by Patricia Unterman

My morning conversation with my fish purveyor of twenty-two years, Paul Johnson of Monterey Fish Market, has become surreal. I, the owner of the Hayes Street Grill, a San Francisco fish restaurant, am trying to put together a menu that will appeal to customers while not contributing to the depletion of fragile fish supplies in the ocean. Johnson, who is one of the most ecologically sensitive fish purveyors in the country and can defend each item on his faxed daily inventory, tries to steer me to what he calls "underutilized fish," the fish that no one will order.

"Go for the tombo," he says. "The price is right."

Well, yes, the price of this plentiful white-fleshed tuna is nearlyhalf that of large loin yellowfin with its silken, meaty flesh, but Ihaven't figured out a way to cook tombo that makes me, let alone anyoneelse, want to eat it. Grilled or braised, it always turns out dry.

"And what about Boston mackerel?" he asks, his Rhode Island lilt unshaken even after thirty years in Berkeley. I agree with him on this fish. Marinated, seared over mesquite wood, and served with a warm, mustardy potato and green bean salad, it makes for an absolutely delicious dish, its flesh buttery and full of character. But fish eaters on the east coast may have a higher regard for mackerel than we do in San Francisco because the waiters practically have to beg to sell it.

The customers want shrimp, scallops, salmon, swordfish and crab cakes. They like tender white-fleshed fish that they've heard of--anything called sea bass. Restaurant goers are not immediately drawn to skate, oysters, shad roe, anchovies, sardines, smelt, or any fish served on the bone, though in San Francisco they do order their beloved local sand dabs.

While my fishman and I are turning somersaults to find only ecologically correct fish, the dining out public only recently have discovered that they even like fish. So we in the business have to maintain a precarious balance between encouraging people to eat fish and at the same time making sure they don't eat too much of it--or at least too much of the wrong kind.

When we opened Hayes Street Grill two decades ago, we were the only fish house in San Francisco serving all fresh and no frozen fish. We wrote our menu on a blackboard each day and sometimes, especially in winter, we were lucky to come up with four items. Johnson simply couldn't find a greater variety of fresh fish in our market. Little by little he developed sources as the demand for fresh seafood expanded. Our daily menu now regularly offers fifteen seafood choices, at least half of them admittedly unecologically flown in. Johnson's job has changed from buying fresh local seafood to sifting through a vastly expanded seafood marketplace searching out fishermen and producers with ecological sensitivity.

Over the years we went through our mako and tiger shark phase until sharks practically disappeared. Recently the world nearly ate the patagonian toothfish, otherwise known as Chilean seabass, into extinction. When Paul Prudhomme invented blackened redfish in the eighties, newly minted Cajun food lovers caused the ravage of the Gulf rock fish population. We've had some mighty lean Dungeness crab years but Johnson claims that has more to do with reproductive cycles than over fishing. Fifteen years ago few would eat fresh Montery Bay squid; now we can barely clean enough to keep up and we don't even deep fry it! Luckily, the local supply of squid remains plentiful, as long as El Nino, a warm ocean current, doesn't drift north.

Fish are the world's last wild food and they will disappear if the nineteenth century idea persists that human use is more entitled than conserving the natural bounty.

Not only consumer demand, but the short-sighted international fishing practices cause the crisis. Fishing fleets use sophisticated modern technology to pinpoint warm fronts in the ocean where vast schools of fish collect to spawn. Factory-sized fishing boats move in, wiping out whole species before they can reproduce. Wasteful fishing ractices that capture non-targeted species adds its toll. (According to a Chef's Collaborative Environmental Defense pamphlet "Seafood Solutions" one quarter of all fished marine life is discarded as by-catch.) Habitat destruction of coastal wetlands where fish breed; pollution from fish farming; and fishing methods, like trawling, that damage the ocean floor contribute to the devastation. Regulation and management of fisheries is simply inadequate.

So I'm hoping that my morning chat with my fishman about where and how the fish were caught will reverberate through the supply chain. He will ask his sources, and if the answer is wrong he won't buy because I won't buy. And if diners started questioning waiters where and how the fish on the menu were caught, and the waiters asked the chefs, and the chefs asked their purveyors and the purveyors asked the fishermen, consciousness would rise like a tide that could keep delicacies like wild Chinook salmon swimming onto our tables. Since we have become fish lovers, we want more than four of them on the menu.

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