Just about all of the New York restaurants that Roberto Nuñez buys seafood for want the same thing: genuine American red snapper (Lutjanes campechanus). He’s skeptical about finding any, though, because the guys at the Fulton Fish Market haven’t had much to offer lately. It’s getting close to 2 a.m. on a late September Thursday, as good a day as any to buy fish, he reveals. It may be several hours before dawn in farthest reaches of the Bronx, but it’s time to go to work, because the market opened for business within the hour. This is no job, and no place, for timid types.
As he drives his van through the gated, modernized seafood hub, passing a dozen or more trucks unloading fish, Nuñez — who local traders call both Roberto and Robert, depending on how well they know him — senses he’ll have a wide array of options once inside. There’s talk of some spectacular Spanish mackerel about, and he’s already pondering the snapper substitutes he’ll undoubtedly have to make, while reviewing a shopping list on a piece of scrap paper he jotted down from chefs’ voicemails, text messages and emails.
He buys some of their seafood for them over the phone like anybody else, but there’s nothing like actually seeing and touching the product before purchase. Aside from New England’s display auctions that allow for early-morning lot inspections before online bids begin, the New Fulton Fish Market Cooperative here on Hunt’s Point in the Bronx is one of the last places in the world where you can truly buy with your eyes, wholesale. You want that fish? You got it. New York is known for window-shopping, but this place takes the hake.
He’s fashionably late, but it’s a good time to arrive, Nuñez says, because all the vendors should be set up and ready to deal. Now if he can only find some red snapper.
“Everyone loves American red snapper,” he said, shaking his head before striding confidently inside. He’s referring to the budding Mario Batali and Lidia and Joe Bastianich restaurant empires he buys for — about 90 percent of the fish served at the notable chefs’ restaurants has to pass his demanding criteria before ever touching a cutting board. “But my policy is I gotta bring something, so I often have to get creative. I can’t show up empty-handed.”
Click here to read the full story that ran in the November issue of SeaFood Business >
