More and more these days, conscientious consumers are choosing wild-caught fish over farmed. With salmon, for example, most environmentalists prefer wild, as they generally consider the facilities that produce the farmed stuff to be ecological disasters. And recent studies showing high levels of PCBs and dioxins — both carcinogens — in farmed salmon have convinced many fish fans that eating tank-raised salmon is bad for their health. In response to these consumer beliefs and trends, many restaurants now boast on their menus and Web sites that they serve only wild fish.
But that doesn't necessarily mean it's true.
Take the recent case of Park Chow, the Inner Sunset's revered Cal-cuisine hot spot. Park Chow's menu advertises its nightly fish special as "wild" — always, without change or exception. However, diners were served farmed salmon on a few occasions in November and December without knowing it, the restaurant acknowledged after being contacted by SF Weekly.
Joe Conte, who oversees Park Chow's operations, says it was an honest mistake and that it won't happen again. Conte says that the error occurred just three times in the last two months, and that Park Chow otherwise serves wild seafood "99 percent of the time." (After speaking with SF Weekly, Conte deleted a wild-only boast on Park Chow's Web site.)
Timothy Ports, owner of Ports Seafood, one of the main suppliers of seafood for Park Chow and its three Bay Area sister locations, says that the New Zealand king salmon he's been carrying for the past few months is farmed. According to Conte, one of his chefs believed the fish was wild-caught when he purchased it from Ports. Conte explains that Ports' sales sheet at the time of purchase made no mention of fish farms, and his chef didn't know that king salmon ever came from farms.
SF Weekly also found several other Bay Area establishments making iffy claims about their fish. One, Metro Lafayette in the East Bay, was using a highly misleading title for its farmed Atlantic salmon on the printed menu as of early January. The restaurant was calling it "king" salmon, which implies to diners that it's wild. The restaurant's owner, Jack Moore, was not aware that Atlantic salmon is a very different species from king salmon. Most of the latter is wild-caught in the Pacific Northwest. Moore said that he would be changing the entrée's title soon to avoid misleading diners bent on eating wild fish.
Ralph Montano, a spokesman for the California Department of Public Health, says that mislabeling farmed salmon as wild is illegal. State law, he says, requires that foodsellers represent their goods truthfully and not in a false or misleading way. But Montano also says that his agency hasn't gotten such a complaint about misbranded fish in at least several years.
Kevin Westlye, Golden Gate Restaurant Association's executive director, argues that "common sense" and "integrity in marketing" should be sufficient to encourage honesty in the restaurant biz. He also believes a sure deterrent to consumer fraud is not the eye of the law, but simply "the heat of media focus."
He may be right. After all, at a time when public agencies are facing huge budget deficits, seafood regulators have bigger fish to fry.
