

The restaurant’s warm lobster roll, lobster spaghetti and moules frites have their own appeal, but with a martini or a shochu-gin-cucumber cocktail at the bar, tins could constitute the whole meal.Welcome to the Department of Chemistry at Wake Forest University. Couple it with a more distinctly flavored contrast: smoked oysters, Norwegian mussels marinated in dill and fennel, hake in salsa verde, white anchovies in roasted garlic or umami-packed brined razor clams. Choose a straightforward benchmark like sardines in olive oil or silvery needlefish they taste ideal slightly mashed into buttered bread with a sprinkle of salt and maybe a dollop of piquillo pepper relish, all of which are part of the presentation. It’s overwhelming in the best sense, with the per-tin prices stretching from the teens to more than $60 for a splurge on delicate grilled branzino. Its tinned seafood menu presents more than 100 options divided into 17 categories of fish and shellfish.

The West Hollywood location of Saltie Girl - which is a spinoff of the original restaurant in Boston, with a third outpost in London - charged into the local conservas arena late in 2022. emerged, shifting our assumptions around tinned fish with colorful, eye-catching cans stuffed with responsibly sourced seafood like smoked geoduck with black pepper and rainbow trout tenderloin. New, women-led brands like Fishwife and Tiny Fish Co. “It changed the paradigm of how we think about tinned fish.” “Over the pandemic, it became one of those foods that you could have in your pantry that was kind of a luxury,” said Kathy Sidell, owner of Saltie Girl, a seafood-focused restaurant with locations in London, Boston and West Hollywood that flaunts one of the longest tinned fish lists in the United States. Conservas, as they’re called in the Iberian Peninsula, preserve fish in oils and sauces that bring out its natural textures and flavors, and are considered a delicacy. Affordable and utilitarian, canning quickly caught on across Europe, especially in the seafood-rich regions of Portugal and Spain.

The tinned fish of today goes far beyond Chicken of the Sea.Ĭanned seafood traces back to early 19th century France, when Nicola Alpert, known as the “father of canning,” introduced the concept as a way of preserving large amounts of food during the Napoleonic Wars.

Smoked sardines with heather and chamomile.
