Bluefin Tuna. For years we were told to "just say no." But Bluefin fishing season recently opened in Southern California and Conner Mitchell says now is the time to say "yes." Conner is the owner and operator of Dudley Market in Venice. He's also a fisherman, and these days, he supplies many of LA's top restaurants with the bluefin he catches off the Southern California coast. He's here to help us navigate when it's ok to say "yes" to these kings of the sea, and when we should be skeptical.
In addition to Dudley Market, here are restaurants where you can find the bluefin tuna that Conner is fishing:
Evan Kleiman: It's a pleasure to have you. And such good news! I wish Jonathan [Gold] had been around to hear that bluefin tuna got a big "yes."
Conner Mitchell: Knowing all about Jonathan's taste for bluefin, or lack thereof, I think it would have been something if he could be part of this conversation today, and it's a shame that he's not
Yeah. You began your career in the kitchen. How did you find your way to fishing?
I found my way into restaurants at a very young age. I really didn't find my way into fishing until a little bit older, when I was 29. I did, however, grow up on boats my whole life, and I'd kind of always been searching for where my place on the water was. It wasn't until I was 29 that I actually found it.
Chef Conner Mitchell of Dudley Market in Venice grew up sailing but didn't find his way to fishing until he was an adult. Photo by Rob Hoffman.
How did that happen? Did you crew on a friend's boat or were you out on a fishing cruise?
It was a little bit more of a self-journey than that. Picture this: I'm 29 so I'm in the best shape of my life — the good old days. I had gotten a pretty serious injury skateboarding in the Venice skate park, after surfing and snowboarding and skating every day and making it to work every night, and I ended up with a titanium rod from the ankle to the knee.
Really, it was boredom that led me to fishing. I couldn't skate, I couldn't run, I couldn't jump. I could just stand and that was after some wheelchair time. I realized that I had some keys to a 22-foot boat and I could stand, so why not go to Big 5 and buy a $20 fishing rod and stand on a boat and fish?
For me, growing up, we were diehard sailing on both sides of my family. Racing sailboats is what the whole family does. Fishing is not what anybody in the family did. So the idea of fishing to me, previously, was being in Catalina, putting some bread and cheese on the end of a hook and seeing what comes. When I first got that Big 5 fishing rod, I got down to the boat ramp and met a couple people who came into the dock that day and shared some fish with me (it was a really nice bonito). I took it home, made sashimi out of it. It was incredible.
I went out fishing, started catching our local rockfish, some sand dabs, some other things like that, taking them home and eating them with friends and everyone's going, "This fish is so good." I'm kind of having the same thing in my head where I'm going, "Yeah, this local fish is really good."
Why, my whole career, has it seemed like such a competition to import fish from the farthest places of the earth? Everyone wanted the fish from Italy. Everyone wanted the fish from Japan. I am not exactly sure where the shift happened but it's like the same light bulb moment that happened for me happened with a lot of chefs and a lot of restaurateurs and maybe even the general public. Suddenly, the shift is towards focusing more on local, less carbon impact, starting with what's coming from our own village.
Conner Mitchell spends time on the water with his crew. Photo by Rob Hoffman.
When you go out to fish, particularly bluefin, which we'll talk about in a minute, how far out are you going?
There's good days and there're terrible days fishing bluefin. Anyone who fishes them regularly knows the fish that can be there one day and can be gone the next. Typically, we're fishing anywhere west of Catalina Island, and usually somewhere between 35 and 90 miles out. But we have had days as close as five miles from Dudley Market, where we were catching bluefin tuna as far as the eye could see all day long.
Did Dudley Market come about because you wanted a place to cook your catch? Which came first, fishing or the restaurant?
Restaurants came first. I certainly did not open Dudley Market with the idea of being a commercial fisherman. It was in the very first weeks of opening, and I was feeding my investor some of the fish we were catching locally, and he was asking me, "Why aren't we serving this fish?" I said, "Well, commercial fishing is very complicated. A lot of regulations. I don't know the first thing about it but maybe it's something we should look into." All these years later, it's been a long and bumpy road, and I'm very proud of where we are at now.
Did you start off catching bluefin or is fishing for this animal more complicated? And did it take you a while to get there?
We certainly did not start off fishing bluefin. As I mentioned, I grew up on sailboats, so being on the water, that was the normal part. Chasing an apex predator on the open ocean, that was something that's completely new and foreign to me. When we got into fishing, it was all the local variety stuff. It was the rockfish, the sand dabs, the whitefish, and it really wasn't until a fisherman brought us our first bluefin tuna from our local waters at Dudley Market that we said, "Wow, these things are out there, and maybe we could catch them."
As a former restaurateur myself, I understand how demanding restaurant hours are. How does operating a restaurant compare to the life of a fisherman? And do you relish those hours on the sea?
Well, Evan, as you know, better than anyone, to have a restaurant, you have to be a little bit crazy. To be a fisherman, you have to be totally crazy. So the lifestyle is very similar. The hours are equally long. The hours of a fisherman compare to that of a pastry cook. You're almost never seeing a normal clock. People ask us, "What time do you leave?" We just giggle and reply because it's any time. It's all the time. It's whatever time we're off the dock. Sometimes it's noon, sometimes it's 6 a.m., sometimes it's 2 a.m., sometimes it's 4 a.m.
It is a long and demanding shift but it's rewarding because at the end of the day, I'm not a farmer, as much as I'd love to be, and there is something about being connected with a food source and being the fisherman of the village that makes all the hours worth it. None of that would be possible without the team that we have on land. Without my partner, Dina, in the shop, without Danny running the kitchen, who's also a total asset on the boat, we wouldn't be able to do any of this or get to where we got without our entire team at Dudley and all the guys who fish on the boat with us. It is not a one-man operation in any way.
Junya Yamasaki (left) of Yess Restaurant works with a fish that has been caught. Photo by Rob Hoffman.
Let's talk about bluefin tuna. For years, it was the poster child for overfishing, and many diners decided the only ethical thing to do was to not order it. Can you help us understand how that happened and what, if anything, has changed?
One of my favorite things to say about that is the title of NOAA's June 25, 2024 article. If anyone doesn't know, NOAA, that's the National Oceanic Atmospheric Association, is probably our biggest resource in the Pacific on the West Coast for any and all data in regards to bluefin tuna stock assessments, migration patterns, etc. The title of their June 25, 2024 article is "From Overfished to Sustainable Harvest: Pacific Bluefin Tuna."
Really, this was something that was completely taboo, not just in the US, but globally. Tuna was overfished, and it's still under a lot of pressure, because these fish are not just facing pressure from the United States, Mexico or Canada, they're facing international fishing pressure, and there are many countries, especially US, Mexico and Canada, working together to protect and manage correctly both the Pacific and the Atlantic bluefin tuna stocks, as well. They have serious regulations, quota managements, and assessments in place, and that plays one of the biggest roles in the increase that we have seen in our population.
Our stock management is based primarily on what's called unfished spawning stock biomass, or SSB. That's, theoretically, the amount of fish that would exist if there was no fishing pressure. In that spawning stock, our last assessment, and I know I referenced an article from 2024 but that article is actually in reference to the last assessment done by NOAA on our stock, which was in 2022, the number of spawning bluefin reached 23.2% of potential unfished spawning stock, which means that the stock had now exceeded the point where a balance can be found between abundant harvest and continued population growth.
While I might not use the word "sustainable," because I think it's fair for everyone to make their own assessments and own judgments, there's a lot of data out there, and this is not one agency. There are many agencies involved in the regulation and management. There are many scientists devoting their whole careers to this, my favorite being Barbara Block up at Stanford. She's the head of Marine Biology there, and she runs a program called Tag-A-Giant. It's where we get a lot of our data from bluefin tuna, both here on the Pacific Coast and on the East Coast for the Atlantic stock.
Bluefin tuna was overfished for years but stocks have rebounded and enthusiasts are, once again, fishing for them. Photo by Rob Hoffman.
I'm curious about the interplay, if there is any, between Pacific and Atlantic stocks of bluefin. Do the fish in either ocean stay in those oceans or do they migrate from one to another?
That's a great question. While these stocks don't intermingle within the stocks, they do end up geographically in similar areas when they return and make their migration back to Japan. Now, there's a lot of data on this. I'm not the scientists, but what I do know is that within the last few years, the NOAA has learned that the Atlantic stock has no longer been traveling all the way back to Japan to breed, and that they've started breeding, potentially in Texas. We're of the belief that something very similar could be happening on the West Coast, where these fish that used to swim back to Japan before they spawn, could be spawning here on the West Coast now.
We all know that the quality of a fish when it's on your plate is not just what comes out of the water but what you do with it after you get it out of the water. Could you talk about ikijime and shinkeijime and how these two methods changed your relationship to fishing for bluefin?
To start this off, I'd actually like to say that bluefin tuna fishing is something that I never took lightly. Taking the life of an apex predator was something that meant something so deeply to me that I actually ended up becoming a pescatarian immediately after my first trip. It was something that I had a connection moment with a fish going the way I respect this life and the way I'm going to process every last part of this fish and consume it is probably something I couldn't do with one of these other animals that I've been eating my whole life. It was that thought process that led me to being pescetarian for the last five years. I've only recently started eating a little bit of meat, again, from sources where I know people care as much about the animal as we have the fish.
I'm incredibly grateful that my world collided and I became friends with Junya Yamasaki. He is the owner, operator, and chef of Yess Restaurant in downtown but he started with a food truck called Yess Aquatic, and that's where I really met him. When I took Junya fishing for the first time, it was a recreational trip, so we got to dive in the water as well. The guy didn't get out of the water for nearly nine hours. I knew I loved him from day one.
His journey of coming to our West Coast and bringing this culture of pushing ikijime and shinkeijime on a tribe of local fishermen is something that I think all of us who have been included are feeling very blessed to be part of.
READ MORE: Our interview with chef Junya Yamasaki.
Can you explain what it is?
Yeah, so ikijime is to take the life of a fish, in which the fish is immediately brain dead. From there, your next process is shinkeijime. Shinkeijime is running a wire down the spinal column of a fish to stop all of the nervous system and electrical reactions that will cause things like lactic acid buildup and more serious rigor mortis process. So when I talk about it as dispatching a fish and running a wire down a spinal column for electrical and nervous system reaction, it makes it sound a little more scientific.
One of the things I've learned in the last few years while spending a lot of time doing this is the Japanese ideology behind it is so much more than that. It's really about trying to acknowledge that you are taking this fish's life and prevent suffering as much as possible. The actual shinkeijime process is going to shut down all the nervous system and electrical reactions, which allows the fish to go through rigor mortis more gently and come out with a noticeably different taste, texture, appearance, shelf life. It's truly remarkable the difference in the quality of the fish.
Can you compare the taste and texture for us?
I think anyone who's ever eaten sushi regularly has had a bite or two in their life that maybe tasted like you had a little bit of tin foil in your mouth. Typically, that's from lactic acid buildup. And lactic acid buildup is usually from stress in a fish. When you care for the fish and you harvest it in the right way and you try to minimize the amount of time that you're fighting the fish on the end of the line to prevent stress and you perform the ikijime and shinkeijime on this fish, what you get is production of amino acids instead of lactic acids. Amino acids cause umami flavors. So we've all had that bite of sushi that makes us go, wow. And we've all had that one that makes us go, mmm, not for me. More than the fish itself, oftentimes it's handling of the fish.
Conner Mitchell casts a line into the Pacific Ocean. Photo by Rob Hoffman.
Do you use the techniques on all the fish you catch, or just on bluefin?
Doesn't matter what kind of fish we catch, we use the technique on all of them.
How common or rare is it for diners to be able to eat fish that has been dispatched in this way?
I think it's becoming really popular. You have local fishermen and Japanese fishermen who have been practicing these methods for a long time. So there could be times that a diner ate some of the fish without realizing it. But there are also now big companies making AI robotics equipment to practice this, and there's a company doing that right now that you're starting to see pop up in different restaurants.
What I think is really important is that diners are starting to learn about the seasons of fish and that they can be as short as the ones we cherish at the farmers market. Everyone goes crazy for our short little ramps episode, and thinking about Bluefin more in this way of like, if you're eating it year-round, that should be a question you're asking yourself. Where is it coming from? How big of a carbon impact does it have? Is this local? Is this sustainable?
I can tell you that we're a rod and reel, hook and line, one bait, one fish at a time operation, and that's not how tuna got over fished. That's not what's on a lot of the plates and shelves and packages out there. There's a lot of tuna in the world, just like there's lots of beef and lots of chicken, and it's really important to know where your seafood comes from.
How many restaurants are you supplying in LA right now? Do you want to shout out some of your customers?
We have a good handful of loyal chefs that we really appreciate. We've got Harry [Posner] at Tomat. We've got Junya [Yamasaki] at Yess. We have the incredible team, Travis [Lett] and Ian [Robinson], at RVR. We've got Ari [Kolender] at Found Oyster and Queen's Raw Bar & Grill. We've got the gang at Little Fish and many other places. I want to shout out everybody who's on my team at Dudley or at Not No Bar. I want to shout out everybody who helped me build the Dana Lee, and I want to shout out my fiance who, without Dina, I wouldn't be able to go fish a day in my life.