What the Water Gives You

There are nearly 3,000 species of seafood in the world. Americans eat about five of them with any regularity, and about 80% of what ends up on restaurant plates comes from foreign imports. What makes that number surprising is that the US is also one of the world's largest seafood exporters. The fish is here. It's being caught. It mostly leaves.
The North Fork sits at the edge of some of the most productive coastal waters on the East Coast. And yet even here, getting genuinely local fish into a kitchen is harder than it should be. A fisherman catches black bass off the North Fork, it gets picked up by a wholesaler, trucked to the city, bought by a distributor, and trucked back out to Long Island to be sold to a restaurant twenty miles from where it was caught. As more independent wholesalers get absorbed by larger corporate companies, the chances of working directly with the people who actually catch it keep getting narrower.

Halyard's Chef Francis has spent years trying to close that gap. He's built a menu that moves away from the usual suspects that includes skate, tilefish, and trout sitting alongside whatever is actually running locally, and we source oysters from four local oyster farms on the North Fork. The goal is a kitchen that reflects where we actually are. Some of it takes work to sell. Francis would tell you that's part of the job.

One of our favorite partnerships is with Jermaine Owens of North Fork Seafood. Jermaine is a Greenport native who knew he wanted to work on the water when he was nine years old. His father was a fish cutter at Cooper's Seafood Store, and watching him break down fish, as Jermaine has said, sparked something that never went away. He spent over 25 years learning to fish and cut fish on North Fork waters before launching North Fork Seafood, a wholesale business built on a simple principle: 95% of what he sells comes from local waters.

Jermaine calls from the boat. He tells us what he's caught, what he's going for, what he thinks he can bring in. We might ask for five black bass, line-caught. He'll try to meet it, but if he comes in with three, that's what goes on the menu. The fish walks in the door hours after it came out of the water. No distributor, no city detour. We buy whole fish, which cuts waste for both of us. The round trip to the city disappears entirely.

The partnership is new: bass just started running, fluke is coming soon, and the menu will move with it. "It's too complicated - that's the honest truth," Francis will tell you. "It's the hardest way to go about it. But it's the right way." Each dish on the menu features locally sourced ingredients, reflecting the abundance of Long Island and the North Fork. That commitment matters. But what it represents matters more: a kitchen that chose the harder way - direct relationships, loose menu descriptions, a willingness to serve three fish instead of five if that's what came in.The supply chain will always pull toward the city. Sometimes you have to pick up the phone instead.

Because sometimes that call comes from the boat.