Author: Mildred Bell

A certain type of person finds something that works and just won’t let it go. Not because I’m stubborn. More akin to loyalty. That type of person is Marco Reyes. For the past eleven years, a 38-year-old surfer who lives a few blocks from Mission Beach has prepared fish tacos every Friday using the same basic recipe, battered white fish, warm corn tortilla, and shredded cabbage piled on top like a little mountain. He no longer measures much. He is not required to. He claims that it began almost by accident, just like most rituals. A friend gave him a…

You can tell that everything is going well when you hear a certain type of sound. When the battered cod hits the oil, there’s a deep, rolling hiss that fills a small kitchen and gives even the most experienced home cook the fleeting impression that they know exactly what they’re doing. It’s not a tired sizzle or an anxious splutter. It’s easy to get fish and chips at home. However, there are a few things that most recipes subtly ignore that are necessary to get it truly right, the way a backstreet London chippy has been doing it since before…

The word “Cajun” is likely to be found somewhere in practically every restaurant along the Louisiana Gulf Coast, whether it’s on the menu, painted on the wall, or sewn into the server’s apron. It’s the atmosphere. It’s its identity. Surprisingly, it’s also not totally truthful about what’s in the bowl. For years, shrimp that were caught thousands of miles away in Ecuadorian or Indian waters have ended up on Louisiana plates with local branding. The shrimpers who are most negatively impacted by this have been watching their livelihoods steadily decline. That is beginning to change. Over the past few years,…

A certain type of traveler has visited enough five-star hotels to understand that a rooftop pool and pillow menu won’t ultimately make a trip feel authentic. These are the people who are currently knee-deep in rivers in Montana at six in the morning, throwing lines into icy water that makes you feel uneasy. Waders were exchanged for the minibar. The majority of them say they would repeat the activity tomorrow. It is difficult to ignore the numbers that support this. According to the Recreational Boating & Fishing Foundation, 58 million Americans picked up a fishing rod in 2024, a post-pandemic…

Everybody who ends up in Ena seems to experience a certain moment. After driving through winding mountain roads that don’t appear correctly on any map app, they arrive exhausted and possibly a little lost. Then the sea suddenly and broadly opens up, encircling a tiny, lone island that is motionless in the water. And they slow down in some way. Ena is a fishing village on the Kii Peninsula in Wakayama Prefecture, roughly two hours south of Osaka. The majority of tourist maps do not include it. It features a single store selling fishing gear, snacks, and sake, as well…

You can get a pretty good idea of what American fishing is like by standing on the docks at the Port of New Bedford on any given morning. You can see the crews offloading catch that will end up on plates from Boston to San Francisco, weathered boats arriving in heavy loads, and the smell of salt and diesel. It’s unglamorous, physically demanding work. And for years, the people who do it have been quietly losing ground to something they cannot see: fleets of foreign ships operating far out at sea, circumventing environmental regulations, disobeying quotas, and, in certain situations,…

Early March in Bergen is a gloomy, chilly, and subdued city where billion-dollar decisions are made over coffee in unreported rooms. However, at the North Atlantic Seafood Forum this year, something changed. Standing at the podium, the executives who typically use tactful language and diplomatic hedging stated unequivocally that Norway’s salmon farming regulations are flawed. Not a hassle. Not requiring a small adjustment. Broken. Ivan Vindheim, CEO of Mowi, stated what many in the room had reportedly been thinking for years: that the government’s own aquaculture whitepaper, which was intended to promote organic growth, might actually lower production in some…

Outside Captain Eddie’s Clam Shack is a hand-painted sign that says, “If the water rises, so do we.” It has been faded by forty years of Gulf sun and salt air. After Hurricane Ivan destroyed half of the roof in 2004, someone took a picture of it. The picture was shared throughout the neighborhood. People sobbed. Laughing, Eddie placed an order for plywood. This location had a personality, which was its unique quality. a stubbornness. The type that is passed down through fryers that have been in use since Reagan’s administration and cracked linoleum floors rather than through a business…

When you realize you’ve been missing something remarkable for years, you feel a certain kind of embarrassment. That feeling comes quickly from the Maine Lobster Trail. This loosely defined coastal route, which stretches from the southern tip of Kittery all the way north toward the Canadian border, connects co-ops, working piers, lobster shacks, and seafood restaurants in a way that feels more like how people up here eat than a carefully planned tourist destination. It most likely doesn’t receive the breathless coverage it merits because of this. Hand-painted signs nailed to weathered posts, lobster traps piled five feet high next…

Before you ever start the car, a version of this trip exists in your head, somewhere between a spread from a travel magazine and a scene from a movie. For years, the 658 miles of salt air, slow roads, and seafood shacks that make up the Gulf Coast from Tampa to New Orleans had been on the back of my mind. A budget of two thousand dollars, a full tank of gas, and five days with no real plan other than traveling west along the water were what ultimately propelled it forward. It already seemed like the right decision to…