Co-owner, Porgy’s Seafood Market, New Orleans
Caitlin Carney calls herself the “Lady Monger.” Her business, Porgy’s Seafood Market, is a purple storefront on a busy corner in Mid-City New Orleans. It feels like a cross between a fish shop, a lunch joint, and a neighborhood bar.
It’s a market with a mission: to reconnect New Orleanians with Gulf seafood. A lot of the fish sold in the city is not from the Louisiana coast. Most shoppers are getting their seafood from big supermarket chains, which don’t always make buying local a priority. And those shoppers often choose the fish that’s most familiar, like salmon or tilapia, which are not from the Gulf of Mexico. Meanwhile, Caitlin says, it’s getting less and less profitable for independent fishers to harvest seafood from the Gulf.
Co-owner, Porgy’s Seafood Market, New Orleans
Caitlin is trying to educate consumers and also trying to make it more profitable for fishers in Louisiana to keep working. One way she does this is by selling bycatch, which is unintended, non-target catch. Often bycatch is thrown away, even when it’s delicious, and the fisher makes no profit.
“We love what we call hot fish, which are hot fish—you know, they’re sexy,” she says. “Whenever we get bycatch, and they come in and they’re gorgeous, we’re like, ‘Damn, that’s a hot fish!’
“One of our favorite bycatch is scorpionfish, which is really fantastic as a sashimi,” she adds. “We got some longtail bass in the other day that I didn’t even know you could get. So, yeah, it’s always an adventure.”
if Caitlin can buy it and then convince her customers that it’s worth trying, that means additional revenue for the fisher.
On rethinking “trash fish”:
“We have the ability to buy four fish of one weird kind that we haven’t heard of, and also educate people on that. To me, the idea of trash fish is really, really frustrating because these fish that we’re bringing in are gorgeous.
“Currently, I work with purveyors. I have trained them to only sell me wild-caught Gulf fish. I get on the phone every morning and I’m like, ‘What came in overnight? Where is it from? Who brought it in?’
“They’ll tell me, ‘Oh, and we have four rosefish and a few yellowtail snappers and a couple longtail bass.’ And I’ll be like, ‘Sure, send them over.’ That’s how I source. When you ask why these things aren’t as present in New Orleans, it’s because it takes a lot of work. You have to really, really—on top of running a business—want to find these things.
“It takes a lot of relationships. It takes a lot of communication, a lot of sending things back, a lot of questioning people that you trust. And so I think for the restaurant business, it’s just too much.
“Porgy’s Seafood Market feels more important than anything else we’ve done because it is about creating a direct line between fishers and the community and also trying to be a community center for seafood, education, and access.”
On changing attitudes:
“I have noticed, in the year that I’ve been running the shop, the change in the way the community reacts to new fish. When we first opened, it was like, ‘Do you have redfish?’ Which is something that we don’t ever carry because it’s not commercially fished in Louisiana. At first we were like, ‘No, but we have black drum.’ And then it turns into, ‘No, but we have these fish that are very similar. And the reason we don’t have it is because all the redfish you see in New Orleans is from Texas and it’s farm raised.’
“Now that there’s confidence in what we’re providing them, and there’s also confidence in the fact that they’ve cooked other species, other than the ones that they’re used to, people will just be like, ‘OK, I’ll try that.’
“That, to me, proves that we can make change. It didn’t take that long. It’s just about being open and kind to everybody that’s asking these questions and understanding that we all can be ignorant. We just need to be open-minded about learning.”
To read the introduction to this series, follow this link.
Still Here: Stories from a fragile coast
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A Peace of My Mind on Buzzsprout
Credits:
Interview and text: Barry Yeoman
Photos: John Noltner
Editing and production: summer interns Kate West, Sawyer Garrison, and Kaitlin Imai
Audio engineering: Razik Saifullah