How Minnesota Got Hooked on Sustainable Seafood

In just the past 10 years, the Twin Cities’ seafood marketplace has become a success story in sustainability. How did our fishmongers and restaurants get it right?

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It’s hard to enjoy sushi when your farmed salmon could be destroying the world’s overfished oceans. But in just the past 10 years, the Twin Cities’ seafood marketplace has become a success story in sustainability. How did our fishmongers and restaurants get it right? And now that it’s safe to go back in the water, what fish should we buy from the display case or order off the menu—tonight? 

To find the ravenous center of Minneapolis and St. Paul’s appetite for fish, you need to locate a quiet brick building behind a VW dealer, near where highways 100 and 394 meet, because that’s where The Fish Guys work. Now, “The Fish Guys” sounds like a casual group of friends. But it’s actually a fish importer, established in 1993, that sells around 5 million pounds of fish every year.

That sounds like a lot of fish, and it is a lot of fish. There are only 4 million people in the Twin Cities metro, and fewer who eat things like day-boat scallops and swordfish. If you eat fish in the Twin Cities, you probably eat Fish Guys fish: It’s a major supplier for most of our good restaurants, and it’s the only fish supplier for better grocery stores like Kowalski’s.

Most of it comes through this nondescript building behind the VW dealer. I wanted to see it. So I strode through a double door, met Tim McKee, the eminent restaurateur and now fishmonger, slipped on a fire truck-red hairnet, stepped through trays of sanitizer, and saw … a completely empty warehouse room. I took some notes, and McKee offered to show me the freezer. It’s the size of an IKEA, 10 degrees below zero, and stacked to the 40-foot-high ceilings with crates of crab, bales of shrimp, cups of tobiko (flying fish roe), and more. All things that once scuttled the seven seas, yet now frozen hard as rock. 

When we stepped back into the warehouse, it was completely full: the whole world’s ocean. A pallet of sea scallops startled me. I am used to seeing them pan-seared and served two at a time, for $14. I instantly realized that a 5-square-foot cube of scallops would make maybe 10,000 appetizer plates, for restaurants across the entire metro.

“That’s worth more than a car,” noted Anderson Witherell, The Fish Guys, Inc.’s marketing director, who had obviously thought about this before. “A nice car. A really nice car.”

“We’re in 400 restaurants,” McKee added, as a forklift moved 1,500 pounds of fresh halibut. Each fish was individually boxed with the pound weight recorded on the outside, and the boxes baled into a large rectangular shape. He continued, “12,000 pounds of seafood come through here every day, seven days a week.” I wrote it down, and by the time I glanced back up, the halibut and scallops had vanished.

McKee noted my surprise: “That’s how it always is in here,” he said. “Everything comes in and everything leaves as fast as we can move it.”

We walked into the unboxing room, where a piece of swordfish the size of a tree trunk rested on ice. It actually looked like a tree trunk, too: a cross-sectional cylinder that appeared pink on the inside and gray on the outside, with none of the fishy bits. A propped sign on top read 106—that is, 106 pounds of swordfish. In the corner, an industrial ice machine rained down ice in a fresh mound, like a pepper grinder that never stopped. This swordfish was on its way to the cutting room, and would end up on the menu that night at Travail, The Lexington, and The Saint Paul Hotel.

This swordfish is more or less why I had decided to tread through pans of sanitizer on this field trip. That swordfish represents something of a modern miracle, and, maybe even more miraculous than that, a good news story of global cooperation and positive change.

In 1999, that swordfish would have been impossible, because there were almost no swordfish left in the ocean, and the North Atlantic swordfish fishery was effectively closed. The swordfish population was only a third the size needed to perpetuate the species. The average weight of a landed fish had declined from 250 pounds in the 1960s to under 100 pounds: We were catching the juvenile fish before they could breed.

The fishery stayed practically closed for a decade. But it turns out that when left alone, swordfish thrive. The last assessment, in 2017, found the swordfish doing well. They’re back, baby!

In 2006, few experts thought a recovery like this one could be possible. That was the year a marine biologist named Boris Worm made worldwide news predicting a total global fisheries collapse by 2048. This theory was not far-fetched. At the time, almost a third of global fisheries had already collapsed, including arguably the world’s most economically significant one, the Northern Atlantic cod fishery. (The cod, by the way, are only just starting to come back.) It wasn’t hard to make the jump from losing a third of fish species to losing the rest of them.

Scientists around the globe sprang into action—and so did many food people. In Minnesota, Tim McKee was one of them. In 2009, he opened one of the country’s first restaurants, Sea Change, dedicated to sustainable seafood. 

A lot of you readers changed your eating habits, as well, ordering sustainable seafood, forsaking endangered species like Atlantic bluefin tuna, checking your Monterey Bay Aquarium Seafood Watch guide for red, yellow, and green choices—you know what you did. You probably tried tilapia, at that time the gold-standard for sustainably farmed fish, and then you forced yourself to try it again a few months later. You maybe read that mussels and oysters stand out as the most sustainable food you can eat, and when you discovered you liked them much better than tilapia, you breathed a sigh of relief.

Did we win one? Is the Twin Cities fish scene at our better grocers and restaurants now, for the most part, a sustainable one? 

A big part of the answer lies in the evolution of The Fish Guys. I suspect most folks became aware of the operation in the winter of 2017, when Tim McKee announced his first move after shuttering the beloved La Belle Vie. McKee would be joining The Fish Guys. He also announced a new Fish Guys–centered market, Almanac Fish, and a Fish Guys–centered restaurant, Octo Fishbar, both of which opened in October.

Now, you can buy retail-priced fish from the fish counter at Almanac, then turn it over to fancy chefs at Octo, who will cook it and serve it to you for a per-pound surcharge. This model, McKee explained to me, might not make business sense in the way normal restaurants operate. But it looks savvier if you think of it as a marketing effort to create new demand for what The Fish Guys sell. Octo can teach restaurant-goers in the Twin Cities about fish, and show other restaurant chefs or owners what they might do in the kitchen and on the menu.

A case study lies in the unappealingly named “scup,” which you can find most days in the case at Almanac, and on the menu at Octo. What’s scup? (If you enjoy dad jokes, please immediately turn to the closest person and provide the correct response: Nothing. What’s scup with you?) Scup is a “trash fish”: a species common up and down the East Coast that trawlers can’t help but catch, even though they don’t really want it.

People who care about sustainable seafood want us to stop not-knowing about scup. Because if we eat former trash fish with relish, or just plainly grilled, we will take pressure off more popular Atlantic fish, such as grouper or bluefin tuna. What you’ll learn at Octo Fishbar is that scup tastes quite good: clean and fresh, just like other flaky ocean fish.

McKee’s influence extends to a bunch of other restaurants. A few of these he founded, such as the Cities’ first sustainable sushi spot, Masu. Many more—Grand Cafe, Borough, The Lexington, Grand Catch—belong to a long list of individuals who came up through his kitchens (including prominent chefs like Jamie Malone, Mike DeCamp, Jack Riebel, and Sameh Wadi). They adopted some of McKee’s ethos when they opened their own restaurants.

Of course, McKee was not the only one working and worrying in this realm. In retail, Kowalski’s made a parallel commitment.

“I think it must have started about 12 years ago,” said Deb Kowalski, a company spokesperson, when I met with her on a recent weekday, in front of the gleaming Kowalski’s fish counter at the Woodbury location. We were joined by a gray and glistening octopus, spread over ice like a star in the middle of the packed case. “We wanted everything to taste good, and to taste good it needs to be as clean as we can get it. And that has to do with how it’s fished, how it’s treated.” One sensible (and virtuous) decision led to another, and soon enough, Kowalski’s made a commitment to carry only sustainable fish.

Kowalski continued, “We’ve always felt that, as a business, you don’t have the option to throw your hands up and say everything’s a mess. You have to get in there and take responsibility, and do what you can to lead to a better place. That’s what our customers expect of us.” 

Troy Schmeling, Kowalski’s meat and seafood director, told me that since Kowalski’s went all-in on sustainable fish, “our growth has been exponential.” Sustainability, as it turns out, is a leading indicator for quality. 

Keeping the store honest, Schmeling told me, is the customer’s ever-present smartphone. As I stood in front of the Kowalski’s case, a couple approached, put their heads together, and ordered about five species, in small quantities. “That’s pretty typical,” Schmeling said. “Your seafood customer likes to try a lot of different things. Might be going for a mixed grill.”

How did we go from crashing depopulation in 2006 to this healthier ocean today? The answer includes a thousand innovations: traceability, third-party certification, spot DNA tests to tell valuable cod from cheap generic white flaky fish, UPC sticker printers on fishing boats, advances in aquaculture, treaties—we’d need an encyclopedia to get into all the detail.

Keane Amdahl is one of those local encyclopedias: He learned about all these practices, and more, while working at the Minnesota Zoo’s Fish Smart program. Today he works in marketing for Fortune Fish, the Chicagoland-area wholesaler that supplies Whole Foods. Fortune entered the Minnesota market in 2016 by buying up Coastal Seafoods. As of this writing, Coastal’s small original home on Minnehaha Avenue is about to transform into a 50,000-square-foot facility across the street.

I toured it. It’s big enough for a football practice, with a marching band on the sidelines. When the facility’s expanded retail store opens by the end of the year, it will make your sustainable fish shopping feel like a trip to the Dayton’s basement in its prime. This Minneapolis hub will allow Fortune to reach every city within a day’s drive: Rochester, Duluth, Fargo, Des Moines, Sioux City. 

Stocking a facility this big with only sustainable seafood would have been tough a decade ago. But most problematic species have a sustainable counterpart these days. Instead of overfished wild Gulf redfish, there’s farmed redfish. Instead of tuna caught in giant dolphin-killing nets, there’s tuna caught on individual lines. Instead of high-density, shallow-water salmon pens filled with sick fish (which demand regular doses of pesticides and medicine), there are deep-water, pesticide- and antibiotic-free salmon pens. Producers can move them easily so the sea floor doesn’t get polluted. 

(One exception: farmed shrimp from Southeast Asia, which can contain antimicrobial residues and leave their coastal waters wrecked. Readers: If you want to win the last battle, demand better shrimp.)

“We used to do a lot of talking about, ‘Should we avoid this species, or should we avoid this practice, like salmon farms?’” Amdahl said. But those rules have evolved.

“The fishing economy globally is such a big thing, such a complicated thing,” Amdahl continued. “It’s what I’ve been working on for years and I’m still learning. If I had to tell consumers one thing, I’d say it’s not about the species anymore. It’s about those additional questions: Where your fish is from, how it was caught and raised, and what your level of trust is with the people you’re buying it from.”

Back at my desk—and hairnet-free—I called chefs around the Cities. I asked one question: Is all the fish on your menu actually sustainable these days? Most chefs said they thought it was. And with The Fish Guys and Fortune sewing up the fine-fish market, where would the top-tier restaurants even find unsustainable fish?

Sameh Wadi told me about taking over Seven, the sushi and steakhouse joint. “When I first got here there was Chinese tilapia. The non-MSC Chilean sea bass”—that is, fish not certified by the Marine Stewardship Council. These fish “were easy to cut out.” Then the hard work started, educating his suppliers and cooks about his quality and sustainability standard.

“It’s so complicated,” Wadi said. “With beef or chicken, you say, ‘I want top grade, organic’—whatever it is. Check a box and order. You want prime, choice, select, it’s easy. For fish, the more you get into it, the more you wonder if your supplier can just tell you anything, and you’re at their mercy. If they run out of your sustainable tuna, do you trust them to replace it with a different sustainable one?” 

Wadi concluded, “In an industry that exerts so much control over so many things, what can you do to make a difference? The guest doesn’t see it, but you have to do it anyway.”

Now, the success we’re talking about here is a Twin Cities story—not a Boston story or a San Diego story. Our situation is special. Imagine an hourglass, with the world’s fisheries as the top half, and us Twin Cities eaters at the bottom. In that pinched middle, we have mainly good actors: The Fish Guys, Kowalski’s, Lunds & Byerlys, Fortune Fish & Gourmet, and the co-ops.

One of the main reasons all these businesses supply sustainable seafood is because you, the consumer, demand it. For every Edina values-driven shopper who worried over her Seafood Watch guide, for every St. Paul diner who wouldn’t stop asking about his trout, for every Minneapolis birthday-partier who paid more for the line-caught Alaska salmon—you did it. 

That smell in the air isn’t just fish. It’s victory.

So many fish in the sea

There was a time, just a decade ago, when the Minnesota seafood market offered a mere two- or three-dozen options: cod, salmon, shrimp, sole, you know the drill. Nowadays, with the growth of sustainable wholesalers like the Fish Guys and Fortune Fish & Gourmet, the seafood options number in the hundreds. Think of yourself as an adventurous eater?Well, have you tried these wonders from the far side of the seafood case?

Itoyori (threadfin bream)

A wild-caught fish, prized for sushi, from the shallows off the Japanese coast. When The Fish Guys gets one of these and posts it on Instagram, aficionados start tagging chef Shige Furukawa, of Kado No Mise and Kaiseki Furukawa, until he finally calls up and claims it for the kitchen. 

Gooseneck barnacles

They cling to rocks in the wave-pummeled intertidal zones of Baja, California. That is, until someone plucks them from their rock and dispatches them on an airplane to Minneapolis. Spot them at Octo Fishbar.

New Zealand Tai snapper

Caught with longlines (rather than nets, which also scoop up by-catch), the big pink fish marketed as Tai can be found at sustainable sushi star Kyatchi (in both its Minneapolis and St. Paul locations).

Eat it or throw it back?

Are you out of date on your sustainable seafood news? Several species that were once horribly overfished or sloppily farmed now can be eaten with a clear conscience.

Farmed salmon

There are still sea lice– and disease-ridden salmon farms, fouling the waters and the coast. But well-run salmon farms exist, too. Seek out brands like Skuna Bay, a highly regulated Canadian brand known for clean ocean practices. (It uses only sustainably raised fish food, for a start.) Look for it at Borough with fennel cream.

Redfish (red drum)

Remember when everyone raged at chef Paul Prudhomme for inspiring a blackened redfish craze, and all the wild fish disappeared, and then the Feds had to ban the catch? Well,the redfish you’ll now find in a Northern restaurant have likely been cleanly farmed. They’re a Seafood Watch best-choice for sustainability.

Chilean sea bass/Patagonian toothfish

There are still pirate boats preying on Chilean sea bass, endangering their future, and selling them into the gray market. But the Marine Stewardship Council sets standards for fishing on the right side of the law, with sustainability in mind. If we don’t support the good guys, the bad guys will pull every last fish out of the sea.

There Are Fish in Those 10,000 Lakes?

Minnesotans may be surprised to learn that commercial businesses harvest fish from our wild waters and farm them on land. Even though we’re nowhere near salt water! 

Walleye

Since 1917, the Red Lake Band of Chippewa Indians has operated a commercial walleye fishery. After overfishing led to a population crash 20 years ago, careful management has brought back the catch. Order direct airmail delivery from redlakewalleye.com.

Arctic char

Is St. Paul the arctic? Don’t answer that! But inside the old Schmidt Brewery, the massive aquaponics system at Urban Organics St. Paul, LLC raises lettuce for city folks—and arctic char, too.

Rainbow trout

Driftless Fish Co., a new company from Southeast Minnesota, uses fresh springs to raise fat and shiny rainbow trout, year-round. (Fast-running water keeps ice from forming on the trout ponds.) 

Lake herring

Lately, the most sought-after Minnesota fish has been the Lake Superior lake herring (or cisco). Chefs like its delicate, mineral flavor. But the population comes and goes year to year. 

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