I tire quickly with the philosophy and want to get on to the fun, concrete stuff... like where in the heck are we going to get all this fun, local(ish) food for the restaurant? I'm going to post occasionally on a possible vendor that we may or may not end up using. I'd like the collection of posts to end up being a sort of catalog for us, so that when the day comes, we can go back and look at the long list of vendors to choose which of them will be best for us to work with.

And up first, we have Catalina Offshore. I think I originally heard of them from a friend who has a Japanese friend who makes sushi at home. I was having a sushi party and she mentioned Catalina Offshore to me. (I thought it might have been an oil drilling company.) Then I think they may have come up on The Linkery's blog. And again, I was searching on the internet for local food and they popped up. When it comes to fresh, high quality fish in San Diego, they are the biggest fish in the sea. You can also buy from smaller distributors or directly from fisherman. Maybe I can meet some of them in the future.

With no appointment, I walked in and explained my interest in learning about their business. Alain Leroy gave me a tour of their processing facility and told me about the company. So what does processing facility of the king of seafood look like?

Okay, it's just a nondescript warehouse off of Morena Boulevard north of Old Town. Now here are some photos of the inside.

Okay, that's a photo of the inside of a fish... now for some photos of the inside of the warehouse.

Catalina Offshore sells to some of the most discerning fish buyers, notably to Zenbu Sushi. Dave Rudie, a sea urchin diver, started the company about 25 years ago. He and his family processed the catch in the evenings and made deliveries the next day. This grew and he has transformed the business in to one of the largest seafood import and export companies in California. They now have more than 60 employees and a 16,000 square foot processing plant.

They purchase from fisherman who work the waters of Southern and Baja California. Most fishing is done with hand lines which is more environmentally friendly than other methods. Catalina Offshore knows the fisherman and trains them in handling procedures to assure freshness.

I was interested to learn that the large majority of their sales are to restaurants and distributors outside of San Diego. The small part of their sales that is in San Diego is mostly to sushi restaurants who come and pick up the seafood at the warehouse. But for most of their customers, Catalina Offshore is not a local company that they can easily visit or get to know personally. They buy from them for the quality of their product. I get a little "go home team!" feeling when I think about this, but I also feel lucky to live in a place where I can personally go out and experience what the ocean has to offer.

Speaking of personally experiencing the ocean, here's the true test of a distributor... When I asked if I could meet some of the fisherman and take pictures, they said that it wouldn't be a problem. There was no fear of me cutting out the middleman or discovering something about how they operate that would turn me off. Hopefully I'll get a chance to go fishing with them some day!