Amid seafood shortages and price hikes, these East coast chefs are looking beyond the usual catch | Canada Voices

The spotted wolffish is one of the Atlantic Ocean’s less photogenic specimens, with the unimpressed face of a wizened sea turtle and a long, tubular body. But this May when Moncton Chef Pierre A. Richard laid eyes on one brought in from Prince Edward Island, he saw beautiful potential.

Wielding a sharp blade in the kitchen of his fine-dining restaurant Little Louis, Richard sliced the strange-looking fish in half and then folded the flesh onto itself and tightly wrapped it in thin slices of house-made guanciale, Italian cured pork jowl. From the resulting log of fish encased in pork, he cut thick medallions, which he cooked sous-vide, seared and served alongside roasted and fermented turnips and watercress gnudi, a ricotta-based dumpling.

Richard has always loved the creative challenge of using exotic local ingredients – wild ramps, watercress, white asparagus – but there were other motivations behind his choice to serve spotted wolffish to diners.

This summer, as every summer, tourists will arrive in the Maritimes hungry for local seafood. But they may have trouble finding some of the staples on menus, and if they do, they’ll be paying a premium for them. Shortages of oysters, haddock and scallops have created major challenges for chefs and restaurant owners across the region, who draw the vast majority of their revenue from summer tourism. In response, they’ve altered their sourcing, rewritten their menus and experimented with types of seafood that had previously been given short shrift.

The reasons for the shortages are multipronged. To manage declining populations of haddock and scallops, the federal Department of Fisheries and Oceans have greatly reduced fishing quotas for both. The total allowable catch for haddock in some parts of the region has dropped by 57 per cent, and for scallops, it’s down by 51 per cent. Meanwhile, two parasitic diseases – MSX and Dermo – have devastated much of PEI’s oyster population. While the diseases pose no risk to humans, the reported death rate is as high as 98 per cent on some oyster farms.

The shortages have affected prices. In a year, the cost for a pound of raw sea scallops has risen from $23 to $30; raw haddock has gone from $10 a pound to $12.50 (and is often frozen); and on restaurant menus, oysters have jumped from $19 a half dozen to $24.

Richard plans to serve spotted wolffish – which has a meaty, buttery texture similar to lobster and can handle being paired with strong flavours – throughout the summer. For now, the entree is $58 and he’s hoping adventurous guests will give it a try and become converts. It’s from a sustainable aquaculture operation in PEI, so he doesn’t have concerns about sourcing or price fluctuations.

The giant scallops he used to showcase in dishes are hard to come by this year, but he’s reluctant to take scallops off the menu altogether or to switch to sourcing them from China. “I would refuse to do that because we’re right by the Bay of Fundy,” he says.

For this summer, he’s developed a dish of broken scallop-filled ravioli in a smoked potato and leek velouté topped with a few pieces of maple-glazed pork belly and a handful of scallops that are smaller than the marshmallow-sized ones he’d typically use.

Richard said he’d rather get inventive in this way than dramatically alter prices on his menu to reflect the increased cost of those hard-to-source colossal scallops.

“You just have to be really careful with these prices jumping up and down like that,” he said. “You have to make sure that you adjust everything properly, but at the same time, you want to make sure that the customers don’t feel like they’re getting gouged, because sometimes people don’t understand that the price is actually that high, right?”

At Lightfoot & Wolfville Vineyards in Wolfville, N.S., executive chef Chris Pyne has similarly tried to figure out how to navigate these sourcing challenges and price spikes without scaring off the 300 daily guests the restaurant serves during its summer season.

“It takes using your full chef sense and knowledge to come up with something clever or inventive that still fills the gap, and is super delicious, and can leave the guest satisfied with what they ordered, and not feel like they just forked out way more than what it was worth,” he said.

At his restaurant, they’ve switched out a popular bacon-wrapped scallop dish using colossal scallops to one made using the relatively diminutive bay scallops and served with a bacon vinaigrette alongside a maple-carrot puree, sherry gastrique and crispy fried carrots and rosemary.

While there are restrictions in place on fishing both the smaller bay scallops and larger sea scallops, the former – which are sweeter and more tender and usually used in chowders and bubbly bakes rather than cast as the star of the dish – have been more widely available at a cheaper price. The bay scallops Pyne has sourced cost him $8.76 a pound at the moment, compared to the jumbo ones, which are $32.25 a pound.

“You still get that feel of bacon and scallops, but at the end of the day, you don’t have to pay that super high price tag.”

The colossal scallops Pyne used to buy that can stand up to a hard sear – which were so widely available he could buy them for $11 a pound at the gas station when he arrived in Nova Scotia in 2019 – simply aren’t available for purchase, unless he wants imports from Japan.

While crafting the summer menu, Pyne and his team have decided to lean into the uncertainty. This summer Lightfoot & Wolfville will be doing seafood dinners on Wednesdays where the menu will change based on what’s available. It’s an opportunity to offer things like turbot, a firm flatfish with a light flavour similar to halibut, or bycatch like flounder, which is delicate and flaky. All these alternatives will be fresh-caught and carry the clean, briny taste of the Atlantic Ocean.

“We just showcase the seafood available to us and try to give it the respect it deserves,” Pyne says.

But one area where he knows he can’t let down guests is with oysters – a non-negotiable menu item that also happens to be “our worst food cost item by far.” On their spring menu, they charged $22 for half a dozen, but that price will go up to $24 this summer. Pyne believes this is the ceiling of what they can charge, despite making very little on them even at that price point. Last year they charged $20.

Because Lightfoot & Wolfville is a winery, they have many wine pairings built into their menu and this summer will take a loss on their Brut chardonnay to make their oysters more affordable.

“Every time somebody orders that over something else, we’re leaving money on the table, but it almost feels like doing a disservice to the tourist not being able to order Atlantic oysters while visiting,” he said.

A few hours away, in PEI, you can see the harbour from the patio of the Blue Mussel Café. Last year that view also included oyster boats, which helped make it easy for the restaurant to sell about 60,000 oysters last summer.

“It’s pretty nice to be able to say, ‘Those are our oysters, we see them from here, they get brought in every morning for us.’ But that’s not going to be the case this year, from what I’m hearing,” says Steve Murphy, who co-owns the restaurant with his wife, Christine McQuaid.

For many years, even before MSX and Dermo wreaked havoc on the oyster population, the mollusks had been a loss leader, he says. Often in a box of 100 from his supplier, a few would be dead. Then, in every dozen, one or two were lost during the shucking process when a shell broke. “Unfortunately, there’s no money in oysters for a restaurant,” he said.

He sources much of his seafood from MR Seafoods in Charlottetown, where owner Reggie Jameson said he’s had a lot of trouble tracking down oysters and scallops for his restaurant clients this year. In the winter, Jameson stopped buying from many of the suppliers from the western parts of the province that sold him oysters because of their near-100-per-cent death rate: Some oysters inevitably died shortly after reaching Jameson, and he’d get phone calls from restaurants reporting that more had perished after delivery.

This spring he’s been increasingly sourcing oysters from Nova Scotia. In an ideal world, island restaurants would be serving island oysters, but being able to claim they are fresh from Atlantic Canada will have to be good enough for many visitors to PEI this summer.

There are bigger roadblocks for Jameson when it comes to scallops, though. The government-enforced fishing quota means he’s only been able to purchase about one-third of the scallops he usually does. They’re not just expensive – there simply aren’t enough of them.

While planning their summer menu at the Blue Mussel Café, Murphy and his team made a tough call: “Scallops are out.” (The eponymous mussels, however, are in good supply.)

The smaller bay scallops don’t cook in the same way as the colossal ones they used to use, and don’t have the same wow factor when crowning a plate of pasta when they’re a fraction the size of the big ones. Jameson has noticed other restaurants on the island remove scallops entirely from their menus, or list them as an add-on to a steak or lobster dish.

A government-imposed quota on haddock, which is commonly used in fish and chips, has meant prices are as high as Jameson’s ever seen them – up roughly 25 per cent from last year. He’s heard restaurateurs chatter about what this could mean if the prices continue rising: Will they sub out haddock for a cheaper fish, like pollock?

At Charlottetown’s Slaymaker & Nichols Gastro House, another restaurant that Murphy and McQuaid co-own, they’ve experimented with trout as an alternative to haddock because it’s easier to source, and have been promoting the dishes using New Brunswick salmon and PEI tuna on their menu, which have been selling better than they used to.

“People thought oysters were gross for a long time, and now they’ve become a delicacy … that was a change that happened over years,” Murphy says. “Now we’re kind of in that same boat, where we’re starting to change into something else, and just adapting as we go.”