How Steven Wong Moves 80,000 Pounds of Lobster a Week — Vendors

selling lashes is definitely a complicated process [Music] i've eaten so much options in my life i can actually taste the difference in where they are i caught it my name is steven my company is aqua best and my job is to source the best seafood for chefs and restauranteurs do i have any nicknames um the seafood sorcerer come here and pick this one up [Music] a lobster is not just a lobster a lobster is just like a diamond there's different cuts there's different grades there's different size there's different areas where you catch lobster has different qualities certain times of the year in maine is a little bit better and massachusetts is a little bit better or canada is even better you must go through millions of pounds from different areas and figure out what area has the best lobster and what time of the year has the best quality of the lobster we used to go through about 60 to 80 000 pounds per week on a holiday week we can go up to 150 to 200 000 pounds of lobsters there's many types of lobsters in the world but there is one which we are familiar in the northeast that's the american lobster or homarus americanus it's with the two claws for the pandemic we were servicing over 175 restaurants just in new york city itself we can basically ship to anywhere in the world in less than 24 hours even singapore which has the longest flight like 19 hours japan korea china spain france and italy all over the world so alaska is just not a lobster these are your greek branzinos so they want a backside butterfly it's it's not hard it's just different so we'll just do a couple how to cut off the gills the fins we always have to improvise our tools this is actually a fabric sheer we're not just the restaurants fish longer i mean we'll do as you say we'll customize anything for you and i'm trying to make at least work as possible for the chefs and the prep guys in the in the restaurant i think just through trial and error i figure what's the easiest way to kill a fish you have to sort of develop your own style or you kind of have to adapt [Applause] so cutting fish is also about repetition and feel you got to feel where the bones are backside butterfly let's do two simple cuts and then you'll have just a spot i used to do this a long time ago but since the pandemic you kind of have to do everything all over again which is great i do miss cutting fish sometimes very clean very simple that's my brother every night my brother free man he goes to owen's face market morning around 10 p.m to 2 a.m we'll check his email he'll see what the orders are for the restaurants restaurants do like to have all their deliveries as early as possible in the morning right now there's about like four or five thousand pounds of seafood right now due to the pandemic outdoor seating rain knows everything is dependent on the weather pattern the restaurant tours are just like us seafood people we got to look at the weather to determine if we are able to sell anything fresh ice is important every day [Applause] so here's freeman he's my brother he looks like me with glasses everybody in the market knows him and he deals with all the chefs good morning this is jimmy what's up guys he does a lot of my lobster buying in canada hey jimmy how's it looking looks like money no you gotta say 81. he handles all my lobsters you got fish you got pen you got this trick [Music] family business he's my nephew he's my other right-hand man even though he looks younger he knows almost everything about lobster as much as i do i have a couple guys over here that's great team many of them been with me over 10 years there's a giant tile fish over here we're gonna stake that in today kingfish [Music] one of these caravel jack when people say i can't find stuff i'll try to find them whatever they want yeah one person asking for like that specific fish he looks more than 25 pound but he's pretty heavy cermak is just the brand when you have really fresh salmon there's almost this smell that's almost like watermelon i can't describe it these are really beautiful coffees louisiana's mudbugs i got everything i have seafood from around the world in new york city we sell almost every variety of seafood but our main specialty is lobsters we can hold about seven thousand pounds of losses over here only the best quality comes in here so people can hand pick their own lobsters in our tanks we always separate by region and size i have customers who prefer new brunswick lobsters this is a canadian hardshell you can tell by the striations over here it's nice and dark and imagine this is a sea floor and this lobster is walking and the claws are heavier so they're actually dragging their claws onto the floor these are pi lobsters peis majority of the times you can't really see as much on the bigger ones we call them popeyes because they tend to have bigger claws and smaller tails nova scotia lobsters over here some main lobsters up here and i also have massachusetts lobsters down there as well we keep our waters about 36 to 38 degrees lobsters are carnivorous and they will eat each other so once you hibernate them they won't be as active so the secret to keeping good lobsters is to have cold cold water our standard for a lobster crate is 100 pounds net weight almost everyone in my company by just lifting a crate we can really tell if it's overweight or underweight we just do it so much that we really know this guy is dangerous sometimes they can't unband it when we get lobsters from the fishermen if there is one female big lobster unbanded you put in a crate they will pretty much tear off every single other claw don't mess around it does hurt i mean if you're dealing with millions of pounds every year you're gonna get caught one time i'll show you the difference between a male and a female lobster on this this hand is a male and this hand is the female you'll see that the side flares out a little bit more to protect the eggs if you look at the first appendage this is a male you can tell by this is a hard fin on the female this is a softer bin that's a female this is a pei lobster but an old shell in any lobster there's actually a line down the middle you can see that it's starting to split over here so between spring and summer when the water temperature turns about 58 degrees they know i need to change shells now that's how you get soft shell lobsters every year when i pick a lobster out i like to see that it has nice dark colors on the bottom side of the claw just because i know the old shell of hard shell lobster on your main soft shell lobsters you cook 100 pound of lobster you might get 11 to 14 pounds if you cook 100 pound of canadian lobster you'll get 22 to 24 pounds for chefs food costs everything and this is something we need to be very wary about we need to keep them happy and give them the best product these are your new york chicks the bigger in size we're gonna bring these over to the district right now and uh we'll see you there chef omar how are you how are you good what's going on baby how are you doing sir you got your main calls today these came down last night from down east main so it's really when it's like down east main is actually the tip of maine the northern part of maine so this area and all these islands have really good rocky bottoms where a lot of these lobsters have a sweeter taste right so these came in the last night literally they're from the ocean to you going into the weekend about 150 a day going into the weekend we usually go about maybe three to four last week was quite busy you almost ran out so we're trying to up it a little bit we'll wait about 15 minutes getting nice and cold and then we'll uh put a couple lobsters up here break them down get the meat out we'll show we do a couple cocktails which is a split lobster in the shell we'll just crack the claws so people can get into the meat and then we'll break the lobsters completely down and we take that lobster meat out waiting for our lobster roll the other trick that you can do most people will crush it this way i know that's the consensus but i actually push if you can see from this angle up or like that push down a little bit oh that's perfect that's the road right to me that's my favorite part perfect great awesome perfect top this is our meat that we just got from downstairs so we're looking for five ounces worth of meat there you go i'm generous today what do you think about a lobster is you definitely want to toast either side to have the bun warm take a little bit of old bay mayonnaise big dice because people want to see the meat key thing right here is clarified butter last little bit we do a little celery seed on the top homemade bun plenty of lobster little salad tastes great every single lobster that we've gotten we actually have to decorate and create it right one by one we have to put on the scale one by one we have the feel for the firmness the hardness really you're good we actually do our quality control is pretty much the best my mother and father they started this business when i was just a baby my father passed away when i was eight coming from the ground up being poor we used to eat leftover for three days in a row and working as a kid i remember eight nine years old you get off of elementary school and around 2 30 3 o'clock and we used to work until midnight every day even as a kid just to help out the family and it went on for years until we actually got a stable footing to make you know ends meet and we saw that uh doing safe it was lucrative i mean it kept the bills going so we kept on building upon that and since that was our only lifeline we actually put all our energy into it and that just became a passion for us to really hone our craft and be really good seafood people so just came off the boat it's been purged today so looks like these are clean and just give it a little soak and they should be ready for service this is funny now but when you're younger you don't understand but now that i'm older i do appreciate you know the stuff that i went through and i think a lot of people don't realize how hard work you need to put in to get to where you are success is not just instantly overnight you have to build upon it layer by layer by layer so right now we're just setting up stations for different grades every size we'll have a different crepe and this way after we finish we're going to color code them so we're going to take some lobsters off check for heart lobsters check for firm lobsters and then we're going to grate it by size we're very meticulous on the sizing because lots of different restaurants they want to use place specific ones food cost is important so we actually scale everything one by one over here you have your traditional in-ground tank it's almost built like the style that it had in maine but the difference is that we built the in-ground same thing a self-circulation tank we're landlocked so all our water is from the ocean on this tank right now and we build a bio filter we'll have the water sucked down go into a pump go to a compressor shoot out out of a protein skimmer we made this ourselves we figured out the math to make it as good as possible to be efficient and in this tank right here we can hold about 25 000 lapses you know we do handle a lot of lobsters throughout the year but i'm still a very hands-on owner i do like to hand deliver stuff still [Music] i got firm show lobsters and i got some hard shell lobsters i still need to feel a lobster like is this quality up to spec i need to see if my guys are packing it correctly if they're not packing correctly i need to make sure that hey you got to change this out you're not doing it correctly let's give them the best losses take it back we got to do something about this experience is everything in the seafood business you need years and years of experience years and years of practice you need to take a little bit of this guys what they say a little bit of what this fisherman says and put it all together to make your own assessment i know chefs try to recreate or mimic a flavor or or dish somewhere that they have seen before or they've tasted somewhere when they travel it out but i think one of the key ingredients in cooking is fresh ingredients it's what kind of ingredients you get when you get it so you can create the best dish and that's something we we try to do for every restaurant and every chef [Music] there's definitely people who are smarter than me in lobsters but i think i'm uh i'm probably not one percent it's a never ending story but i'm still learning even if you wash your hands and you're about to head home and you think you don't smell and you go home and you take the elevator or something and then you start smelling something weird as yourself

Channel: Eater

Views: 1,404,497

Rating: 4.9106851 out of 5

Keywords: Lobster, best lobster, best lobster nyc, best lobster usa, where to buy lobster nyc, how to buy lobster, how to pick lobster, fresh lobster, lobster market, lobster market nyc, aqua best seafood market, seafood market, fish market, nyc fish market, nyc seafood market, lobster sourcer, lobster sourcerer, eater, eater.com, food, restaurant, dining, dish, foodie, chef, food show

Id: HTHw53tZHUE

Length: 17min 9sec (1029 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 02 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/EtchandFletch]

When he mentioned the lobster roe was my favorite part. Seafood roe is so healthy and underrated, sturgeon caviar is not where it's all at. Mentaiko is my favorite overall.