A Feast for Mermaids 

I ultimately think that the inception of the idea of A Feast for Mermaids came from an old Italian cuisine adage – never pair cheese with seafood.  Having that as fundamental to my sense of cooking began a reverence and respect for seafood as something apart.  Ever since I was a young cook, I thought it odd that we tout the occasional smorgasbord of sea creature meat as a “seafood feast.”  All of the proteins are slathered in cocktail sauce, lemon juice, butter, soy sauce, horseradish, ginger…all these flavors that are so terrestrial.  The people cooking, the diners, everyone so wary of anything tasting “fishy,” especially the fish!  It always sat oddly with me, at the back of my mind.

This idea came about around 2016, when a pair of chef friends and I took a trip to Mendocino to go seaweeding.  There were a series of misadventures along the way that day.  A huge swath of time ended up being spent collecting shells, rocks, driftwood - the ocean bringing out the 8-year-old boys in us.  We kept remarking to ourselves how beautiful everything was and what a complete and evocative tableau it would be to be able to showcase all these pieces of beauty together.  I thought back on my original perspective of how seafood was rarely passed off tasting of the sea.  We dubbed the idea of the experience “A Feast for Mermaids,” as a way to cement the perspective.  Wouldn’t it be cool if we could showcase seafood in nothing but sea vegetables and use shells, driftwood, and stones to present it all? 

From there it was a series of challenges to overcome mentally.  On the surface, seaweeds seem a bit one-note, all fish is fish, and you have a few interesting shellfish otherwise, and that’s about it.  Our typical menus usually showcase 100+ ingredients; the thought of switching to that scant handful at first felt like a pipe dream. 

Then I remembered the coconut.

A coconut palm has evolved to distribute its seeds in a very interesting way.  As a tree which thrives on beaches, it needs to spread itself across the sea.  When the winds blow, the long, flexible trunk of the coconut palm is designed to swing back and forth and fling the coconuts as far as possible like a catapult.  Once seaborne, the coconuts bob along, and will even begin to germinate, such that when they arrive at the next island, you have a little palm tree already sprouting. 

Coconuts are definitely seafood! 

Coconuts can be utilized for coconut oil, flour, fat, sugar, vinegar, so many things.  They are the backbone of the pantry of many island-dwelling cultures.  Back at the restaurant, once we had this realization, the idea of a mermaid menu was much more attainable.  We thought along a few more lines, making allowances for a few other surface-growing ingredients we assumed Mermaids would have to come up to forage, and the menu pretty much wrote itself.

How we supplement our flavors for this experience.

Seaweeds – Seaweeds are a funny subject for people.  We eat animals from the land and sea, but mostly stick to only vegetables from the land.  If many people, especially in the US think about eating seaweed, they mostly are thinking of that dyed green seaweed salad stuff from Japan that tastes like sesame oil and sugar or some form of nori chip that has been roasted, toasted, pounded and seasoned so as to be completely unrecognizable as seaweed.   

True, fresh seaweed seems to be a bit intimidating for most people.  Me, however, I love seaweeds.  They each have such a unique character and are so beautiful.  They begin raw with a briny, oceanic flavor of fresh crashing waves with a rich umami finish.  Most seaweeds you can even just put in a pan with oil and fry them crispy and they taste damn close to bacon. 

Seaweeds assimilate minerals directly from the sea and are thought to be the single most nutritious food that you can eat.  Rich in trace elements and vitamins, many of them frequently contain more protein than meat and more calcium than milk.   

So, the most nutritious food you can eat, and that fries up consistently like bacon, why aren’t we using this to season our seafoods?

We have several processes throughout this menu that seek to:

• roast/fry/smoke seaweed to bring out that umami bacon characteristic

• break down to a puree or powder many of the tougher seaweeds that have a briny mushroom savory-ness

• keep seaweeds raw to bring a juicy crunch and burst of oceanic saltiness to dishes

• allow seaweeds to ferment slightly in the presence of lactobacillus to bring a deeper flavor and acidic tang

• break seaweeds down enzymatically in the presence of koji for a complex, rich savory sauce.  We do this both at a lower temperature to produce a shoyu-like sauce and a slightly higher temperature to create a seaweed garum.  Both of these sauces rich in glutamic acid but with different profiles.

Early on in the process of finding a responsible and consistent source for seaweeds, we came across Mike Graham of Monterey Bay Seaweeds and Moss Landing Marine Labs.  Phycologist. Professor. Entrepreneur. Moss Landing Marine Laboratories’ Mike Graham wears many hats on any given day. He edits the world’s leading scientific journal on kelp, teaches classes, mentors graduate students, and runs an aquaculture research facility all while supplying some of the best chefs in the country with raw, living seaweeds.  Dr. Graham has his hands in so many mind-blowing projects that all seek to either undo the damage that we’ve done to the ocean and marine life or to find better, truer, more efficient ways to bring the sea to our tables (and usually while meeting both goals simultaneously).  He also has managed to cultivate a series of seaweed products unlike any that chefs have been able to experience before.  We have been so lucky to have his encyclopedic mind to pick in the development of this menu and cannot wait to showcase some of the amazing product Monterey Bay Seaweeds has developed.

Non-traditional Seafoods:

Coconut – Definitely the swiss army knife of our Mermaid Pantry.  Coconut is a superfood powerhouse.  It can be harvested at several stages of its growth, yielding soft, fudgy sweet flesh and a beautiful water, to dry, toasty crisp shavings and a rich, fragrant oil.  The various products we have taken advantage of:

Coconut milk – we have been harvesting our own coconut milk by blending mature coconut meat with water and squeezing the milk from the pulp. 

• Coconut yogurt – our house coconut milk aged with lactobacillus  

• Coconut whey – byproduct of coconut yogurt making (tastes like French toast!)

• Coconut flour sourdough starter – a byproduct of our coconut milk process, aged from an increasingly complex and aged mother.

• Black Coconut – coconut flesh, aged at 140 degrees for 10 weeks, similar in process to black garlic

• Coconut Sugar – actually made from the blossom of the coconut palm, which are tied into a thick rope, the end of which is sliced and allowed to weep a nectar, much like maple tree sap.  This nectar is cooked down to produce coconut sugar

• Coconut Vinegar – coconut blossom nectar twice fermented into acetic acid

• Coconut Aminos – coconut blossom nectar fermented with salt into a shoyu-like sauce

• ….and the list goes on

Coastal Greens - Many seaweeds grow only along the coastline and the transition from seaweed to halotolerant (salty soil-growing) plants is a bit of a grey area.  Some of the coastal greens that we decided make the cut:

• Crystal Lettuce – a bit of a succulent visible near most beaches in the SF area

• Sea Beans – probably the saltiest terrestrial plant that grows on coasts worldwide

• Coastal Cabbage – thicker, more fibrous broccoli-like leaves, grows on beaches

• Coastal Onion – Fine-stemmed, mostly green scallion-like plant.  Grows wild in wetter climates.

• Coastal Garlic – Useful for stems and leaves.  Typical sweet garlic bulb not particularly present

Lotus – The water lotus grows primarily in large bodies of fresh water.  We made the decision to consider this Mermaid-appropriate.  You get several amazing products from the water lotus.  Firstly its seed, which has a murky, pondy, peanut-like flavor.  It can be cooked to a fudgy puree like a chestnut or roasted crisp and crumbly.  We are actually using this seed in place of corn to make tostadas!  Additionally, Lotus yields a root which has a very unique shape and gives us some options for a starch on our menu.  We also are using lotus leaf as a tea base for our kombucha pairing.

Wasabi – Wasabi grows along riverbeds and in other wet areas.  Spice is potentially the most challenging component when producing a “mermaid menu”.  Without wasabi, this theme again may not be possible.  We have attempted to diversify the flavor of our wasabi, making both a wasabi hot sauce as well as folding the wasabi into several sauces, gelees, and powders and shaving raw.

Koji Rice – We decided rice is as far as we would bend the “mermaid rules.”  Rice grows in water-logged paddies, which, at least, shifts it in a mermaid direction.  Additionally having rice allows us to have koji, which is rice inoculated with Aspergillis, giving us the ability to incorporate many other components.  We did elect to completely avoid the service of actual rice, as that seemed too easy, and too much like cuisines that do already exist, allowing only for koji-inoculated rice and its products:

• Sake – made from Koji, rice, water, and yeast, we are able to now achieve a mermaid beverage pairing!

• Rice Syrup - as an alternative sweetener

• Shoyu – Seaweed proteins to replace the soybean, we can make seaweed shoyus using koji

• Garum – Utilizing the enzymes given off by koji, we can create fishsauce-like ferments using seaweeds, mussels, etc and koji.

• Mirin – Somewhere between rice syrup and sake itself, we ferment the mirin with lactic acid bacteria, giving us a bright, vibrant alternative to vinegar

• Mirin Lees – a byproduct of mirin production

• Shio Koji – a salty cure using koji, rich in enzymes to tenderize and enrich proteins

• …and the list goes on again

Our Ethos

The pressure of responsibility when creating a seafood menu is quite high.  Humankind has already done immense and potentially irreparable damage to marine life and its various ecosystems.  It’s enough to make us think twice about promoting the sea as a source of food at all.  As in all things, however, the important virtue is moderation.  With our menu, we are, first and foremost, trying to showcase a small amount of many different seafoods, from many types of sources, all of which are responsible and sustainable. 

Fishing the Wild:

There are so many responsible fisheries bringing fish in from the wild, and there’s no need to turn our backs on those practices.  Our heritage has deep roots in these fisheries, and there are people, families, even cultures that thrive on these connections which are completely sustainable.  In recent years, however, we have developed technologies to over-fish.  These technologies, especially trawling and dredging can actually damage habitats and create by-catch in the form of vulnerable species.  Competition and increasing appetite for threatened species, even if caught using responsible technology such as line-catching, can dwindle damaged wild stocks, as is the case for bigeye tuna or bluefin.  Being mindful of these two concerns is paramount.  Additionally, there are two mindful directions to shift our appetites and our buying habits: firstly, to diversify the species and populations we consume, secondly, to go lower on the food chain.  The food chain, in the wild, is really more of a pyramid, with massive numbers of simpler, usually smaller, faster reproducing sea creatures or plants feeding smaller and smaller numbers of the animals high on the food chain.  Tuna, salmon, toothfish (seabass), swordfish, shark, these fish are all the way on the very top of the food chain and its unsustainable for us to only enjoy them.

Farmed Fishing:

It may seem this is the easy answer to the damage we cause by fishing in the wild, but not all seafood farming practices are responsible either.  There has been concern in the past that farmed salmon are causing higher numbers of sea lice to affect wild salmon, especially in western Canada, due to inadequate separation of populations.  Additionally, at times, sustainably farmed fish can receive feed that was not caught sustainably.  These make it increasingly difficult to know what product is smart and safe to serve, and ultimately thorough research is always necessary.

Land-Based Aquaculture:

Rarely is land-based aquaculture a bad move.  The farmer/fisherman has great control over his stock, which usually leads to a delicious and nutritious product.  The only potential concerns for sustainability from land-based aquaculture are power and carbon footprint.  This brings about the need, once again, for research.  Another one of the reasons we love working with Monterey Bay Seaweeds is that they can boast production of their seaweeds as carbon negative!

We hope A Feast for Mermaids will showcase the sea for you in a delicious, evocative, and sustainable way.