Bennett: Here’s how those oysters, prawns and fish get to your table
It’s 10 a.m. at King’s Seafood Distribution in industrial Santa Ana and it’s about to be purchasing manager Michael King’s favorite time of day: tortilla delivery.
I watch as a box truck backs into the loading dock at the 15,000-square-foot fish-filled warehouse in Santa Ana and unloads cases of just-pressed Diana’s yellow corn tortillas. Workers help the driver place the tortillas next to more than a dozen pallets, each destined for one of King’s Seafood Co.’s 19 restaurants.
By tonight, the discs of fresh masa will be wrapped around fillets of beer-battered Atlantic cod at Water Grill in downtown L.A., crusted mahi mahi at Sunset Beach’s Fish Camp or grilled swordfish at any of the 11 King’s Fish Houses. Each taco will be made with just-caught fish, which is currently being gutted, cut and prepped in the room next door.
“I like to say it’s magic,” King, who is also the son of the distributor and restaurant group’s founder Sam King, tells me. “At most restaurants you have to order your food from a bunch of different vendors, but with our system, the managers just put the order in by 9 a.m., and 12 hours later, it all shows up and it’s ready to go.”
With a 32-year history of restaurant operation (555 Steakhouse in Long Beach, Lou & Mickeys in San Diego and Pier Burger in Santa Monica are also theirs), King’s Seafood Co. has cornered the West Coast seafood-concept market with everything from fast casual to fine dining options that offer the same quality product through a variety of experiences.
But seafood — the most seasonal protein on earth — is no easy meal to offer. Not only is it more expensive to procure, it’s an often inconsistent product that must be flown long distances and handled properly every step of the way. All this for a shelf life that can be measured in days, not weeks, making logistics for running a seafood restaurant of any price point a mammoth challenge.
After a meal at Costa Mesa’s newly opened Water Grill, I wondered not about the expertly trained chefs who create the high-end restaurant’s exquisite dishes, but about the ingredients. How do 18 different oysters end up on the raw bar menu every day? How did that giant Norwegian king crab come to be swimming in the live tank? And how do black bream from Greece, Dover sole from England and soft-shell crabs from Maryland all get onto the menu at the same place?
As I discovered on my recent tour of King’s Seafood Distribution, every single fin fish (15 to 20 species a day), oyster (at least 20 per day) and live crustacean (from Alaskan king crab to Santa Barbara spot prawns) that gets put on a table at a King’s restaurant started its journey in this warehouse.
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The daily dance that goes on inside King’s Seafood Distribution is a sight to behold.
After the tortilla delivery, Michael King leads me into the production room, or as King’s Seafood Distribution Director Juan Vargas calls it, “The Operation Room.” Nearly 12,000 pounds of fish move through here each week.
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FOR THE RECORD
An earlier version of this article stated that more than 3,000 pounds of fish move through King’s Seafood Distribution each week. The correct figure is nearly 12,000 pounds.
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It’s a cool 39 degrees inside, and a team of professional “operators” are already hunks of fish deep into fulfilling the day’s orders. On one end of the room are whole wild Pacific swordfish and massive wild Alaskan halibuts, plucked straight from the box of sliver ice they’ve been sitting in since they were caught less than 48 hours ago. As the fish move down the production line, they get smaller and smaller, eventually ending up as perfectly portioned fillets.
“If you have 18 different restaurants portioning halibut, you’re going to get it done 18 different ways,” King says. “Here, we’re better and we’re faster.”
King’s Seafood Distribution moved into this warehouse in 2008, after decades of building up a similar operation out of Santa Monica Seafood’s facility. At the time, the company had 15 restaurants where more than than 90 percent of protein sold was seafood — including the highly acclaimed original Water Grill in L.A. (that raw bar!) and nearly a dozen mid-priced King’s Fish Houses. It was more than enough to consolidate purchase orders and justify investing in a fleet of custom delivery trucks.
To this day there are only a handful of restaurant groups that operate their own large-scale seafood distributorships as King’s does. None are on the West Coast.
“It’s definitely easier to work with beef or pork and that’s why not a lot of people are doing this,” King says. “We like that, though. We like that challenge.”
In the shellfish room — where all the clams, mussels and oysters are stored — I learn that the company purchases nearly 3 million oysters each year, buying them in bushels (about 120 per pack) and using their special reshipper certification to divide them into smaller orders for each restaurant.
Near the live tanks (which are maintained to mimic the environment where the product was caught), a tray displays spiny lobsters caught just offshore, a 60-year-old Maine lobster with massive claws and Dungeness crabs that prove their vitality by standing on their hind legs for a fight. King says his crew receive 2,000 pounds of live lobster at a time, which they weigh and individually tag before sending off.
In an adjacent minus-10-degree room that’s by far the largest in the warehouse, all kinds of frozen goods -- including some seafood like shrimp and Chilean sea bass (there’s only a few months a year when it’s fresh) — wait to be “re-freshed” (aka thawed) and sent off.
“One of the things that makes us unique is that we don’t just do frozen, we don’t just do fresh, we don’t just do shellfish. It’s all of it,” King says.
As my tour winds down, another delivery truck arrives, this one from the airport with a portion of the day’s fresh seafood intake. King and Vargas inspect the haul of translucent spot prawns from Santa Barbara, prehistoric looking Norwegian crabs from the Bering sea and live sea urchins from the California coast, thankful that at least so far today, there are no major fires to put out.
Because the most predictable part of working with seafood is that it’s unpredictable.
“We plan for the worst, hope for the best. You have to with seafood because too much changes,” King says. “The weather is an impact, so is international politics sometimes. Anything that can go wrong will at some point. But that’s what makes it so cool. This is the best the world has to offer at it’s peak. We just want to get it out there so our guests can enjoy it.”
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SARAH BENNETT is a freelance journalist covering food, drink, music, culture and more. She is the former food editor at L.A. Weekly and a founding editor of Beer Paper L.A. Follow her on Twitter @thesarahbennett.