- Selling lobsters is definitely a complicated process.
I've eaten so much lobster in my life,
I can actually taste the difference
in where they are caught.
My name is Steven.
My company is Aqua Best,
and my job is to source the best seafood
for chefs and restaurateurs.
Do I have any nicknames?
The Seafood Sorcerer.
Come here and pick this one up.
Free Willy this is called.
(upbeat music)
(people chattering)
- A lobster's not just a lobster.
A lobster is just like a diamond.
There's different cuts, there's different grades
there's different size.
There's different areas where you catch lobster
that has different qualities.
Certain times of the year in Maine is a little bit better,
in Massachusetts is a little bit better,
or Canada's even better.
You must go through millions of pounds
from different areas to figure out
which area has the best lobster,
and what time of the year
has the best quality of the lobster.
We used to go through about 60 to 80,000 pounds per week.
On a holiday week, we can go up
to 150 to 200,000 pounds of lobsters.
There's many types of lobsters in the world,
but there is one which we are familiar in the Northeast.
That's the American lobster, or Homarus americanus,
with the two claws.
Before the pandemic, we were servicing over 175 restaurants
just in New York City itself.
We can basically ship to anywhere in the world
in less than 24 hours.
Even Singapore, which has the longest flight,
like 19 hours.
Japan, Korea, China,
Spain, France, and Italy.
All over the world.
So a lobster is just not a lobster.
(soothing music)
These are your Greek Branzinos.
So they want a backside butterfly.
It's not hard, it's just different.
So we'll just do a couple.
I cut off the gills, the fins.
We always have to improvise our tools.
This is actually a fabric shear.
We're not just the restaurants' fishmonger.
I mean, we'll do, as you say,
we'll customize anything for you,
and I'm trying to make as least work as possible
for the chefs, and the prep guys in the restaurant.
I think just through trial and error,
I figured what's the easiest way to gill the fish.
You have to sort of develop your own style,
or you kind of have to adapt.
Cutting fish is also about repetition and feel.
You gotta feel where the bones are.
Backside butterfly.
Let's do two simple cuts, and then you'll have a spot.
I used to do this a long time ago,
but since the pandemic, you kind of have to
do everything all over again, which is great.
I do miss cutting fish, sometimes.
Very clean, very simple.
(percussive music)
That's my brother.
Every night, my brother Freeman,
he goes to Fulton Fish Market.
- Morning!
- Around 10:00 p.m. to 2:00 a.m.
He'll check his email, he'll see
what the orders are for the restaurants.
Restaurants do like to have all their deliveries
as early as possible in the morning.
Right now, there's about four or 5,000 pounds
of seafood right now.
Due to the pandemic, outdoor seating.
Right now, everything's dependent on the weather pattern.
The restaurateurs are just like us seafood people.
We gotta look at the weather to determine
if we are gonna sell anything.
Fresh ice is important every day.
So here's Freeman, he's my brother.
He looks like me, with glasses.
Everybody in the market knows him,
and he deals with a lot of chefs.
- Morning, Aqua Best.
- This is Jimmy.
- What's up, guys?
- He does a lot of my lobster buying in Canada.
Hey Jimmy, how's it looking?
- Looks like money.
- No, you gotta say A-1.
He handles all my lobsters.
- You got fish, you got Penn, got District.
- Family business, he's my nephew.
He's my other right hand man, even though he looks younger,
he knows almost everything
about lobsters just as much as I do.
I have a couple guys over here, a great team
Many of them have been with me over 10 years.
This is a giant tilefish over there.
We're gonna stick that in today.
Kingfish!
(Steven groans)
We got one of these, crevalle jack.
When people say I can't find stuff,
I try to find them whatever they want.
(speaking foreign language)
- Yeah, so one person asked me for that specific fish.
- He looks more than 25 pounds, but he's pretty heavy.
Cermaq is just a brand.
When you have really fresh salmon,
it's almost this smell that's almost like watermelon.
I can't describe it.
These are really beautiful crawfish.
Louisiana's mud bugs.
I got everything.
I have seafood from around the world in New York City.
We sell almost every variety of seafood,
but our main specialty is lobsters.
We can hold about 7,000 pounds of lobster over here.
Only the best quality comes in here,
so people can hand-pick their own lobsters.
In our tanks, we always separate by region and size.
I have customers who prefer New Brunswick lobsters.
This is a Canadian hardshell.
You can tell by the striations over here.
It's nice and dark, and imagine this is the sea floor.
And this lobster is walking,
and the claws are heavier
so they're actually dragging their claws onto the floor.
These are P.E.I. lobsters.
P.E.I.s, majority of the time you can't really see as much
on the bigger ones, we call them Popeyes.
'Cause they tend to have bigger claws, and smaller tails.
Nova Scotia lobsters over here, some Maine lobsters up here.
And I also have Massachusetts lobsters down there as well.
We keep our waters about 36 to 38 degrees.
Lobsters are carnivorous and they will eat each other,
so once you hibernate them, they won't be as active.
So the secret to keeping good lobsters
is to have cold, cold water.
Our standard for a lobster crate is 100 pounds net weight.
Almost everyone in my company,
by just lifting a crate, we can really tell
if it's overweight or underweight.
We just do it so much that we really know.
This guy is dangerous.
Sometimes they come unbanded.
When we get lobsters from the fishermen,
if there is one female big lobster, unbanded,
you put it in a crate,
they will pretty much tear off every single other claw.
Don't mess around, it does hurt.
I mean, if you're dealing
with millions of pounds every year,
you're gonna get caught one time.
I'll show you the difference
between a male and a female lobster.
On this hand is a male, and this hand is a female.
You'll see that the side flares out
a little bit more to protect the eggs.
If you look at the first appendage,
this is a male.
You can tell by this is a hard fin.
On the female, this is a softer fin, that's a female.
This is a P.E.I. lobster, but an old shell.
In any lobster, there's actually a line down the middle.
You can see that it's starting to split over here,
so between spring and summer,
when the water temperature turns about 58 degrees,
they know I need to change shells now.
That's how you get softshell lobsters every year.
When I pick a lobster out,
I like to see that it has nice, dark colors
on the bottom side with a claw, just because I know
an old shell is a hardshell lobster.
On your main softshell lobsters,
you cook 100 pounds of lobster,
you might get 11 to 14 pounds.
If you cook 100 pounds of Canadian lobsters,
you get 22 to 24 pounds.
For chefs, food cost is everything,
and this is something we need to be very wary about.
We need to keep them happy,
and give them the best product.
These are your New York chicks.
They're bigger in size.
We're gonna bring this over to Le District right now,
and we'll see you there.
(funk music)
Chef Omar.
- Hey, how you doing? - How are you?
- Good, how are you? - Good.
- What's goin' on, baby? - How you doing, chef?
I got your Maine claws today.
- Look great.
They smell great.
They smell like the ocean.
They don't smell like anything else.
- Behind you, chef.
Behind.
- [Omar] Watch behind.
- These came down last night, from down east Maine,
so it's really, well usually down east Maine
is usually the tip of Maine,
the northern part of Maine,
to this area and all these islands
have really good rocky bottoms,
where a lot of these lobsters have a sweeter taste, right?
So, these came in last night.
Literally, they're from the ocean, to you.
- Going into the weekend,
got 100, 150 a day going into the weekend.
We usually got about maybe three to four.
Last week was quite busy, we almost ran out,
so we're trying to up it a little bit.
(funk music)
We'll wait about 15 minutes, get 'em nice and cold.
And then we'll put a couple lobsters up here,
break 'em down, get the meat out.
We'll show how we do a couple cocktails,
which is a split lobster, in the shell.
We just crack the claws,
so people can get into the meat,
and then we'll break the lobsters completely down,
and we take that lobster meat out
and weigh it for our lobster roll.
- So the trick that you can do,
most people will crush it this way.
I know that's the consensus,
but I actually push, if you can see from this angle,
up more like that.
Push down a little bit.
Oh, that's perfect.
That's the roe, right?
- [Joe] It is.
- [Steven] To me, that's my favorite part.
- [Joe] Yeah, we love that stuff.
- [Steven] There you go, perfect.
- Great, awesome.
Perfect tail.
This is our meat that we just got from downstairs.
So we're looking for five ounces worth of meat.
There you go, I'm generous today.
Key thing about a lobster roll
is you definitely wanna toast either side,
to have the bun warm.
Take a little bit of Old Bay mayonnaise, big dice,
'cause people wanna see the meat.
Key thing right here, is clarified butter.
Last little bit, do a little celery seed on the top,
homemade bun, plenty of lobster, little salad, tastes great.
- Every single lobster that we've gotten,
we actually have to grade it one by one,
we have to put it on the scale one by one,
we have to feel for the firmness, the hardness.
- Really, really? - We actually do.
Our quality control is pretty much the best.
My mother and father, they started this business
when I was just a baby.
My father passed away when I was eight.
Coming from the ground up, being poor,
we used to eat leftovers for three days in a row.
Working, as a kid, I remember eight, nine years old.
You get off of elementary school
around 2:30, three o'clock,
and we used to work until midnight every day,
even as a kid, just to help out the family.
And it went on for years, until we actually got
a stable footing to make, you know, ends meet.
(emotional music)
We saw that doing seafood was lucrative.
I mean, it kept the bills going,
so we kept on building upon that,
and since that was our only lifeline
we actually put all our energy into it,
and that just became a passion for us
to really hone our craft and be really good seafood people.
So, just came off the boat.
It's been purged today.
So, looks like these are clean.
And, just give it a little soak,
and it should be ready for service.
It's funny now, but when you're younger,
you don't understand.
But now that I'm older, I do appreciate,
you know, the stuff that I went through,
and I think a lot of people don't realize
how hard work you need to put in to get to where you are.
Success is not just instantly overnight.
You have to build upon it, layer by layer by layer.
So right now, we're just setting up stations
for different grades.
Every size will have a different crate,
and this way, after we finish,
we're gonna color code them.
So we're going to take some lobsters off,
check for hard lobsters, check for firm lobsters.
And then we're going to grade it by size.
We're very meticulous on the sizing,
because lots of different restaurants,
they wanna use and plate specific ones.
Food cost is important.
So, we actually scale everything one by one.
(soothing music)
Over here, you have your traditional in-ground tank.
It's almost built like the style that they have in Maine.
But the difference is that we built it in-ground.
Same thing, a self-circulation tank.
We're landlocked, so all our water is from the ocean
on this tank right now,
and we put a biofilter, we'll have the water sucked down,
go into a pump, go to a compressor,
shoot out out of a protein skimmer.
We made this ourselves.
We figured out the math to make it
as good as possible to be efficient.
And in this tank right here,
we can hold about 25,000 pounds of lobster.
You know, we do handle a lot of lobsters
throughout the year,
but I'm still a very hands-on owner.
I do like to hand deliver stuff, still.
(pleasant music)
I still need to feel a lobster, like is this quality,
have to inspect.
I need to see if my guys are packing it correctly.
If they're not packing correctly, I need to make sure
that hey, you gotta change this up.
You're not doing it correctly.
Let's give 'em the best lobster, take it back.
We gotta do something about this.
Experience is everything in the seafood business.
You need years and years of experience,
years and years of practice.
You need to take a little bit of this guys,
what they say, a little about what this fisherman says,
and put it all together to make your own assessment.
I know chefs try to recreate, or mimic a flavor,
or dish somewhere that they have seen before,
or they've tasted somewhere when they've traveled out,
but I think one of the key ingredients in cooking
is fresh ingredients.
It's what kind of ingredients you get,
when you get it, so you can create the best dish.
And that's something we try to do
for every restaurant, and every chef.
There is definitely people who are smarter than me
in lobsters, but I think I'm probably in the 1%.
It's a never-ending story, but I'm still learning.
Even if you wash your hands,
and you're about to head home,
and you think you don't smell.
And you go home and you take the elevator or something,
and then you start smelling something weird.
It's yourself.