaction and be able to get your philosophy and style across to the overall team serving under you.

How important is seafood to your operation?

Very important. People judge you on the quality of your fish. When it comes out just perfect, it shows your professionalism.

Are you serving more seafood?

Yes. When I went into the Park Hyatt Philadelphia, the majority of the items on the menu were meat. I turned around and made them seafood, and it overtook the entire menu. When people come to the types of restaurants I run, they eat what they don’t get at home, and that is seafood. It’s not easily available, and when it is, what do you do with it when you get it home?

Which seafoods are your most popular?

Salmon is the favorite entrée, but sea bass has become very popular over the last three years. It’s been a craze for people. Everything else seems to just trickle and trail, whether it’s snapper, swordfish or mahimahi. Ahi does well as an appetizer, though. I sear it and serve it with salads.

Shrimp cocktail is very popular in the restaurant as an appetizer. It’s a strong, strong comfort food. It still does very well. Crab cakes – or something with crab – are No. 2 as an appetizer.

How is seafood used in your banquet department?

I’ve found that the main focus is to have some type of seafood for the first course, and then people like to stick with the meat for the entrée. But in the last four years, I’ve noticed that more and more people have gone to fish for the entrée. Very rarely will they have shellfish as an entrée, because of allergies and cholesterol. Shellfish is usually served as an appetizer.

How do you serve 1,500 people a decent piece of fish at the same time?

Generally, we mark the fish on a grill, put it on a sheet pan and finish it in the oven. We do what we call batch cooking. I would do 500 at a shot. We always aim to cook the fish medium rare, because it keeps cooking when you take it out of the oven.

We plate up by lines, which is a group of people with plates, the product and covers. The plate goes down, each component gets placed on it, the cover goes on, and it gets stacked in the hot box. You can do a 100 of these in 15 minutes if it’s a basic presentation. So if I’m doing 1,500, I would have six double lines. In 15 minutes, I could get 600 done, so the piece of fish that was plated first is going to be 45 minutes in the box.

In reality, 1,500 people is not that big a number. Five thousand or 6,000, which they do at convention centers, is a big number. It doesn’t matter whether it’s 100 or 1,500 if you follow the principles of timing, batch cooking and you make sure you have enough bodies to execute it in a timely manner. The heat of the box is the key, because it has to stay hot without letting the cooking process continue.

Which fish work best?

If you have a moist fish, it does very, very well. We like sea bass, we like salmon – halibut also does well. Tuna’s tough. People want it medium rare, and you can’t do that for a banquet.

How many seafood suppliers do you use?

We use three vendors. I added one when I came on. I have two preferred ones and one that we go to in time of need.

Do you find fish vendors are any better or worse than other vendors?

I think they’re all the same. You get what you pay for. Meat, fish and poultry have so many facets to them that most end users don’t know enough to be able to call a vendor and call their bluff.

Fish vendors can be as tricky as anyone else, without a doubt, because when you fillet fish, it gets harder and harder to judge the quality. Most people don’t buy fish whole anymore, so you never see the heads, you never see the skin.

It comes down to having a fish vendor that gets the best product consistently and has the resources to unload it quickly. What happens when they can’t move it? They’re going to try to give it to you. There are going to be some accounts that they’re always going to give the best fish to. Those are the customers that are educated and demand it.

Being an executive chef is incredibly demanding, and putting in 70 or 80 hours a week is not uncommon. What is it about the job that keeps you working that hard?

We have this passion for our job and our people. I’m always changing things, always creating things. I also have 70 employees, and I want to touch a couple every day to help them grow. That takes time.

Peter Redmayne can be e-mailed at predmayne@divcom.com.

AQUACULTURE FORUM

MUMS the word for a healthy aquaculture industry

The U.S. catfish industry alone estimates that disease costs farmers $60 million a year.

The nation’s aquaculture industry raises more than 800 different species, but only five drugs have been approved for treating diseases. Internationally, drugs for treating minor animal species are much more readily available.

Japan’s aquaculture industry, for example, has access to more than 29 drugs to treat just a few fish species. U.S. producers are at a considerable disadvantage, which contributes to our seafood trade deficit.

After a one-year collaborative effort by various minor-animal-species organizations, federal legislation has been introduced in an effort to make more drugs available for domestic aquaculture. Last year Rep. Chip Pickering (R-Miss.) and Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) introduced the Minor Animal Species Health and Welfare Act of 2000 in the House and Senate, respectively. This bill was written by the Minor Use, Minor Species (MUMS) coalition, led by the National Aquaculture Association.

Both bills have widespread, bipartisan support. The legislation is supported by the Food and Drug Administration, the Animal Health Institute, the American Farm Bureau Federation, the American Veterinary Medical Association and virtually every organization representing minor animal species.

While time ran out for approval of the MUMS bill last year, a new version will be introduced this year, the Minor Use and Minor Species Animal Health Act of 2001. Pickering and Sessions are key sponsors.

Several new means of getting drugs approved are included in the bill, which:

• uses proposals by the FDA’s Center for Veterinary Medicine to increase the availability of drugs for minor species and for rare diseases and conditions in all animals;

• creates a program very similar to the successful Human Orphan Drug Program, which has dramatically increased treatments for rare human disease; and

• offers incentives for drug manufacturers to invest in product development and obtain FDA approval.

The Act does not override the FDA oversight of drug use in the United States. Nor does it remove FDA’s authority to ensure human antibiotic resistance does not become a problem as a result of antibiotics used for animals.

If the bill is enacted, fish health will be enhanced through a greater variety of drugs. Human health will be enhanced through greater control of diseases that can be transferred from animals to man. It will benefit fish farmers by making them more profitable and allowing them to be more competitive on an international scale.

The aquaculture industry is simply asking for what most other large agricultural businesses have: safe, effective control of diseases that threaten their crops and livelihoods.

To learn more about the MUMS bill or the impact of this legislation, call the National Aquaculture Association at (304) 728-2167 or e-mail at naa@intrepid.net.

Bob Robinson is communications committee chairman of the National Aquaculture Association in Charlestown, W. V., at www.natlaquaculture.org

BACK TO TOP