Author: Mildred Bell

The fishmonger isn’t the first thing you see when you enter Market at 25th. It’s the mural by the entrance, the one with the neighborhood map of Richmond and the phrase “one team, one voice, one goal” taken from the nearby middle school. East End Fish Co. is tucked into a 400-square-foot corner as you pass the produce, the bakery, and a few neighbors chatting while leaning on their carts. It’s tiny. Surprisingly tiny. However, the fact that people continue to walk back to it—sometimes twice in one trip—indicates that something is going on here. The man behind the counter,…

Overcooking salmon can lead to a certain kind of disappointment. You are aware of the time. The fish goes opaque, the white albumin starts pushing through the surface like wax, and what was supposed to be the centerpiece of dinner turns into something dry and apologetic. Anyone who has cooked fish more than a few times has lived through this. It’s why so many home cooks quietly give up and order salmon only when they’re out. Which is part of why the slow-roasted method has been getting so much attention lately. It isn’t new, exactly. Cooks have been pulling fish…

What happens to people when they eat by the harbor in Nafplion is difficult to describe. Despite decades of effort, the majority of travel writers give up midway and turn to adjectives they would never normally use. Cinematic and magical. Silently devastating. The town is situated on the eastern edge of the Peloponnese and faces the Bourtzi, a small island fortress. The entire layout seems almost too calm, as if it was created especially for long lunches that stretch into the evening. The fishing port is not particularly impressive. That’s part of the ruse. On any given morning, there are…

On Tuesdays, friends who actually cook share a specific type of recipe in text messages. Those who pin and forget are not the kind. the type that, in less than a week, secures a permanent place in the rotation. Among them is Melissa Clark’s Vietnamese caramel salmon. A few years ago, it began to appear on weeknight tables, and for some reason, it hasn’t disappeared. Cá kho, the original dish from which it is derived, is a slow, methodical dish. Thick catfish steaks are cooked in a dark, peppery caramel in Vietnam for more than an hour, sometimes longer, until…

The food wasn’t the first thing that caught my attention. It was the smell of Hoi An’s harbor at five in the morning; it was briny, sharp, and slightly sweet, as if something living was being unpacked from the sea at my feet. Indeed, it was. Women wearing conical hats were hauling baskets of squid that were still twitching in the lamplight, while wooden boats with sun-bleached and chipped blue paint were pushing against the dock. Before tourists arrive, a fish market has a certain silence that is only broken by the wet slap of fish on plastic and fast,…

Your first reaction is to roll your eyes when someone tells you that a single dish at a small Logan Square restaurant has a two-month waiting list. Chicago has heard this tale before, usually in relation to a Copenhagen-trained chef or a tasting menu. The peculiar thing about Casa Tigre is how uncomplicated it is. There were twenty-six seats, mismatched chairs, and a hastily redrawn chalkboard above the pass. However, as of the last time I looked, the booking system was offering early July. After nearly ten years of cooking in other people’s kitchens throughout the city, Camila Rivero-Salazar opened…

Gloucester’s docks are quieter now than they were. It’s missing something, but not quite silent. The gulls continue to circle in the same manner, a few boats continue to arrive, and a few buyers continue to wait. However, anyone who has visited these harbors in the past 20 years can sense that the beat has shifted. What the captains have been whispering about for months is confirmed by the most recent quarterly data from all of New England’s fishing ports. It was the worst three months the industry has experienced in almost ten years, according to almost all relevant metrics.…

For months, a quiet bureaucratic earthquake has been rumbling somewhere between the Dutch Harbor cold-storage warehouses and the Rotterdam customs desks. The majority of customers who purchase an Alaskan pollock fillet at a supermarket in Berlin are unaware of this. However, those who put that fish on the shelf do. Since January, they have been having trouble sleeping because of it. It was anticipated that the European Union’s new digital CATCH certification system, which became required at the beginning of 2026, would be a positive development. a modernization. A means of permanently ending illicit, unreported, and unregulated fishing. It appears…

The dock at Point Judith smells like it always does—diesel, bait, and old rope—and the men who work there appear exhausted. On a Tuesday afternoon, a sixty-year-old boat captain was coiling line when he learned about the new NOAA proposal. He continued to coil. For the most part, news comes in this way—slowly and in opposition to the work rhythm that doesn’t stop for press releases. On paper, the rule itself seems modest. Bottom-fishing gear should be limited to a single vertical line and buoy at the surface, with color-coded markings to identify the owner, according to NOAA Fisheries. The…

Only before sunrise on the Chesapeake can you find a certain kind of silence. The water breathes, but it doesn’t really move. On most mornings, you’ll come across a man who used to write code that helped Wall Street package mortgages into something it could no longer comprehend. He departed from that existence. He arrived here. In some way, it has improved the oysters. Parts of his story have already been told. The programmer whose software assisted banks in securitizing the loans that ultimately failed was portrayed in a brief Marketplace segment years ago as a warning about the 2008…