Boston Restaurant to Host Dinner With Blacklisted Seafood

The Boston-based seafood chain Legal Sea Foods will hold a dinner featuring fish that are on some environmental activists' blacklists, specifically the Monterey Bay Aquarium's Seafood Watch list. The meal is an effort to "bring awareness to some of the inherent complexity that exists within sustainability in the seafood industry," and Legal Sea Foods CEO Roger Berkowitz says, "There's no scientific basis for what they [eco-labeling groups] are saying... Restaurants and chefs don't understand any of this when Monterey comes to them." He believes "a lot of people have been brainwashed."

The meal will feature cod, a blacklisted fish which is currently the center of fierce debate as it is an integral ingredient in New England cuisine and a huge part of the region's fishing industry.

The four-course meal, which will also feature tiger prawns and hake, will be served at Legal Sea Foods' Park Square location in Boston on January 24. The full menu consists of "black tiger shrimp fritters, with chick peas, slab bacon, smoked tomato and avocado sauce, cod cheeks with spaghetti squash, toasted pecans, melting marrow gremola, and prosciutto-wrapped hake, with braised escarole, rancho gorgo beans and blood orange marmalade, together with wines."

· Legal 'Blacklist' Meal Backs Fishermen [Gloucester Times]
· All Legal Sea Foods Coverage on Eater [-E-]