|
Local Moms with a Passion for Seafood
By Sumi Hahn
Photo courtesy Surfin’ Seafood
Every working mother needs what Tina Montgomery has for her minivan: a set of magnetized signs that indicate when she means business.
The bright blue letters shout “Surfin’ Seafood.” When Montgomery slaps the rectangular magnets onto the front doors of her black Ford Windstar, they transform her nondescript mom-mobile into a gourmet seafood delivery service with a passionate customer base stretching from Everett all the way down to Tacoma.
“After five years, I can’t get the fishy smell out of my car,” Montgomery admits as she places the blue coolers of frozen fish and freezer packs into her minivan. The scent is a small price to pay for the satisfaction of running a successful business that fits neatly alongside her other responsibilities as a mother of two.
Five years ago this past October, Montgomery and fellow mom Jennifer Hanseler launched Surfin’ Seafood as an online business (www.surfinseafood.com). Their goal was to deliver to home cooks the same impeccable seafood served in high-end sushi restaurants and local institutions like Dahlia Lounge and Canlis. Montgomery’s son Dillon, in second grade at the time, came up with the name, and the two moms turned themselves into virtual fishmongers.
Word-of-mouth quickly grew their customer base beyond close friends and family—about 20-30 deliveries a month when they first started. A 2008 Sunset article that raved about the quality of their fish cemented their reputation. Now the two moms are delivering up to 10 times that initial amount. Every month. In their own cars.
“We try to do everything ourselves,” Montgomery admits. This hands-on approach makes special requests easy to honor. “If you don’t like end pieces, then request a center cut, just like when you’re at the grocery store. We’re the ones packing up, so it’s very easy for us to make sure our customers are getting exactly what they want.”
Inside the freezer, where Montgomery goes to pick up the last of her coolers, the -10 degree cold hits hard, like a deluge of ice water. She pores over the orders, which are printed out with each customer’s precise instructions. Her words come out in thick white plumes.
“We have someone who wants a whole side of salmon every year, and another person who specifically requests fish carcasses, to make soup. If it’s easy for our supplier to get, and we can do it well, then we can accommodate just about any request.”
And when Montgomery finds something amazing, she’ll share it with her customers, like the North Carolina shrimp she tried at a seafood marketing conference last spring. After making sure the shrimp met all of Surfin’ Seafoods quality controls, she ordered some for summer. Customers loved the sweet, white Gulf shrimp, which are unavailable in local grocery stores.
“We’re really, really picky about our product.” Montgomery sounds almost apologetic. “We need to have a lot of control over the fish. It needs to be caught properly, be sourced from the right place, and handled properly, in a humane way. The whole process is extremely labor intensive.”
Surfin’ Seafood follows the Monterey Bay Seafood Watch guides closely, striving to offer as many sustainable products as possible. King, Coho, and Sockeye salmon are their most popular fish; 95 percent of their salmon comes from Southeastern Alaskan waters, including the Yukon River, Kodiak, Bristol Bay, Cooks Inlet, and Prince William Sound. Their next most popular fish, halibut, is also mostly sourced in Southeast Alaska. Bay shrimp are wild caught in Oregon; sea scallops are wild caught from the Northeast Atlantic; and Dungeness crab comes from the Washington and Canadian Coast.
Montgomery shows me the cutting room at TH Seafoods, their main supplier. The room is immaculate, and the filleters work quietly and rapidly. An entire salmon is cut into pieces with not a single wasted stroke of the knife.
“These guys are the best filleters in the industry,” Montgomery says. A baby-faced guy with dark hair grins at us. “That’s Juan, he’s our savior. He knows to set aside the prettiest, best cuts for us.”
I ask Juan about the long scimitar-shaped knives they use. Any special brand? He laughs. “It’s just a knife. If you’re a good filleter, you can use anything.”
And, really, it doesn’t look like the knife has much to do with the process. The fish appears to part its flesh obligingly into pristine cuts wherever the knife points. The cutter’s hands are relaxed. He doesn’t seem to expend any effort at all; it’s as if he’s simply guiding the fish and the knife in a dance. A few turns, and the salmon is transformed into square fillets to be flash-frozen to -20 degrees in Surfin’ Seafood’s vacuum packs.
Despite—or perhaps because of—the recent economic turmoil, “the business has been holding its own,” Montgomery says. “More people have been cooking at home.”
It certainly helps that Surfin’ Seafood’s website is studded with hundreds of mouth-watering recipes, like the Shrimp and Grits recipe that won Surfin’ Seafood’s 2007 recipe contest and which she made just the other night. “That recipe,” Montgomery states matter of factly, “is to die for.”
So when she says she has extra bags of Gulf shrimp left over and offers me one, I can’t resist. I haven’t had Gulf shrimp since I left New Orleans 10 years ago, and I want to know if their sweet, firm flesh survives the vacuum-pack and freezing process.
“These shrimp were caught just two weeks ago,” she says. “You gotta try them.”
I defrost them in the fridge as instructed, overnight. The grits sound fabulous, but they only serve two, and I need to feed 5. The best way to stretch what I have is to make shrimp Creole, a tomato-based shrimp stew served with rice. After the stew base simmers for a good long while, the last ingredient that goes in are the shrimp.
The heat transforms their grey translucence into snowy white meat. I spear a shrimp with my fork and taste. Just like I remember. Surfin’ Seafood certainly delivers what they promise.
Surfin’ Seafood orders can be placed online or over the phone. Deliveries are made once a month; cooler deposits are refundable. The rock-solid seafood should be placed in your freezer for storage or in the fridge for defrosting (1-2 days).
www.surfinseafood.com
(425) 821-1303
Sumi Hahn is a retired restaurant critic (Times-Picayune, Seattle Weekly) who moonlights on www.sumisays.com when she's not her children's chauffeur.
For the Surfin' Seafood award winning recipe for Shrimp and Grits, click here
 |
