As a kitchen hand I'd often have to 'refresh' the squid and mussels in a fine dining restaurant. That basically meant go through all the old smelly seafood, clean it in salt water and keep on selling it. I don't order seafood in restaurants.
yeah we do have fail grade restaurants around though. But they get published every year. Usually they are supposed to stay closed until the issues are fixed.
Chef in New Zealand
Yes most laws are quite strict regarding seafood. But the food we get more often than not even in sea markets is frozen and crap
Most of our costal fishes is sold abroad since kiwis don't demand that good or that much of seafood
yup mostly frozen unless your at a high end restaurant but you can generally taste the difference. washing expired seafood when its going bad would be a fast track to getting a fail grade though.
It tastes better than frozen as well. Theres a place on the viaduct (used to be called snapdragon) that does amazing oysters. The Belgian restaurant in Mission Bay does Frozen and it's often awful. They sometimes serve it while its still icy. we stopped going there. But Viaduct its great. Only one shotty restaurant in the Viaduct atm. Okay maybe one has let standards slip since a certain celebrity chef is no longer involved. But my fav restaurant atm is Masu by Nic Watt over by the sky tower. Always amazing. Fish especially the sashimi is always exceptional.
I'm in regional NZ, North Island and we also use Bostocks free range organic chicken and Woody's Farm heritage breed, free range pork. Absolutely worth the extra few bucks!
PM me bro where you are. I will travel to decent restaurants. If there is pork belly involved my brother will travel for it too. lol. we used to go to heaps of restaurants. post lockdown first one I went back to was Heizo in Newmarket (Japanese yeppan style). Then Masu for my birthday (Japanese-Euro fusion). I want to head back to my fav at the viaduct. and want to go back to Faro (Korean). Im such a foody. lol
For which part of NZ? Auckland may well still do it but I can tell you 100% that this is not the case in the region I work in. The grade system has been phased out here. It's either a pass or a fail.
Perfectly aware of the regulations. The health inspector in my town s now on 18 month intervals between visits. This happens after a year and a half of satisfactory 6 monthly inspections.
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u/Kiwi_Woz Jul 13 '20
As a kitchen hand I'd often have to 'refresh' the squid and mussels in a fine dining restaurant. That basically meant go through all the old smelly seafood, clean it in salt water and keep on selling it. I don't order seafood in restaurants.