There’s an interesting post out of the New Orleans website Nola.com about a restaurant in the city dinged by customers for serving shark fin. Owner and Chef Scott Boswell has included a dish with shark fin broth on the menu of his highly-rated restaurant, Stella!. However, there was a quite an uproar over a recent Times-Picayune review of the restaurant which briefly notes the shark fin on the menu. According to reviewer Brett Anderson, he received a lot of feedback from the review, much of it filled with outrage over the use of the highly controversial and thoroughly unsustainable shark fin ingredient.
“I don’t care how good a chef this Boswell guy is,” one reader said in a voice message, referring to Stella! chef-owner Scott Boswell. “I won’t set foot in a restaurant that has anything to do with something so horrid.”
While I appreciate that Boswell is now serving the dish with a shrimp broth – “I elected to pull it off [the menu] until I can have a better grasp of whether or not it should be there or not,” – what astounds me most is that no one has bothered to comment on the fact that the shark fin is served in a sea bass dish! The beautifully named Japanese Mero Seabass listed is actually just your standard, run-of-the-mill, unsustainabily-caught Patagonian Toothfish (aka Chilean Sea Bass). I appreciate the kerfuffle of shark fin activists, but let’s look at the big picture, folks!
If Alice Waters can step away from her unsustainable seafood habits, so can you.
~Jennifer Heigl