Caroline Bennett

Why did you decide to turn Moshi Moshi into a sustainable sushi restaurant?

Moshi Moshi had been open for about 11 years and I just came in one day and we didn't have bluefin tuna. I remember asking the chef where it was, because I thought, 'This is ridiculous! We can't call ourselves a Japanese restaurant without bluefin tuna!' But the chef said, 'We ordered it and it just never showed up.' So I spoke with the suppliers and they said there just wasn't any to be found. And this was the case for three or four weeks in a row, when it was just really, really difficult to get any bluefin. After that, I started doing some research through WWF [World Wildlife Fund]. It was quite apparent very early on just how desperate the bluefin tuna stocks were. The more I started looking over WWF reports and Greenpeace reports, the more I realized that it wasn't just tuna that was in dire straits. There are plenty of other fish that are not faring that much better. When I decided to switch over to only sustainable seafood, it was a slow process of really looking at one species at a time and saying, 'Okay, over the next 3 months, I'm going to change that or stop serving that' and then moving on to the next species and just going step-by-step. I'm still not 100 percent there yet, there are things on the menu that I'm not really sure about, but we do what we can.

How did the Pisces Responsible Fish Restaurants organization get started and what is its mission?

At a Slow Food event in 2004, I met this wonderful fisherman, Chris Bean, who fishes off the Cornish coast. He said he'd courier me some samples of his seafood and the next thing we know, we got this wonderful box of fresh, quality fish. He fishes most mornings, docks around 3 o' clock in the afternoon, he lands the fish, ices them, puts them into boxes, drives them to his courier and then the courier will deliver them to us in London the next morning. I don't think in London you can get fresher fish than what we get from the individual fishermen that we work with. Generally, seafood has to go through a wholesaler and through distribution routes that all inevitably add time. Plus, Chris allowed us to go on his boat so we could check that he didn't have any bycatch [less edible marine life that get dredged up in nets and thrown back, dying or dead]. He really does land everything he catches, mainly because he's not targeting anything, he just takes what's there. And we've figured out a way to just take whatever he catches. Rather than placing an order and saying we want 5 kilos of bass and 5 kilos of sole, we say we'll have 5 kilos of any kind of flat fish and 5 kilos of any kind of fish like Pollock or mackerel or bass. We just make substitutions on our menu when we have to. For the Pisces project, which I'm working on with Dr. Malcom MacGarvin, we've found fishermen in Cornwall, Devon and Sussex, and if we have the time we'll look for some on the Yorkshire coast as well. We're basically looking for small-scale day boats that meet the Slow Food criteria of clean, fair and good: Clean meaning a fishery that's not going to damage the environment; fair meaning the fishermen are getting good prices, that they're not being squashed by middle men; and good being a quality criteria. You'd be surprised that many fishermen here don't use ice! They also need to adhere to the UN section of the guidelines for fisheries. We're not trying to create anything new, we're just going with guidelines and working within parameters that have already been established. We then grade the fisheries and plan to introduce them to a number of London-based restaurants. It's been an incredibly time-consuming process and I think that's the big reason there aren't more sustainable seafood restaurants out there. There's an established route for getting seafood that's been in place for years and we've only recently realized it's not the most sustainable way to do things, which makes going against the grain so much harder.

Other than time, would you say that cost is the main difficulty you've faced in managing a sustainable Japanese restaurant?

Price has really only been a problem in instances where there are affordable farmed alternatives. And it just goes to show you how unrealistically low they're setting the prices for farmed seafood. Salmon prices have collapsed because of farming and its taking its toll on the ecology and the stocks of certain smaller fish. Fish farming certainly isn't like sheep farming, where the sheep are turning grass into meat. Fish eat other fish, so farming is not a sustainable answer because you're just depleting other wild stocks. I'd say the major problem is finding sustainable sources for the seafood. Most suppliers stick with sources that have been working well for years, so they don't think to bother looking for something different. It's really like looking for a needle in a haystack to find the individual fishermen like we use, who are doing these great things with no differential in price.

You mentioned earlier that there are items on your menu are you still concerned about....

Yes, the first is tiger prawn. We found some that's sustainably sourced from New Caledonia, a French island in the Pacific, which we use for our cooked food, our tempura, but I can't find a sustainable prawn of sushi-grade quality that also comes prepared. We have a small restaurant and we have to do about 600 per day so we don't have the time or the space to take the tails and heads and skins off ourselves. That all has to be done outside of the restaurant. Ours come from Bangladesh or Thailand and they're farmed and though I haven't looked into those farms specifically, I'm pretty sure that anything from those areas isn't going to be great these days. So that's one howling issue that sits on my conscience, and I've set my target for this year to change that. The second thing is bass. When I opened the restaurant 15 years ago, English people weren't really familiar with Japanese food, so I was really introducing it to a lot of people who had never tried it before and to do that you have to keep the prices affordable. So I've always had bass that is farmed because it's less expensive. I don't think it comes from a particularly bad farm, but having met fisherman down on the Cornish coast and the Sussex coast where they have wonderful bass, I feel like I should be avoiding farmed fish at all costs when there is a good alternative. If there's a way to get it wild-caught I should be doing that. But farmed bass is a lot cheaper than wild. There is a huge difference in price and it's one of those dilemmas about how do you keep the menu affordable yet still sustainable.

Because there are so few restaurants that offer sustainably sourced seafood, what is your advice to someone dining at a sushi restaurant? Should they just skip the seafood and order something else?

I usually do, but only after asking questions about the seafood on their menu. If you just skip seafood and look for meat or veggie options, then the restaurateur will never know why. I do very small things, like asking if certain things are farmed or wild-caught. It's asking these simple questions that gets restaurant owners thinking.

What do you think are the top three types of seafood that everyone should avoid?

Bluefin tuna is just number one, right at the top. The second is probably farmed shrimp—like the ones I have on my menu, unfortunately. The third is probably Chilean sea bass. It's a beautiful, dense and oily fish and it stars on Nobu's menu in London, but I've only seen one fishery that's been certified sustainable. It's such a long-lived fish and it matures sexually late in life. It's been overfished and the stocks have a difficult time building back up because many are caught before they’ve had time to reproduce.

What are some types of seafood that are usually safe to order?

In general, I think lobsters and crabs and mussels and oysters are absolutely wonderful. There are plenty of those and they live quite happily and are doing great from all accounts. And the fishing methods for them are pretty benign, as well. They're caught in pots so it's not damaging to the ecology or the wider marine environment. These shellfish are things everyone is familiar with, but they're doing fine and people should generally be encouraged to choose them. After that, I think it comes down to region. For example, down in Cornwall they have great stocks of sole, Pollack and even monkfish are doing well down there. But if I got my monkfish from the North Sea, I'd be in trouble because the stock status there is so much lower. That answer is difficult, especially in a country as large as America. What I think customers can and should do is just ask the questions. If you ask a server and they don’t know anything, hopefully that waiter will go to the manager and say, 'You know, I got this really weird question. Someone asked how that fish was caught. Do you know?' Maybe the manager will go to the chef and ask them the same question. And the chef will ask the supplier. If people say nothing, then nothing will ever change. People shouldn't get their expectations up and think they're going to get an immediate answer, but the more people who ask questions, the better. I think that's the best thing and the easiest way to show that people actually care.

What is one green habit that you've recently adopted into your life?

As I've gotten older, I find it less necessary to consume. I think I now have this general sense that you can't throw off your boredom through consumption. I'm doing what I can to reduce my footprint. Maybe it's by buying less food and making sure I eat absolutely everything in the fridge, that nothing gets wasted or thrown away. Or maybe it's by just wearing the same pair of jeans for a while and realizing that I don't really need new ones. For me, that is just the most obvious thing I've been doing recently, saying, do I need that? I think that mindset sort of comes with age.

These days there's a lot of trendiness involved in going green? What do you make of that?

Everything that highlights the problems facing the planet and suggests ways to solve them can only be good. What people need to be slightly cynical of is that there are companies and restaurants just jumping on the bandwagon and taking advantage of everything. Recently, in London for example, a restaurant was fined quite heavily for saying it had organic dishes on its menu when it didn't. I think that's deplorable when businesses do that.

Do you have any eco-sins?

I suppose food wise, I still from time to time love to eat foie gras, and I think it's not great. And I have a flat that's probably way too hot. I like heat. I'm sure if I turned the heat down two degrees I'd save so many pounds of carbon, but I can't do it. Maybe one day. . . .