Restaurants in New Orleans – and the rest of the U.S. – are competing for the same supply of Gulf oysters, which have risen in price over the last two years over increased demand and lack of supply.
SeafoodSource recently caught up with Michael Nelson, executive chef at GW Fins, a premier seafood restaurant in New Orleans that serves around 400 guests daily during the week and more on weekends. Nelson reveals oyster sourcing challenges as well as how the restaurant keeps its menu fresh and different.
Blank: GW Fins is known for its sizzling smoked oyster dish and other oyster apps and entrees. What challenges have you had sourcing oysters over the last year or so?
Nelson: Oysters were almost a commodity, but, over the last three years, they have turned into a delicacy. The price that restaurants can get for them now has really gone up, but they are one of the worst margins on every restaurant’s menu. We are paying 40 percent more now than we were three years ago. They oystermen are still recovering from Hurricane Katrina and the BP/ Deepwater Horizon oil spill. A lot of people got out of the oyster business after the oil spill because they got paid to get out.
Blank: Where do you source your oysters and other Gulf seafood?
Nelson: We get our oysters from P & J Oyster Co., which is just three blocks away. They shuck the oysters for us. We work directly with shrimpers, and buy a lot of the bycatch off those shrimp boats. We are always happy to buy the random fish off their boats. It was treated as “trash fish,” and they didn’t have an outlet for it. For example, Sheepshead gets a real bad rap because of its strange teeth and it is difficult to clean. But it eats crab, which gives it a very delicate, crab flavor. Other bycatch include drum and mullet. A lot of people don’t realize that Louisiana is the number two tuna fishery in the United States, behind Hawaii. So, in addition to swordfish and tuna being in constant supply here, we get a ton of cool bycatch, such as local wahoo, escolar and moonfish.
Whenever we can buy from fishermen at the dock, we do. We are skipping the middleman and the amount of time things sit on the shelf. We also work with the big suppliers in town, such as New Orleans Fish House, Craig Borges’ New Orleans Seafood Company, Inland Seafood, La Seafood and Louisiana Seafood Exchange.
Blank: Describe GW Fins’ sizzling smoked oyster dish, which is a different way to serve oysters than other restaurants.
Nelson: We shuck the oysters ahead of time, clean out the shells really well and put them in a 400-degree oven overnight to remove all the moisture. We put the oyster shells under the broiler and separately cold-smoke the oysters and season with Creole seasoning. We drop the cold-smoked raw oysters on to the hot shells with rock salt, and drizzle the whole thing in melted butter. The dish comes out to the dining room sizzling and popping. If you like your oysters cooked, you can wait a couple minutes to eat them; otherwise, you eat them right away.
Blank: GW Fins offers several other unique seafood apps and entrees. How do you keep the menu fresh and different?
Nelson: Our menu is printed from scratch every day and features at least 15 different kinds of fish. We are not tied down to any cuisine. As long as seafood is always the prime focus on the plate, we can go any direction from there. We have a really great crew of cooks, who look forward to being very creative. And we have a decent bit of buying power, so we can pull in some cool stuff from all over the world. We spend time, money and effort getting these pristine types of seafood, so we try to cook the seafood to its perfect point. As soon as the fish is cooked, it goes to the table. There are no heat lamps here.
One dish that represents us is “Scalibut,” a dish I came up with a few years ago. We slice scallops very thin and layer the scallops to look like fish scales. We take meat glue and lay halibut fillets on top of the scallops, fusing them together for around four hours. The dish ends up being a halibut fillet with a crust of scallops on top. This dish is so popular because a lot of people don’t like scallops because of the texture issue. This dish solves that problem. When both halibut and scallops are in season, we sell around 100 orders a night.
