There’s a lot of buzz about Dock to Dish at the best restaurants locally and around the globe, but it started right here, with some local fishermen and the dream of a community-supported fishery.
Now the movement and the original Dock to Dish company itself have moved into global waters, reducing carbon footprints worldwide by serving the catch of the day, and working with the Cayuga Collection, a consortium of hotels committed to both luxury and ecological sustainability.
Sean Barrett, one of the company’s founders, took the time to speak with James Lane Post.
Sean, how did Dock to Dish begin?
First, I have to pay homage and give credit to where I got the idea from originally, from local community-supported agriculture: Quail Hill in Amagansett. That’s just the oldest CSA in the country.
For years growing up we’d seen the problems happening in food and an industrialized food system, and how Scott Chaskey and his CSA at Quail Hill was reconnecting the community directly to the farm, realigning people with seasonal, local, all these important fundamentals that had been lost.
And that were very difficult to reintroduce to people, because they’d become accustomed to ordering whatever they want.
So I got Scott’s book, “This Common Ground,” and it talks about the interconnectedness of things, life on an organic farm, but he gets into some of the mechanics of a CSA. And I just had a little light bulb went off in like 2010 or ’11, that I was like, “What if we took Scott’s idea of a CSA and made a community-supported fishery?”
I went straight to Scott. It was a cold March day and we talked it all through and at the end, he’s like, “I can’t see a reason why it wouldn’t work.” So we started.
Who was on board first? No pun intended.
Quail Hill; people were coming to get their vegetables and their fish. The channels were already grooved for people to understand that now seafood was going to behave the same way that Quail Hill’s vegetables did.
The whole idea was basically translating farm-to-table into dock-to-dish, community-supported agriculture into community-supported fishery, to know your farmer and to know your fisherman.
How did Dock to Dish expand from communities to restaurants?
The whole restaurant-supported fisheries version of this was born out of crisis. Joe Realmuto and Mark Smith got involved, Jason Wiener got involved, there’s about a half-dozen local guys, but mostly Realmuto and Smith. They just totally embraced it — at Nick and Toni’s we were having a lot of good, fun events with those guys. We’d bring everyone out fishing with us.
And Dan Barber from Blue Hill at Stone Farms, he was just a key to all of this.
What we realized was the two big expenses that were killing us at a community level were labor and waste. But if the restaurant takes the whole fish, all the labor and the expense for breaking down fish already lives in their kitchens, it’s already there, right? So that’s labor. The restaurants didn’t have really any waste. They used the racks, the cheeks, the collars, the skins.
So what we realized was that that business model then worked. And as we realized that, a half-dozen other community-supported fisheries across the country, who had also started to fail because of the expenses, reached out to us and were like, “Oh my God, can you help us create a restaurant program like you guys have, where they just take whole fish straight to the restaurant?”
And so I went to Dan Barber and he said, “Well, what do you need?” I said, “If we had 16 or 20 restaurants, it could work. But I don’t know 16 or 20 restaurants who are going to be able to take 100 pounds of unknown, whole fish every week dropped on their doorstep.”
So he called Eric Ripert, Thomas Keller, at that time April Bloomfield. It was serious A-list chefs and restaurants. He came out of his office two hours later with 16 of the best chefs in New York City and goes, “They’re all ready for deliveries next Wednesday,” and I was like, “Holy shit.”
So how did that translate to more of a global reach?
On that foundation we were able then to solve a lot of the problems that everyone across the country had, and all over the place — Fiji, South Africa — suddenly people were like, “How are you guys actually able to get people to pay in advance for a season’s worth of seafood, and to be willing to just accept whatever is coming off the dock that day?” But once we started to build momentum, people were like, “Dude, if it’s not Dock to Dish…” Because what you’re gaining in quality, freshness, transparency, that ended up outweighing people’s right to demand.
How would you define sustainable fishing?
If you see a fish name that’s printed in ink on a menu, and they just have that every day, it’s a very unnatural thing. It’s only in the last 100 years that humans and restaurants have been able to put a wild creature, anything, on a menu and say, “That’s our menu for the next three months. We’re going to have this every night.” But any of the Dock to Dish members, you’ll see that their seafood, it just says “market catch,” “catch of the day,” or, “Dock to Dish special.” It’s unknown. It’s the lighter harvested seafood — not cod or sole, or apex predators like tuna and swordfish. There’s a lot less of them in the pyramid.
Give an example of some of those species that are lighter harvested.
Butterfish is a great example, different types of mackerel that are very abundant, hake, whiting, golden tile fish. Some of them are now becoming a little more popular or known, but are not really well known from a marketing perspective. A lot of the marketing stuff is just words. Like Patagonian toothfish being turned into Chilean sea bass.
So okay, then I assume that all of this somehow got the ear of Cayuga.
So Cayuga was founded by a very cool couple, Hans Pfister and Andrea Bonilla, his partner, and she’s Costa Rican. They got their master’s in hospitality from Cornell together, and they went to Costa Rica and began creating authentic, ecologically sound tourist and travel experiences for people in a world of greenwashing, a tsunami wave of sustainable travel crap. They came up with a code of ethics and put forth a mission and built a very good team, Jorge Arrieta and a bunch of guys who were just honest, hardworking, good folks.
So, once again, Dan Barber. The Johnsons, who owned Harmony Hotel in Nosara, Costa Rica, which was managed by Cayuga, were having dinner at Blue Hill, and the staff would come out and do a full explanation of how Blue Hill was a member of the Dock to Dish restaurant-supported fishery program in Montauk, how that worked, where the seafood came from, who caught it. And then Dan would knock the people’s socks off with this incredibly fresh seafood. So the Johnsons, I guess, asked Dan, “What’s this seafood system you have?” And he was like, “Oh. My friend Sean has this program called Dock to Dish…”
And at that same time, Hans and Andrea at Cayuga were researching how to solve all these problems they were having with seafood, “How do we solve this problem at our hotels and get our ‘food miles’ down, and get reintroduced to the fishery?” This was in 2015, I believe. So that’s how it got started.
What have you learned?
It was a humbling experience. We thought we were these pioneering, entrepreneurial inventors at first. But when we really started to work internationally — Costa Rica, Fiji, Nicaragua, Panama — the local fishing communities were looking at us like, “Dude, that’s the Indigenous practice that’s been going on here for a thousand years.”
It showed us how far we had deviated from the basics. What Scott Chaskey originally predicted from the beginning was this full circle concept — the interconnectedness of just the basic, fundamental Indigenous philosophies and roots that humans used to survive for thousands of years. At the end of the day, that the most sustainable way forward is actually to look further back.
Is there some measurable way to know if what you are doing is changing the paradigm, even in a very small way?
We always say treat the disease and not the symptoms. You exhaust yourself trying to treat the symptoms. And the symptoms of the system are many. And high carbon footprint, depleted fish populations, low pay for fishermen, fish fraud. But I think what I’ve seen and what I’ve heard repeated back to me from everyone, from Dan Barber, to Bonnie Brady at the Long Island Commercial Fishing Association, to Cayuga, to the United Nations, is that there has been a change in mindset. That the most noticeable thing, is that people are actually much more aware. Now, the term dock to dish has been blended into the vernacular, the lexicon of, “Is it dock to dish?” is no longer really talking about us or our operation, it’s more the philosophy and the mentality of like, “Do you know where this came from? Do you have access and transparency to the actual fisherman? Is it seasonal? Is it local?”
What nourishes your soul?
I’m a solution seeker and an eternal optimist. Now we’ve hit, with Dock to Dish, mission accomplished on a lot of levels. If I look back 10 years ago to what we set out, the goals, and we’ve succeeded to a point of obsolescence, where now everyone is doing dock to dish.
So we’ve opened this whole new chapter into Sea to Soil and kelp farming, and how do we connect capturing carbon with kelp farms all around the island, sequestering that, and then burying it into soils to benefit the growth of land plants and increase photosynthesis. Now we’re grappling deeply with how do we solve climate change and carbon capture and things. And so if I zoom out and looked at this whole picture, you can see a pretty defined trend of where I’m finding my joy or my dharma or my fulfillment, is by problem solving and using, basically, the ocean in a way, or resources from the ocean, to try to solve problems that we’re having here on land. I think that’s ultimately what I was put on this planet to do.
To learn more, visit docktodish.com.
