Robert Clark has a caveat for people planning an Aussie-style grillfest this summer: Don't throw another farmed tiger shrimp on the barbie.
For one thing they taste bland, says Mr. Clark, executive chef of Vancouver's shrine to seafood, C Restaurant, and its sister establishments Nu and Raincity Grill.
But more important, tiger shrimp - almost all of which come from China, Thailand and Brazil - are destroying ecologically vital tropical mangrove forests because of waste products and chemicals associated with intensive farming.
Mr. Clark has earned an enviable reputation over the past 10 years as one of Vancouver's top toques, but these days he's garnering more widespread acclaim for what's not on his menus: iffy fish.
As the founding chef of Ocean Wise, a Vancouver Aquarium conservation program launched 2½ years ago, Mr. Clark has been working with city restaurateurs to reduce their reliance on products harvested from scarce wild stocks and environmentally questionable ocean farms.
Other pressing examples include cod, halibut and sole from the Atlantic, as well as monkfish, orange roughy, shark and skate. So far, more than 60 Vancouver restaurants have vowed to replace at least one questionable species with a sustainable alternative.
And lately, Mr. Clark has been taking his sustainability gospel on the road, and literally across the ocean.
In March, he flew to Melbourne at the request of the Australian Conservation Foundation to help raise money and awareness for Ocean Wise's first international chapter, slated for launch in October.
And last week Mr. Clark was present at a ceremony to inaugurate the program's first Canadian spinoff in Victoria, where six restaurants have taken the sustainable-seafood pledge. Soon to follow is the Okanagan region in late June and, Mr. Clark hopes, possibly Calgary, a city normally more preoccupied with the quality of its beef.
"To make other cities in Canada or in the world take notice of things that don't affect them on a daily basis, I think it's going to be a great accomplishment," he says.
Mr. Clark is part of a growing network of professional cooks prompted into action by a series of events over the past decade. With the East Coast cod fishery in collapse, chefs began noticing something was wrong with the ocean's bigger fish, such as swordfish and tuna - the fillets and steaks they were preparing seemed to be shrinking almost before their eyes.
In 1998, a group of culinary stars in New York announced they were taking swordfish off their menus as part of a campaign dubbed Give Swordfish a Break. The ripples were felt as far as Washington, where six months later then-president Bill Clinton imposed a ban on the sale and importation of north Atlantic swordfish weighing less than 33 pounds.
In Mr. Clark's case, the wake-up call came about eight years ago in the form of Chilean sea bass - officially but less palatably known as patagonian toothfish - then the darling of upscale restaurant kitchens because of its ability to endure the cardinal sin of haute cuisine, overcooking.
"At some point it didn't even look like Chilean sea bass any more," says Mr. Clark, who had also become worried about reports that up to 75 per cent of sea bass supplies were illegally poached.
Mr. Clark's solution, initially motivated by the more selfish desire to expand his seafood offerings, was to bypass large wholesalers and go straight to local fishermen, who could offer more than just the ubiquitous "farmed salmon, halibut and shrimp," he says.
In a move that remains a milestone of Vancouver's modern fine-dining explosion, he replaced Chilean sea bass with a then-unsung local variety known as sablefish (a.k.a. black cod), now a cornerstone of spring menus around the Lower Mainland.
"Eight years ago, not an ounce was sold locally," Mr. Clark says. "Now every white tablecloth sells it. That was kind of the eye-opener for us, that we needed to go to fishermen directly."
Sablefish's other distinction is that it can be purchased fresh. That's not the case with most other species.
"The majority of seafood consumed in North America is previously frozen, whether they tell you that or not," Mr. Clark says. "Not one ounce of sea bass that reached this country was fresh."
After dropping the inconvenient toothfish, as it were, from his menu, Mr. Clark got the go-ahead from C's owner, Harry Kambolis, to revamp the rest of the menu.
As C - the name is a play on "sea" - began acquiring a reputation for sustainable seafood, conservationists and fresh-fish suppliers came "out of the woodwork" with information and new choices, Mr. Clark says.
