Can Chefs Cozy Up to Frozen Fish?

"Some people are of the thought, 'You buy farmed fish; that's terrible,' " Katz said. "We're definitely educators in the community. I think it's so important to teach local people about this, especially when it comes to fish."

Chefs such as White Dog Cafe's Andrew Brown in Philadelphia try to split the difference. During the summer, the cafe sells black fish, bluefish, striped bass and weakfish caught in New Jersey, along with oysters and clams from nearby Cape May. Brown serves salmon that was caught and frozen in Alaska and shipped by boat, but sometimes he offers fresh fish that has been air-freighted from more far-away locales.

"I'm not going to say that I don't buy some fish from Hawaii or even Tobago now and then, but we do try to maintain a good balance between sustainable and local," the executive chef wrote in an e-mail.

Although several prominent chefs and caterers have embraced the idea of using more frozen fish, not everyone wants to. Kona Blue Water Farms President Neil Sims, whose Hawaii-based company farm raises a yellowtail it has dubbed "Kona kampachi," sells to Hook and other high-end restaurants in cities including Los Angeles, Chicago and Dallas. Those places pay for Kona Blue to ship its product by air.

"We've encountered low-level resistance because fresh sells, particularly in seafood," Simms said. "Restaurants are not opposed to frozen fish. They are just more willing to pay a premium for fresh. 'Fresh' is the single most powerful adjective in describing seafood."

It's a mentality that applies to customers and the people who serve them. Chef Rick Moonen, who runs his restaurant RM Seafood in Las Vegas, noted during the seafood conference that patrons in that land-locked city consume 60,000 pounds of shrimp each day, more than the rest of the country combined.

"When you're in the middle of a desert, in a place we call Sin City, talking about sustainability, it's a challenge," he said.

But in some cases, suppliers are responding to the demands of their more politically correct and influential customers, such as Bon Appetit. Helene York, director of Bon Appetit Management Co. Foundation, said her company judges fish by quality rather than by whether its temperature has dipped below zero. Not all fresh fish is equally good fish, she said, just as there are quality differences among frozen fish. Her suppliers are now learning that air freighting is going out of style, she said.

"We are saying, 'Look, if you're bringing us fresh fish, let's have it be tilapia from Central America,' " York said. "They're finally getting it."