Hooked (From The Northern Echo)

Hooked

4:18pm Wednesday 4th May 2011 in Reviews

On a drive through southern California, Alex Finer is lured to a succession of excellent seafood restaurants serving locally-caught produce.

MANY travel California’s celebrated Highway One for the breathtaking views of the Pacific, for Big Sur and Hearst Castle.

Others take surfboards, but for me the real magnet is always the fish.

With my wife and daughter in tow, our route from San Francisco took in Monterey, Santa Barbara, LA and beyond. It’s one of America’s great drives, with superb restaurants at every stop.

At Santa Cruz, with its famous boardwalk and vintage wooden rollercoaster, our base is the Beach Street Inn, a modernised Fifties motel, built around a pool at the quieter end of the front overlooking volleyball games on the sand.

On the pier, jutting half a mile out to sea, fishermen catch rock cod and ling, and always hope for halibut. “The biggest I caught was 65lbs,” one tells me. “I’ve got a picture.” I choose to believe him. Beneath us, harbour seals and sea lions honk approvingly as they rearrange themselves on pontoons and balance on beams between the pilings.

Trawlers lie at anchor in the bay with mesh nets coiled on huge drums. But my waiter, Ken, at Gilbert’s Fire Fish Grill on the pier, says most commercial boats follow the fish to cooler waters further north. Ken serves my cioppino – a fragrant, soupy stew with clams, mussels, squid, prawns, scallop, white fish and Dungeness crab in the shell. And he explains you can fish with a rod from California’s piers and jetties without a $43.50 fishing licence.

Nonetheless, I can’t – and won’t – hire a rod.

My childhood memory is that fishing stops being fun the moment you feel a tug on your line and reel in a flapping vertebrate, eyes glistening, that wants to be back in the water without a hook in its mouth.

At Moss Landing (population 700), rooms are reserved for us at the Captain’s Inn, a cute, well-appointed B&B run by Melanie Gideon. I spot a framed photograph of her husband, Yohn, with a 45lb king salmon caught offshore.

Captain Yohn runs nature tours of the Elkhorn Slough, an inland channel flanked by 3,000 acres of coastal mudflats. This is home to more than 400 different species of fish and birds as well as the lovable, endangered sea otter that eats a quarter of its own weight in seafood each day.

From an open pontoon boat, we watch astonished as a sea otter floats by on its back using a stone it keeps under a flipper to crack open on its stomach a breakfast clam collected from the muddy bottom of the estuary. Here a sub-marine canyon stretches out to sea for 100 miles to a depth of two miles. That’s why this fishing village is home to major research projects that include the life history of dead whales on the sea floor and the development of underwater robot vehicles.

PHIL DiGirolamo, of Sicilian parentage, serves normal-size calamari from a former fish-processing shed between the beach and the harbour that is now Phil’s Fish Market.

He’s a local celebrity – catering for 1,000 customers a day on summer weekends at this outof- the-way restaurant with local petrale sole, sand dabs, rock cod and king salmon. People wait patiently in line to order and pay before they are served on long trestle tables.

In the Monterey Bay Aquarium, happily, fish are very much alive. On the site of a former sardine cannery in the town made famous in Cannery Row by John Steinbeck, the aquarium is also responsible for Seafood Watch, a West Coast guide to sustainable seafood, now embraced by chefs and retailers along the coast.

A colour-coded list of fish is divided into green for sustainable, through amber to red for overfished or caught in ways that harm other marine life or the environment.

We find well-prepared (and sustainable) fish at neighbourhood restaurants such as Passionfish in Pacific Grove (crab cakes and halibut), at upscale hotels such as the Intercontinental (salmon sashimi), and on the Fisherman’s Wharf pier at Abolonetti (squid and sand dabs). At the last-named you can also sample fresh local abalone, an edible sea snail in a mother-of-pearl shell rendered almost extinct by over-fishing over decades.

Sustainable abalone comes from the Monterey Abalone Company located on the neighbouring commercial pier. I clamber down a ladder beneath the pier to inspect their habitat.

Brought from farm hatcheries, they grow slowly over three years or more on a diet of brown kelp and red algae in cages encrusted with barnacles, and are harvested when they reach about a pound in weight.

The 250-mile drive south to Santa Barbara provides thrilling views for which Highway One is rightly celebrated. The road winds over mountain, crosses vertiginous bridges, runs through forest, farmland and past small seaside towns. It hugs the coastline, veering inland only at Morro Bay just past Cayucos, where the pier is lit for night fishing.

Named by a Spanish sailor in 1602, Santa Barbara is an attractive university town with Spanish colonial whitewash and red tile architecture.

Strict city ordinances after a major earthquake in 1925 prevent high-rise building and billboard advertising.

Based at Brisas Del Mar Inn near the beach, I explored the town aboard a Land Shark amphibious bus. This leaves from the promenade lined with palm trees in front of Stearns Wharf, once part-owned by James Cagney, where fishermen reel in stingrays, smelt and mackerel.

After driving past the century-old railway station and the county courthouse, the vehicle heads for the harbour and takes to the water.

Chugging past a bait boat selling anchovies and sardines, we pass a marker buoy occupied by sea lions, and try to count the oil and gas platforms out at sea.

On the balcony at Brophy’s overlooking the harbour, I open proceedings with an oyster shooter served in a shot glass of iced vodka and a horseradish and tomato sauce. Below, on the dock, diver-caught sea urchins destined for Japan are unloaded from nets into cold store.

The following evening, after browsing in the weekly farmer’s night market in State Street, we enjoy Michelin-quality cuisine at Seagrass Restaurant. Signature dishes from chef John Pettitt include a scallop trio – carpaccio, teasmoked and seared – and rock cod with chorizo in a green zebra tomato coulis. All locally caught and sustainable, naturally, and rather delectable with fine wines from neighbouring Santa Rita and Santa Ynez vineyards.

Nearing journey’s end, my appetite survives even the huge portions of coconut shrimp served at tables on the sand at the Paradise Cove Beach Cafe in Malibu. After a wander past the tattoo parlours, jewellery trays, T-shirt shops and medicinal marijuana outlets in Venice Beach, we make it to dinner at the Lobster Pot in Santa Monica.

The restaurant has a commanding view of the pier and the colourful lights of the Ferris wheel, which complements the star dish of scallops with lobster hash and shrimp sauce.

Our final meal is a light lunch, including different types of Pacific oyster, on Wilshire Boulevard at the Santa Monica Seafood Cafe.

There are a few tables in what is otherwise a large, enticing fishmonger’s store displaying fish from around the world.

Started by an Italian immigrant fisherman in 1898, this business is the largest seafood distributor in southern California, with 1,500 client chefs and restaurants. Daily deliveries by refrigerated trucks go to Las Vegas and Phoenix.

Days earlier, on Crystal Cove beach south of LA, I noticed a bare-torsoed, wet-suited diver with a spear gun slung over one shoulder carrying a 12lb calico bass which he’d speared offshore.

The fish is legally off limits to commercial fishermen.

“Good eating?” I’d ask. “You bet,” he replies with a smile.