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Some exciting Monday morning news just out from Terroir, the not-for-profit hospitality industry organization founded by Toronto’s Arlene Stein. Here it is: the law that prevented Newfoundland & Labrador chefs from buying fresh fish from local suppliers has been lifted.
I had the good fortune of taking part in Terroir’s One Fish Mission to Newfoundland last May, and wrote about it for the fall issue of Taste & Travel Magazine.
The frustration of many Canadian chefs was passionately expressed last spring – including from celebrated chefs like Jeremy Charles of Raymonds and Todd Perrin of Mallard Cottage, St John’s chefs who, until now, were banned from buying fresh seafood plucked from local waters.
The new rules allow for the direct sale of finfish, live crustaceans, squid, seal meat and scallop meat, up to 300 lbs per species, per week, directly from harvesters. The license to purchase unprocessed whole fish will cost a restaurant 50 bucks, according to the announcement made by Fisheries and Aquaculture Minister Vaughn Granter.
Writes Terroir: “Until September 29th, 2015, chefs in Newfoundland and Labrador were prevented, by law, from buying fish and seafood directly from the fishers whose ships were docked literally 20 feet from their restaurants. This week, in St John’s, legislative changes were announced that will give the province’s chefs direct access to the local Atlantic harvest, via wharf-to-restaurant sales. This means they can finally offer diners more diverse native species in their freshest form—taking their share in a local harvest largely earmarked for international markets and taking advantage of the healthy and delicious fish that harvesters working through processing plants uniquely would previously have been forced to discard as by-catch.”
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