King salmon scarce; price is steep
Drought-hit fishery sends cost past $30 a pound
Once a summertime Bay Area staple, local king salmon has become a luxury product. With the impacts of the drought and this year’s severely restricted season, it’s now hard to find the fish for less than $30 a plate in restaurants and $30 a pound in the fish case.
There’s no doubt that the salmon situation has been stark for a while, but this commercial season — which started Aug. 1 rather than the usual May — is the worst Tom Worthington has seen in his 35 years in the business.
“There haven’t been big schools of fish. Then there’s a little school of fish and everyone goes after it,” said Worthington, co-owner of Monterey Fish Market in San Francisco and Berkeley. “It’s panning out to be a really tough year. And our sympathies are really with the fishermen.”
Worthington figures this year is already much worse than 2016, when fishermen netted only 614,636 pounds of salmon, compared with an average of 2.4 million pounds during each of the previous three years. Last weekend, fishermen brought him 1,500 pounds, whereas on a normal summer weekend he would easily have access to 10,000 to 15,000 pounds of the fish.
The scarcity has meant that
the price on the boat is the highest Worthington has ever seen, at around $9.50 per pound, before unloading fees, taxes, storage, transportation and distribution. On top of that, the yield of meat on whole fish is 65 percent.
Home cooks can still find king salmon, also known as chinook, but usually at a price. Local seafood markets report selling it at anywhere from $25.95 per pound at Tokyo Fish Market in Berkeley to $32.99 per pound at Marina Meats in San Francisco, though you can find it at some farmers’ markets for less. That means a family of four could easily drop $50 to $60 for a salmon meal at home. For restaurant diners, a king salmon entree with braised chickpeas and green olive and fennel soubise was $36 at Octavia on Tuesday night.
“The price is ridiculous,” said Kenny Belov, co-owner of Fish Restaurant in Sausalito and Two X Sea, a seafood wholesaler. He has been doling out small amounts of fish to customers when he can. Many, however, are instead buying the more abundant wild coho salmon from Alaska. “Since we opened Aug. 1, we haven’t been able to see a consistent supply where it can go on your menu and stay there.”
Local chef Adam Tortosa tried using local king salmon when he opened Robin, his new Hayes Valley sushi restaurant, this summer. It was part of his $79 omakase menu, topped with whipped tofu, confit tomato and Thai basil. But because of price and availability, he’s alternated between using it and Ora King, a New Zealand farmed salmon with high environmental rankings and, he said, good quality — although it’s not as concentrated in flavor or as rich as the wild alternative.
“It’s definitely really expensive,” Tortosa said of the local product. “It’s potentially double the Ora King, and the Ora King is not cheap.”
At Bi-Rite Grocery in San Francisco, the more abundant wild Alaska coho salmon costs $19.99 while local king salmon has stayed at $30.99.
“People ask why it’s so expensive,” said Daniel Creagan, head butcher at the market’s Divisadero location. He sees the question as an opportunity to explain how the drought has impacted the local salmon fishery. He still sells about 20 to 30 pounds of it on Saturdays and Sundays, he said.
“The king is definitely a premium product,” Creagan said. “The coho — it doesn’t have as much fat and as much name recognition. But we offer it for people who want to get the health benefits of wild salmon but can’t afford the $30.99.”
Restaurants loyal to local fish are being creative with what they buy. Amaryll Schwertner, chef-owner of Boulibar and Boulettes Larder in the Ferry Building, said she uses every inch of the fish, serving smaller fillets, scraping the meat off the carcass for appetizers and roasting the bones for broth.
“This is how I look at it: We are so blessed and so fortunate to be able to get wild king salmon,” Schwertner said. “Whatever the price is, we make either an adjustment on the portion size here, or we help people understand why the price is the price.”
Schwertner serves king salmon with cabbage and corn succotash, cannellini beans and roasted shishito peppers for $30 at lunch, and adds smoked king salmon to scrambled eggs with creme fraiche and lemon for $18 at breakfast.
Commercial salmon fishermen are limited to catching fish a minimum of 27 inches in length, which usually means they’re at least 3 years old. The current population of adult salmon was born in the middle of the drought, when warmwater temperatures and low levels in Sacramento River spawning grounds caused die-offs of baby salmon and made it difficult for those that survived to make it to the Pacific Ocean and into adulthood.
An unusually low estimate on the wild salmon population this year caused the California Fish and Game Commission to limit the San Francisco fishery — which officially stretches from Pigeon Point (San Mateo County) to Point Arena (Mendocino County) — to the months of August and September. There was a season south of Pigeon Point from May through June, but an additional closure of what’s called the Klamath Management Zone, which runs from Horse Mountain in Humboldt County to the Oregon border, added to the statewide shortage.
The hope is that the fishery will improve next season or the year after, a few years after the rainy Northern California winters of 2015-16 and 2016-17. For now, Schwertner feels it’s important to keep buying the local fish.
“Those fishermen and those fisheries that are more and more dwindling need to be charging the prices that they do,” she said. Plus, she said, the fish is of high quality this year: “Firm fish, really beautiful color, delicious, soft flavor,” she said. “It’s just been stunning.”