Giving Fish "The Beef Treatment"
At New Orleans's GW Fins, Chef Michael Nelson has mastered the art of fish butchery & dry aging
When GW Fins opened in 2001 in the French Quarter, founders Tenney Flynn and Gary Wollerman wanted a white tablecloth restaurant that treated seafood like steak. The pair had worked together at the Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse chain and felt that seafood wasn’t given the fine dining respect that prime beef commanded.
Chef Michael Nelson, who became the restaurant’s sous chef in 2005 and executive chef in 2016, took that vision and ran with it.
Nelson, a native of Chicago who attended culinary school in the Napa Valley, finds tuna tastier and more exciting than any Wagyu steak. He made it his mission to intensify the umami flavor of the fish at GW Fins, but how? He had a theory: Perhaps dry aging—a technique typically performed on beef or pork in which the meat is placed in a controlled, open-air environment that pulls out moisture and breaks down muscle—could have a similar effect on primal cuts of fish.
“The Japanese have been doing this for centuries,” said Nelson. “The best sushi guys have always known that fresh fish doesn’t have the deepest flavor. They’ll wrap a just-caught fish in kombu (edible kelp) and give it two or three days for the flavor to develop.” When the proteins start to break down, that’s where the flavor comes in, he explained. Dry aging allows the flavors to concentrate while allowing the moisture to escape.
“I realized that only twenty-three to forty-five percent of a fish was being used [at GW Fins]. The rest was going into the garbage. It would be like cutting the breasts off a chicken and throwing the rest away.” —Chef Michael Nelson
Nelson started experimenting with aging during the early days of the pandemic, when the restaurant was closed for dining and only doing to-go. He had dry aging lockers adapted for primal cuts of fish, programmed to keep the temperature below freezing, about twenty-nine degrees, and at a specific humidity level, while the air inside was circulated through UV light. Every five minutes the temperature and humidity would be monitored. If anything should go wrong, Nelson received an alarm on his phone, day or night. “There was a lot of trial and error,” he said. But ultimately, his efforts were rewarded. He quickly discovered that the process radically improved the texture and flavor of his fish, creating a new kind of seafood umami.
The key, said the chef, is starting with the freshest fish, caught in the past twenty-four hours or so.
Beef is dry-aged for a minimum of three weeks after processing. The sweet spot Nelson landed on for a 150-pound slab of blue fin tuna is about two weeks. Swordfish ages best in nine or ten days. But even just a few days in the case renders skin crisp, sans the usual amount of moisture. “A good example is golden tile fish,” said the chef. “The skin is normally inedible, too thick to eat. Dry aged for four or five days, it puffs up like a cracklin’—delicious.”
The combination of butchering whole fish in-house, which Nelson’s been doing for more than a decade, and dry aging allows him to buy a lot more fish and serve it over a longer period of time. Nelson, a nationally recognized expert on Gulf seafood, has reduced food waste at his restaurant dramatically.
“I realized that only twenty-three to forty-five percent of a fish was being used [at GW Fins]. The rest was going into the garbage. It would be like cutting the breasts off a chicken and throwing the rest away.” Although it takes more space, time, and manpower to break down an entire fish, the result—to Nelson—is worth it, from culinary, economic, and sustainability standpoints alike.
“It’s like they are asking me for a shopping list before they go out on the water. They know where certain species of fish hang out, and they go get them and bring them to me that day or the next. This is the ultimate way to source seafood.” —Chef Michael Nelson
Butchering allows the chef to utilize less-traditional parts of the fish, like the flavorful belly or the collar around the neck and throat. This raises the yield as high as sixty percent for a single red snapper. “That’s forty percent more than we were getting,” he said. His tempura fried fish “wings,” served with a sweet spicy Korean glaze, are a case in point: tender white meat with a fin “handle” that utilizes what used to be waste. “We take the wings off every fish that we can— drum, sheepshead, red snapper. It’s one of our most popular menu items.”
The goal, always, is honoring the fish by using as much of it as possible. “I felt that the word 'sustainable' was losing its meaning, so I go with our own definition,” said Nelson. “To us, true sustainability is taking our capital and supporting people as directly as possible to sustain them in their efforts to do what they’re doing, when they’re doing it right. And we pay them well, to make sure they keep doing it. It’s not about a green sticker on a box.”
Another of Nelson’s projects is swapping seafood out for the usual cured meats on charcuterie platters, think sea-cuterie, made from every part of the 700-1000 pounds of fish that’s butchered in-house at GW Fins daily.
“Because we get so much fish in all at once, there might be forty or fifty pounds of scraps,” Nelson said. His team has discovered that, with no changes in a recipe at all, they can swap pork out for swordfish to make andouille and smoked sausage, mortadella and bacon. Even the skin, such as that on the Golden Tile fish, is transformed into crispy fish cracklins’.
“This is exciting for people who don’t eat pork,” he said. “Also, because we swap out saturated fats with Omega three fatty acids, there’s zero guilt. We’re still working to get the program to the next level.”
At GW Fins, Nelson writes the menu by 4 pm every day, ensuring that there’s always something new and different to entice his strong community of regulars. Because he works so closely with legions of spear fishermen, it’s not unusual for a fisherman to knock on the back door and deliver a just-speared cobia and a couple of barracudas.
“This is a way to support the fishermen directly,” he said. He has developed strong relationships with local fishermen who specialize in spearing their catch and know exactly what he is looking for—even going so far as calling him to get his “order” before they embark on their trips.
“It’s like they are asking me for a shopping list before they go out on the water,” he said. “They know where certain species of fish hang out, and they go get them and bring them to me that day or the next. This is the ultimate way to source seafood.”
Some varieties of fish Nelson has been able to secure for his daily changing menu include triple tail, cobia, black fin tuna, and sheepshead. “When there’s a rodeo, like the annual lionfish rodeo, the word is out. Those guys know who will buy it.”
“Most of what we serve is from Louisiana,” said the chef. “The only state that has more tuna and swordfish than we do is Hawaii, and only Alaska produces more pounds of seafood than Louisiana. We really have it all here.”
By bringing the fishermen into the conversation, the team at GW Fins possesses a deeper knowledge about the fish they are serving than ever before. Before the fish lands on the customer’s plate, Nelson knows where it was swimming, when it was speared, and which dock checked it in. He logs when the fish is butchered and when it starts the aging process.
Regulars in the know have the zeal of the converted, hungry for the taste of that aged tuna tomahawk rib eye. Simply wood-grilled, the perfectly medium rare tuna is fork-tender, but dense with meaty flavor, finished with a drizzle of black garlic bearnaise and Nelson’s housemade Worcestershire sauce.
Although he can’t always guarantee a slab of aged tuna on the bone, fanatics for the Wagyu of the sea can count on the full moon, which determines when many of the boats go out. “If you follow the lunar calendar, count two weeks from the full moon and you’ll be in prime time.”
Besides being sustainable, butchering the whole fish and aging primal cuts is profitable, a fact Nelson’s trying to use to ultimately influence how seafood is processed. “Once they understand there’s money in it, things will start to change,” he said. “We’re missing out on the best parts of all this fish. My regular customers don’t even want a filet anymore.”