Japanese chef Norihito Endo slices tuna during an 18-course omakase dinner takeover at Mr. Tuna on Wednesday. Ben McCanna/Staff Photographer

On Monday afternoon, Norihito Endo, a highly esteemed Tokyo-based sushi chef, walked into Mr. Tuna’s South Portland commissary kitchen on Ocean Avenue holding a bag of live Maine eels.

The chef was about to start prepping for the special 18-course omakase (chef’s choice) pop-up dinners he was holding at Mr. Tuna for the next two nights. Endo is a second-generation sushi chef – trained under renowned three-Michelin-star sushi master Takashi Saito – who owns Ebisu Endo, one of Japan’s best sushi restaurants. To say he’s a seafood aficionado is putting it mildly.

Endo was on a three-leg American tour, holding high-end omakase pop-ups in Omaha, Nebraska; Brooklyn, New York; and Portland. For his Nebraska and Brooklyn dinners, he worked with Japanese seafood that he’d shipped in for the events. But for his Portland dinners, Endo exclusively used Maine seafood, a dizzying array of spanking-fresh products including scallops, lobster, littleneck clams, whelk, Jonah crab, mackerel, fluke, swordfish, bluefin tuna, black bass, sea urchin, cod milt (sperm sac), oysters and eels.

Mr. Tuna chef-owner Jordan Rubin had taken Endo on the rounds that day to gather and inspect his raw ingredients for the dinner. “He was blown away by the quality of the fish here,” Rubin said.

Endo uses his index finger to put a dab of wasabi on a thin slice of tuna. Ben McCanna/Staff Photographer

“Some of the seafood here is even better than in Japan,” Endo said, noting that he was particularly impressed by Maine’s uni, bluefin tuna, oysters and lobster. “I have to be honest. The quality of the product is amazing.”

Endo is one of several high-profile chefs who’ve visited Maine this fall and become instantly enamored with the local seafood. In late October, a group of American chefs including Alex Kemp of My Loup in Philadelphia (named among Bon Appetit magazine’s 20 best restaurants of 2024) and Nicole Cabrera Mills of Pêche in New Orleans (one of Food & Wine’s best new chefs of 2024) toured seafood facilities, including Bangs Island Mussels on Commercial Street and Atlantic Sea Farms in Biddeford, and feasted at SoPo Seafood on some of the state’s best fresh-caught offerings.

Around the same time, tickets went on sale for a celebrity chef culinary cruise sailing out of Boston next October – featuring food world luminaries like Alton Brown, Anne Burrell, Rocco DiSpirito, Alex Guarnaschelli and Andrew Zimmern – that will make a stop in Portland so passengers can enjoy the local bounty and acclaimed restaurants.

“Portland was selected as one of our port stops because it offers such a diverse culinary adventure where we can guide our guests through oyster farms, breweries, famous eateries and so much more,” said Jeff Cuellar, CEO of Sixthman, which organized the themed cruise.

“Portland garnered national attention 15 years ago for its food scene,” said Kathleen Pierce, director of membership and communications for HospitalityMaine, referring to a 2009 New York Times writeup calling the city “one of the best places to eat in the Northeast.” That same year, Portland was named “America’s Foodiest Small Town” by Bon Appetit.

“And that luster has never dimmed,” Pierce said.

Ana Castro, a chef from New Orleans, photographs mussels on a recent tour of the working waterfront at Bangs Island Mussels. Shawn Patrick Ouellette/Staff Photographer

ADDING MAINE SEAFOOD TO THEIR MENUS

But for the chefs visiting this fall, the spotlight has been on Maine seafood. To a person, the chefs said they were incredibly impressed by the quality of the Gulf harvest.

For Kemp, who already features plenty of Maine seafood on his menu at My Loup, the trip – which was organized by the Maine Seafood Promotional Council and funded by a state and federal grant – was a chance to meet fishermen, producers and suppliers, and deepen his understanding of the local product.

“I find that the best products to get in peak season are always from Maine,” Kemp said. “The urchin, scallops, oysters, mussels, tuna, lobster – they’re just beautiful. The suppliers seem to put such a strong emphasis on quality. Everything is always really fresh and perfect, and I’m so happy with it.”

Others like Mills and Chef Ana Castro of Acamaya, a Mexican seafood restaurant in New Orleans, said they planned to start getting Maine seafood shipped down to the Crescent City so they can add it to their own menus.

Castro said she wants to order eels from American Unagi in Waldoboro to make barbecue unagi tacos. She also wants Bangs Island Mussels shipped down to use in her arroz negro, replacing the Prince Edward Island Mussels she’d been using before her trip to Maine.

“The Prince Edward Island mussels can be small and inconsistent,” Castro said while touring the Bangs Island Mussels production facility on the Commercial Street waterfront, which produces more than 600,000 pounds of mussels a year. “The Bangs Island Mussels are so beautiful, plump and clean. The meat has a firm but velvety texture. They just taste better, sweeter.”

A tour group, including esteemed chefs from around the country, walks toward Bangs Island Mussels in Portland. Shawn Patrick Ouellette/Staff Photographer

Another chef on the tour, Katarina Petonito, executive chef at Eastern Point Collective restaurants in Washington, D.C., said she’s been on a mission to find the highest quality, most natural and sustainable products possible.

“I felt like my last piece of the puzzle was finding a source for sustainable seafood,” Petonito said. “I thought of this trip as an opportunity to learn more about the seafood business in general, but it’s really turning into, ‘Oh, I should just get my seafood from here.’ There is a unique flavor, very clean-tasting. There’s not that processed taste you’d get from a commodity fishing boat.”

“In Maine, we have a small boat fleet that takes great pride in having really amazing seafood,” said Ben Martens, executive director of the Maine Coast Fishermen’s Association. The local seafood industry is capable of shipping top-quality products nationwide, he noted, aided by cutting-edge technology that can flash-freeze seafood while preserving its fresh taste and texture.

“We can move product really quickly around the country,” Martens said. “You could get a frozen scallop from Maine in Omaha, Nebraska, and defrost it and you’d have a hard time telling the difference between fresh and frozen because when you have a fresh product that is frozen correctly, the quality on the other side is pretty amazing.”

“The quality of the seafood here in Maine is unmatched in the states,” said Rubin, crediting both the Gulf’s cold waters – though the temperature is rapidly rising – and the state’s “seafood culture.”

“Seafood so important to so many people here. It’s their life,” Rubin said. “Like the oyster people, the uni guy (Atchan Tamaki of ISF Trading on Commercial Street), they’re specialists in their field. The combination of all these different specialists is what makes Maine so unique. These people care so much about the ocean and what we pull out of it.”

Matt Moretti, co-owner and CEO of Bangs Island Mussels, left, talks about mussels with Chef Katarina Petonito of Washington D.C., center and Chef Nicole Cabrera Mills, of New Orleans. Shawn Patrick Ouellette/Staff Photographer

A SUSTAINABILITY ROLE MODEL 

The visiting chefs also said they were struck by Maine’s efforts to ensure the state’s fisheries and aquaculture are as eco-friendly and sustainable as possible. While there may be continuing local debate over the details of certain fishing and aquaculture regulations, the chefs said the system Maine has in place seems far superior to sustainability codes in their home regions of the Mid-Atlantic or the Gulf of Mexico, or other coastal U.S. regions they’ve visited.

“In New Orleans, we have a massive seafood industry, but it’s not as regulated as it is here,” Castro said. “I wish people paid more attention to sustainability in New Orleans and Louisiana the way it’s being paid attention here. It’s really inspiring to see people doing things this way, so we can bring this knowledge back.”

“All of the regulations seem so organized, and it seems like everyone is following them,” Mills said. “It’s very different from the Gulf of Mexico, where the system is kind of a mess. It’s supposed to help the fishermen and the farmers, but effectively it doesn’t.”

“What people are doing with sustainability and marine management here should be a role model for our country in general,” said Petonito.

Their glowing assessments come as no surprise to Maine seafood professionals.

“We have a fleet of small boats that care about the future,” said Martens, noting that his association works with many multi-generational fishermen. “They’re in it for the long haul, because they’ve been in it for the long haul. When you’re not thinking about regulations in terms of how to pay shareholders more this quarter, but instead you’re thinking, ‘How can we make sure my kids and grandkids have the same opportunities I’ve had,’ that’s a different type of equation.”

“I think we’re definitely ahead of the curve here in Maine, and definitely leaders in the sustainability movement,” Rubin said. “And as more chefs and people from around the country see what we’re doing here, they might want to bring those techniques and systems to where they are.”

Just as Chef Endo’s Portland dinners showcased the stunning variety of seafood available in the Gulf of Maine, Martens said the potential to broaden the state’s bounty can bolster Maine’s fisheries and aquaculture industries in the years to come.

“We can talk about haddock and lobsters and scallops forever, but there are so many other things that are coming out of our waters that we’re just scratching the surface of opportunity for,” Martens said.

“It’s not like Maryland, where you show up and you’ve got crabs,” he added. “You come to Maine and you can have the lobster – and you should – but you can also have all these groundfish and all these oysters and mussels and kelp and crab, tuna, swordfish. It really is pretty amazing what the Gulf of Maine ecosystem provides to our fishermen and our state, and it’s really rewarding to see chefs and others be able to witness and embrace it and take it back to their communities.”