table talk / By Bob Doran

Chefs Go Wild

(May 17, 2007)  I’ve cooked a fair amount of salmon in my day. In the years when I worked as a chef at one place or another I became fairly proficient at filleting whole fish or cutting them into steaks. I learned various methods of preparation, but most of the time I’d chargrill the salmon and present it basically unadorned. An exception was something I borrowed from a cookbook by Alice Waters of Chez Panisse fame: I would grill a slab of red onion brushed with olive oil along with the salmon and serve it atop the fish.

In the ‘80s, when I was beginning my career in a professional restaurant kitchen, Waters was an inspiration, a back-to-the-roots chef who advocated a return to “real food,” a “buy local” visionary who started talking about organics and sustainability before they became buzzwords.

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Back then I did not think much about where my salmon came from. I bought it directly from local fishermen, or from my fishmonger, who typically got his fish from some other Pacific Coast source. Somewhere along the line Atlantic salmon came into the picture. I didn’t know a lot about it, just that it seemed a pale sister to the vibrant red fish I’d grown to love.

The primary advantage was its availability. I could get it in the off-season, and sometimes for less per pound than I paid for local salmon. How could that be? Well, the Atlantic salmon is not shipped here after being caught on the East Coast; it’s raised in captivity in floating pens called fish farms.

A lot has happened since the ‘80s, when salmon farms began popping up along the Pacific Coast from Chile to Canada. A complex range of impacts on the habitat of our native wild salmon drove them toward endangered species status. Meanwhile, chefs like Waters were becoming activists, using their celebrity status to draw attention to impacts on our food supply.

A group of those activist chefs and affiliated restaurant professionals gathered in Washington, D.C., last week to deliver a message to Congress regarding the dangerous state of the Pacific salmon fishery. They called their campaign, “Vote With Your Fork.” (They also prepared the legislators a wild salmon feast.)

Their statement declared, in part, “Wild salmon is one of the unique, authentic heritage foods of the Pacific Northwest, intricately tied to centuries of Salmon Nation culture and tribal traditions. It represents perhaps our country’s last great wild meal. We call upon your leadership to ensure the future of healthy, abundant, self-sustaining and harvestable populations of wild salmon and the healthy rivers upon which they depend in the West Coast salmon states of Washington, Oregon, California, Idaho and Alaska. We urge you to make every effort to protect the declining Columbia-Snake and Klamath fisheries by restoring healthy habitat and thereby sustaining our fishing seasons and a nutritious food for many generations to come.”

Former chef Paul Johnson was part of the Washington invasion. Johnson runs the Monterey Fish Market in San Francisco and Berkeley, a wholesale/retail operation that supplies fresh seafood to what he humbly deems “white tablecloth restaurants,” among them Chez Panisse and Thomas Keller’s French Laundry. He’s also the author of a cookbook, Fish Forever: The Definitive Guide to Understanding, Selecting, and Preparing Healthy, Delicious, and Environmentally Sustainable Seafood , due out in June.

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