Author: Mildred Bell

Before a restaurant opens, there’s a certain kind of anticipation that develops because of the online renderings that circulate, the whisper campaigns from people who know someone who knows the chef, and the ambiguous promises of something different. For months now, San Antonio has been dealing with that specific tension surrounding SeaSpice. The waiting period ends on June 12. On the fifth floor of the Jefferson Bank Building at 1900 Broadway, Gusto Group, the San Antonio hospitality company behind Toro Kitchen + Bar and Cuishe Cocina Mexicana, is opening SeaSpice. This location is directly on the corridor that has been…

The sea isn’t the first thing you see. The octopus is the culprit. Tentacles limp in the afternoon breeze as they are strung up on a thin line between two whitewashed walls, appearing to be someone’s forgotten laundry. If you’ve never seen it before, it’s a strange sight, but once you realize what it means, it becomes strangely beautiful. In Klima, a small fishing village on the island of Milos, drying octopus on a clothesline is not a tourist attraction. It’s only Tuesday. The unrelenting foot traffic of Mykonos and the breathless coverage of Santorini are not available in Milos.…

Sometimes, even before you taste the food, you can sense that something is wrong in a restaurant. The soda is flat. The fries are delivered cold, almost defiantly so. You wait for a manager who never shows up. That moment has come to define Red Lobster for an increasing number of American diners, and many have made the quiet but firm decision that they will never return. The boycott is not dramatic. There isn’t a single scandal or viral moment. One disgruntled customer at a time, the erosion of trust is happening slowly and steadily across TripAdvisor threads and Yelp…

Even before the door opens completely, you can smell it. Butter, salt, and a slightly briny smell that permeates the walls over time rather than existing in a kitchen. That smell is now only a memory for patrons of a cherished seafood restaurant that served its final bowl of clam chowder on May 31. It wasn’t a big announcement. No farewell campaign, no limited-edition nostalgia menu, no press conference. The store manager, staff members who learned of the closure days before the public did, and a brief note that didn’t quite match the gravity of what it said all quietly…

The fishing villages appear out of the gray like something from a half-remembered dream at a specific point on the road between Halifax and Lunenburg when the Atlantic fog hasn’t completely lifted. The boats have already departed. The smell of salt, engine oil, and a hint of life permeates the docks. It’s not a picture-perfect coast. It’s the real thing, which is better than that. American tourists don’t give the Canadian Maritimes—Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island—nearly the attention they merit. The majority of people who travel north in search of seafood make a stop in Portland, Maine,…

On a Tuesday night in Charleston, South Carolina, there is still a line outside Hank’s Seafood that extends past the sidewalk crack where someone planted a flower in a tin can. This is not a weekend or a festival. That particular detail was not planned. It simply exists. In a city where residents have been concerned about their plates for longer than the majority of American cities have been around, that kind of thing takes place. The topic of America’s top seafood cities is frequently discussed in the same way. Boston receives the first nomination, typically due to its clam…

Between the first and second bites, there’s a moment when a really delicious Maryland crab cake subtly challenges your preconceived notions about seafood. Not in a dramatic, epiphany-on-the-mountaintop sense, but rather a subtle, personal realization that something is actually right here. It’s a sweet crab. The texture is hardly cohesive. Almost nothing stands in the way. The whole point is that simplicity. And for that reason, a recipe consisting of less than a dozen ingredients has reportedly won first place in a Maryland state competition three times in a row. Depending on how many bad crab cakes you’ve had in…

When you enter a seafood expo, you anticipate seeing the usual suspects: shiny salmon fillets, piles of shrimp on ice, and a few scallop vendors trying their hardest to compete. You don’t anticipate receiving something from a Taiwanese business that actually tastes like chicken tender. However, that is precisely what transpired at the Seafood Expo North America in Boston this past March, and it reveals something both unsettling and intriguing about the current state of American food culture. Salmon is not the trend. It’s not shrimp, which for decades has been the go-to seafood for Americans. Making fish completely vanish…

At 3:40 in the morning, the alarm went off, which felt more like being cut off in the middle of something significant than like waking up. By 4:15, I was watching deckhands load bait tanks with live sardines under yellow dock lights on a dock at San Diego Bay while the rest of the city slept. The scent of the boat was a mix of diesel, salt, and a hint of animal. Right away, it seemed like a place where no one was doing anything for anyone. Before dawn, we cleared the bay. The captain remained silent. Someone had left…

A certain type of recipe spreads through the more subdued channel of food people genuinely trusting one another, rather than through algorithms or sponsored posts. It is created on a Wednesday night, shared with a coworker, who then texts it to a friend. In just two weeks, it has spread farther than most viral content ever does. This summer’s dish is cold sesame noodles with crab. Not because it was promoted by a brand. Because those who work as cooks were always making it and talking about it. The recipe’s foundation is not brand-new. For many years, cold sesame noodles,…