Knox eateries make adjustments due to Gulf spill

How is the Gulf oil spill affecting seafood available in our locally-owned restaurants here in Knoxville?

We asked some of our favorite area chefs and restaurant managers and found that their opinions are as varied as the food they serve up. The one thing they seem to agree on, though, is that the long-term effects of the colossal spill will probably be worse than the immediate effects, which each is finding ways to deal with.

(Note: Assuming that the national chains like Bonefish Grill have a network of vendors that supply many, many restaurants, we opted not to focus on them for this post. We were more concerned with the locally-owned restaurants that might not have that vast array of vendors to rely on.)

Here’s a sampling of their opinions. If you have any thoughts on the subject, please feel free to post them in the comments section.

The Orangery

John Bryant, executive chef at The Orangery in Bearden: “It’s a nightmare and it’s only going to get worse,” Bryant said. “The cost of shrimp is up. Oysters are up. Even scallops are up. The price of grouper is up.”

Bryant is focusing on shifting his sources for seafood.  “Right now, we are still getting oysters out of Apalachicola, Fla., but there are no more Louisiana oysters,” he said. “We used to get most all our seafood out of the Gulf. Now we are sourcing it from the east coast of Florida, as well as South Carolina, North Carolina and Virginia. We are selling some Hawaiian seafood.”

Bryant said The Orangery will continue to have seafood on the menu. “Right now, our plan is to get what we can for as long as we can,” he said. “Even though we are still getting oysters out of Apalachicola because the oil hasn’t made it there, it is just a matter of one storm changing that. It might even go up the east coast of Florida. It’s a horrible situation.”

Bryant said he changes his menu fairly frequently, which will allow him to make changes to what he serves. “We will adjust when we need to,” he said.

Shane Robertson, executive chef at the S&W Grand on Gay Street: “It’s no big deal for availability, but the price is very affected,” he said. He is struggling with how to pay the higher prices without raising prices on his dishes. His solution: put extra elements on the plates he serves. For instance, he said, he might serve fewer shrimp to an order, but he’ll stuff the shrimp with a crawfish stuffing in order to serve up a meal that is just as large and filling. He said he has found alternate suppliers of crawfish to his normal Louisiana suppliers. But some things, you just can’t get around. “True Gulf snapper, for instance, is non-existent,” he said.

Robertson said he is utilizing a lot of freshwater fish options, although he said the state of Tennessee has a lot of cumbersome regulations on the species of out-of-state freshwater fish it allows to come into the state. He said more and more customers are asking, “Where does this fish come from?” when they place their orders.

Long term? “It’s a major, major catastrophe,” Robertson said, because of the amount of oil that is being spilled every day. “We don’t know now if it will spread to the east coast of Florida and how much damage it ultimately will do.”

My favorite item at the S&W is the crab dip. I nervously asked if that appetizer item would be affected. “No,” Robertson said. “We can still get blue crabs.” Thank goodness.

Bruce Bogartz, executive chef and owner of RouXbarb on Northshore Drive: “It’s not affecting me,” Bogartz said. “Prices are up, but we’ve got other sources. We like to use products from the Gulf when we can, but the deeper waters still have a lot of fish. And we are getting oysters from Texas.”

Bogartz called the spill “super-unfortunate for that area,” and said that some species of fish are more affected than others. But, he added, he just got in “the best piece of sushi-grade grouper” he’s ever had. Bogartz said the long-term effects have him more concerned than immediate effects. “The damage to generations of oyster beds and the people who fish them could wipe out an industry” in the Gulf area, he said.  But he’s got plenty of fish at RouXbarb and says to come on in.

Ken Scoonover is the general manager of Chesapeake’s downtown. He said that being a part of the Copper Cellar chain, which includes 15 to 17 restaurants depending on whether you include catering operations, is a big help in a situation like this. “We have a vast supply of vendors,” he noted. He sees little impact from the Gulf situation except on one product. “The only loss is our purveyor of raw oysters,” he said. “We used to serve a brand called AmeriPure. A Louisiana company actually cleaned the oysters, specially treated them to make them safer, and shipped them in their own juices. They just don’t have the oysters anymore. But everything else is OK.”

Scoonover said the supply of Chesapeake’s three most popular fish is fine: salmon from Alaska, tuna from Hawaii and swordfish from the north Atlantic.  “Alaskan sockeye are running right now and they are gorgeous,” he said. “We are getting halibut from Alaska. Now, the amberjack and mahi, which are fish that live in more shallow water? We are having a little trouble getting them because the fishermen that fish for them are being paid more by BP to clean up the oil than they can make catching fish,” he said.

The snapper and grouper are running from the oil and going into deeper water, he said. “They are so far off the coast, they aren’t being affected. We get our shrimp from all over the world. Same with crab and scallops. We are getting our raw oysters now from the Atlantic. We get seafood flown in every day.”

Scoonover still worries about the future, though. “Who knows what will happen?” he said. “It could damage the oyster beds and it takes years — and I don’t mean two to three years, but many years — for those to come back. And who knows what it will do to the Florida coast?”

But, he said, “We are OK for right now. I don’t want to minimize the situation, but it’s more fear than anything. The oceans are a vast, vast place.”

Chester Miller, executive chef of Bistro by the Tracks in Bearden, said he took crab off the menu before the Gulf oil spill, but his supply of other items from the Gulf has been affected. “We haven’t been getting anything from the Gulf coast lately,” he said. “And we are making it a point to say that our seafood is from Canada or the west coast. We’ve had to change around a few things. We won’t be doing Gulf coast oysters. And shrimp prices are up.”

Asked about the future, Miller said, “The whole market could be disrupted, driving the cost of everything up. But we’ll adjust,” he said. “We do a lot of fresh fish from Canada. It will probably limit some of the specific species we can offer – we won’t be doing Gulf snapper. But we do have Alaskan halibut right now. We are seafood heavy and we always will be.”

Martha Boggs, the proprietor of Bistro at the Bijou on Gay Street said her whole philosophy of food is evolving and the Gulf crisis plays into it. “The only fish on our regular summer dinner menu is farm raised catfish,” she said. “We are moving toward local and organic food. That’s what I want to eat, so that’s what I want to serve.

“When we serve fish other than catfish, it will be tilapia or haddock or white fish of some kind. We will look for the kind of fish that grow more quickly than others and get to eating size quickly. We are moving toward the kinds of fish that are sustainable. There is no reason for anyone to be eating swordfish or Chilean sea bass or orange roughy. And the shrimp raised in China? Well it’s just nasty. You don’t want to know how it is raised.”

Cherokee Country Club

On the other hand, one of my very favorite chefs, David Pinckney from Cherokee Country Club is unfazed. “Only two percent of the fish supply comes from the Gulf,” he said. “It is not affecting us at all.” When asked about shrimp, he shrugged. “We get our shrimp from China and Thailand. It’s good. It tastes like lobster!”

OK. So there you have it. I think I’m going to go eat a veggie burger now. (Just kidding.)