Profiles

Cindy Walter

Along with husband and chef Ted, Cindy Walter is the co-owner of Passionfish, a sustainable seafood restaurant in Pacific Grove, California. In addition to the freshest seafood, the ever changing menu offers slow cooked meats, farm fresh organic greens, and delectable house-made desserts, complemented with a Wine Spectator award winning wine list. A vocal advocate for sustainable seafood education, Cindy has dedicated her restaurant and volunteer hours to the cause, earning recognition along the way for the restaurant's environmentally friendly business practices and environmental advocacy. Cindy was named a 2008 Seafood Champion Award finalist.

What is your favorite seafood?
I love our local Monterey Bay spot prawns. They can only be caught using traps and are such a delicacy. I never know when I’m going to get them and love the phone call that they are on their way in. I love the few fishermen still catching them and find the spot prawns to be incredibly versatile. Ted does everything with them from the grill, sauté and the fryer. But there's just so much romance in them to me.

What’s the most popular seafood item offered on the menu at Passionfish?
Our menu is always changing. Almost daily, definitely driven by mother nature, so that’s such a tough question. I’d say salmon when its in season is always popular, but our local patrons love fresh Monterey Bay squid [California market squid] fried with the tubes & tentacles with the spicy orange cilantro dipping sauce. And Ted's crab cakes have a huge following as do the scallops...

How did you get interested in the issue of sustainable seafood?
Well I didn’t know what ‘sustainable’ meant initially. My father was a commercial hook-and-line fisherman for more than 40 years, and his father before him. I was the epitome of the wharf rat. My father used to walk my brothers and I up and down the wharf and show us the draggers' nets full of mud & tires, and the fishermen would be sewing up holes from tearing it on the bottom, and he’d tell us those nets were destroying the bay. I was so little and those nets were like monsters to me. I didn’t quite understand it, but I can remember the worry of the hook & line fishermen. I learned to clean fish standing on an upturned 5 gallon bucket between my brothers on the wharf and those were great times for me. We floated on tractor tire intertubes and watched basking sharks when they came into the bay. I think the thing that really struck me was reading an article as an adult in National Geographic that a basking shark had not been seen in Monterey in almost 20 years. That was just a devastating moment for me, that I wouldn’t share those gentle giants with my children.

When we opened the restaurant, the influx of farmed salmon was driving the prices of wild salmon down and many of my father's friends who were still in the fishing industry were unable to sell their catches, unable to make boat payments and their families were really suffering. It was really difficult to see and struck very close to home for me. I refused to purchase the farmed salmon, without even knowing the environmental issues at that point. It was more an issue of trying to sustain the local fishermen. From there it just kept going, the East Coast got involved in the [North Atlantic] swordfish campaign and we signed on also, than came along the Chilean seabass boycott. In the meantime, I was refusing to buy anything from a trawl out of my bay, and the Monterey Bay Aquarium was beginning to develop their first Seafood Watch card. Everything just kind of slid together.

How would you describe your philosophy on ocean conservation?
We definitely believe the ocean should be conserved for future generations. It's our last wild hunting ground. It also produces the majority of our planet's oxygen. We believe that aquaculture, outside of shellfish, belongs in contained ponds, not in the ocean. If we don’t continue to create marine protected areas and manage our watersheds in better ways we won’t leave much for our children.

How does your philosophy effect the fish served at your restaurant?
As a business owner who derives my profit from serving fish, I believe I have a responsibility to use my business as a platform and vehicle to educate the guests that come through our establishment. Every plate tells a story. Our mahi is from a small artisinal hand line fishery in Ecuador, and the servers love to tell that story and why it's so different from a long line fishery. The tilapia is from a beautiful farm in Ecuador where all the waste is being utilized, being made into glycerin soaps, the vehicles run on biofuels, and the workers all own a part of the farm. The spot prawns are caught by a local fisherman who has lived his whole life here, has 13 traps and at the age of 82 is still trapping. We spend so much time sourcing the fish, knowing who has handled it, as much as we possibly can, where did it come from, what is it like…. My staff read so much about the crisis of overfishing that they asked to have all tuna removed from the menu before I could come to a decision to do that.

Do your customers notice?
Yes, and I’d say 90% of them appreciate it or come here because of it.

Do you feel it limits what you can offer?
Absolutely, it limited Ted’s purchasing by at least 50%. And there are days that he is so frustrated. I am always looking for something new, reading about new aquaculture products, hoping for something that is being done sustainably. There are days that I wonder if we are doing the right thing, and I go into other restaurants and see them serving everything I avoid and I can become so disheartened.

Have your seafood purveyors worked with you on getting sustainably caught seafood?
Yes now more than before. 10 years ago when we first opened it was like pulling teeth. But it's so much better now, we have actual vendors that all they do is source sustainable products.

What trends have you noticed in seafood in the past 10 years?
The move towards sustainability, and that’s so cool!

Why do you support Seafood Choices Alliance?
Because I want to promote sustainability. I want other restaurateurs to know that it's not hard to do, that it's worth making a difference. That there's a lot of us! I want to be able to have a network of other members that I can turn to when I need help, and there's been so many times that I’ve had to pick up the phone and call one of the folks in the office for help.

Posted January 18, 2008

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