Aloha By Fed-Ex
Honolulu fish find happiness on the plates of mainland high-end restaurants.
Greg Atkinson reports.
At five in the morning, the beaches in Waikiki are basically deserted and I'm enjoying an interlude. The last of the previous evening's revelers have finally gone to bed, and the early risers have not yet risen. Waves splash rhythmically against the just-raked sand, and, because the sun is still below the horizon, the moon reflects off the whitecaps. Not even the birds are awake. I wade into the surf and dive into the first oncoming wave. This is a truly Hawaiian moment.
I need this early morning wake-up swim because I want to be as alert as possible when I attend the United Fishing Agency Auction, also known as the Honolulu Fish Auction. Paul Samiere of Honolulu Fish Company has promised to meet me there. Samiere's brother Wayne, a marine biologist who once worked with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), founded Honolulu Fish Company in his garage in 1995. By 1997 the business had outgrown its humble beginnings, and Wayne hired his longtime friend and associate Damon Johnson as a partner in the company. In 2000, one of his six brothers was drafted as a third partner to handle the financial end of the business; he eventually returned to San Francisco. This year, yet another Samiere brother, Paul, has come on board to direct marketing.
"The family connections don't end there," says Paul Samiere. "We like to think of our company as one big family. It's a big part of Hawaiian culture to have extended family in the workplace." And among the 50 or so employees I'll meet later at headquarters are fathers and sons, brothers and sisters, aunts, uncles, and cousins, not of the Samieres but of one another.
By 5:30, we're at the auction, which takes place Monday through Saturday and goes pretty quickly. The Samieres like their buyers to shop early, so showing up late is not an option. Held on Pier 38 beside Nimitz Highway, between downtown Honolulu and Honolulu International Airport, the auction is open to the public, but because the buyers and sellers use their own insider version of the local pidgin, an outsider would be hard-pressed to follow, let alone compete in, the bidding.
At the auction When we arrive at the dock, fishermen are still unloading their catch. As they come into the warehouse room where the auction will be held, the fish are lined up by species on pallets in rows on the concrete floor. Fish buyers are here too. Most of the buyers wear jeans and T-shirts with light jackets or vests to fend off the cold of the refrigerated warehouse, but one guy stands out; he wears a lab coat. He is Marcus Marrotte, and he's been buying fish here for one firm or another since he was a teenager; now he buys fish exclusively for Honolulu Fish Company.
Also at the auction are Per Se chef de cuisine Jonathan Benno from New York City, plus three of his kitchen staff, including pastry chef Sébastien Rouxel. They are in town in the wake of a benefit dinner they cooked with chef Alan Wong last night. Rick Tramonto, from Tru restaurant in Chicago, is here; he cooked for the same event. Clearly, no one with any serious interest in food should come to Honolulu without checking out the fish auction.
We follow Marrotte from pallet to pallet trying to see what he sees. The fish are organized by species: yellowtail here, mahimahi there, ono on this pallet, shutomi on that one. In 25 years as a chef, I have cut and cooked a lot of fish, but it's easy to imagine that this single day's catch is more than the sum total of everything I've ever handled. Marrotte makes snap decisions, quickly choosing which fish he will bid on and which ones he will not. To my untrained eye, all the fish in any particular row seem very similar. A small section of flesh is exposed near the tail of each one, and each fish wears a green tag.
"The tag identifies the weight of the fish and boat that brought it in," says Marrotte. "It also records any damage to the fish. See this one here?" he says, pointing to a 90 pound yellowtail. "It got a gaff mark coming on board the boat. I can't use that one. And this one?" He presses the bit of exposed muscle tissue on a tuna. "The flesh is firm and dark. That's what we're looking for." I press it; the muscle tissue is indeed firm.
As the fish are auctioned off, I notice that the bidding goes in the opposite way from how a charity benefit auction works; that is, the price starts high and goes low. If no one is buying at the asking price, the price comes down. Some buyers are looking for bargains, and they hold out for a lower price. Marrotte is simply looking for the best fish, so he pays the high price, and his purchases go so quickly and so quietly that I can hardly tell they're happening. I know that Honolulu Fish Company has purchased a certain fish only because a label and then a bar code sticker are immediately attached to every fish it buys.
"This allows us to put the fish directly into our database," explains Paul Samiere. "Conceivably, we could sell fillets off this fish before it even leaves the dock." A handheld bar code label printer and a portable computer are the first tools used in a sophisticated tracking and handling system that monitors every fish from the moment it comes into Honolulu Fish Company hands to the moment it passes through the kitchen door of one of 2,000 customers worldwide.
Outside the warehouse, it's still dark, but the sky has taken on a tropical glow as the buyers transfer their purchases to trucks waiting outside. More guys in lab coats are on hand at the Honolulu Fish Company truck, and the fish is no sooner pulled from the pallets than it's suspended in ice on the truck. While other buyers linger over the remaining fish on the warehouse floor, these guys hustle to get their fish on ice and out the door.
Some fish, purchased by other vendors, lies waiting on pallets outside in the morning air. "You see that?" asks Paul Samiere, pointing to some fish waiting to be loaded onto a truck. "That would never happen with our fish. Every minute spent at ambient temperature affects the flavor of the fish, so we just don't let it happen. Every step we take is strategically planned to preserve the flavor of the fish. It's all about flavor."
In a matter of minutes, fish purchased at the market will be unloaded from the icy truck to the processing plant located just a few miles from the docks. In the near future, the time that elapses between harvest and processing will be even shorter because the Samiere brothers have secured a lease on a building just yards from the auction warehouse. "I guess we'll have to invest in some golf carts or something to get the fish across the parking lot," says Marrotte, only half joking.
At the plant On the way to the processing plant, we stop for breakfast at Roy's Honolulu Restaurant. Roy's is famous for seafood, but Honolulu Fish Company doesn't sell to chef Roy Yamaguchi or to any Hawaiian restaurants. "We only sell off-island because that's what we're set up to do. Island chefs have easy access to local fish," explains Paul Samiere. "We're all about delivering that same fresh taste to chefs who don't have easy access."
By the time we finish breakfast and get to the processing plant, the sun is high in the morning sky and the fish has entered into the system that's the hallmark of this distribution company. The processing and shipping of fish from Honolulu Fish Company truly reflects the state of the art. Even though thousands of pounds of fish are in evidence here, inside the plant there is not a trace of fish odor; nor is there the worrisome smell of chlorine bleach that so often pervades the air inside any place where a lot of seafood is handled. Instead, the air carries the same charge of freshness one gets following a thunderstorm or standing in the face of a waterfall. The smell comes from ionized water, used as a sanitizer on the concrete floors, on the work surfaces, and on the fish itself.
While most of us are probably more familiar with ozone as a protective layer in the outer atmosphere, where it blocks harmful radiation from the sun, ozone is also found closer to terra firma, where in high concentrations it may be considered a pollutant. But ozone, which occurs naturally in rainstorms and waterfalls (hence the familiar smell), is among the most powerful sanitizers in the world; with its three oxygen atoms instead of the more stable two typically found in nature, ozone in water quickly oxides and effectively destroys bacteria, fungi, and viruses. Since oxygen reassembles itself pretty quickly into the more standard two-atom formation, it rapidly disappears from the environment and leaves no trace. Its applications in sanitization are just beginning to be explored.
Inside this incredibly clean-smelling processing plant, skilled fish handlers wearing parkas to keep warm in the 40 degree work room swiftly fillet each fish. The fish are set on absorbent fibers and slipped into plastic sleeves to be vacuum-sealed. As each order is processed, the vacuum-sealed fillets are packed into boxes to be shipped to their ultimate destination. A minimum order is five pounds, with at least a pound and a half of each species ordered. All products are shipped as fresh fillets. Prices per pound range from $12.95 to $19.95, including shipping.
Shipping The Samieres' company was not the first to ship fresh seafood by Federal Express. Rod Mitchell pioneered overnight shipping when he and his wife, Cynde, established Browne Trading Company in Portland, Maine, in 1991. They were building on the successful operation they launched introducing and shipping Maine diver scallops and peekytoe crab regularly to their friend, the late chef Jean-Louis Palladin, who, along with a host of his colleagues, came to rely on the Mitchells for the best fresh seafood for stocking the larders of their fine dining establishments up and down the East Coast. And just as Mitchell eventually attracted the attention not only of professional chefs but of the public at large, so too have the Samieres broken through the fourth wall of the culinary stage and found their way into home kitchens by being featured in popular food magazines and on their own glossy Internet sites.
One thing that makes Honolulu Fish Company unique, though, is the packaging. Every order arrives in a holographic box produced exclusively for the company by Weyerhaeuser. The box, which has won two national packaging awards, stands out amid the usual waxed cardboard in the same way the lab coats stand out amid the T-shirts at the fish auction, but it does more than make a splashy entrance; it's designed to reflect any radiant heat, so the product stays colder longer. It represents another technological step toward preserving the fresh flavor prized by both the company and its clients.
By the time I watch boxes bound for Tru in Chicago and Per Se in New York, as well as The Fifth Floor in San Francisco and Frank Stitt's Highland Bar and Grill in Birmingham, Alabama, the plant is feeling too cold for me, so I step outdoors to warm up. Outside, a light rain is falling but the sun is shining simultaneously—an occurrence not unusual on this side of Oahu—and I have learned over the years that if you stand with your back to the sun and look into the rain, you'll see a rainbow. Tiny rainbows are also bouncing off the holographic print of every box that rolls out of the plant and into the refrigerated truck that will deliver them to the airport.
I can't help marveling that, in a matter of hours, thousands of miles from this Pacific atoll, some of the best-tasting tropical fish on the planet will arrive in a shimmering psychedelic box fairly bursting with aloha. And here, in this light industrial neighborhood on the not-so-great side of Honolulu, it occurs to me that, just like diving into a predawn wave at Waikiki, this is a truly Hawaiian moment.
