Unsung Heroes Festival offers unorthodox twists on unusual seafood

Blue Water Café + Raw Bar

Hot diggity sea urchin?

A sea urchin hot dog might seem a terrible waste to those who enjoy the sea-salty flavour of these delicate gonads when freshly scraped out of their spiky shells.

But for those who are squeamish about uni's pimply, tongue-like texture, emulsified urchin in a tube on a nori bun could be a gateway dish that will tempt them to try other unusual seafood delights such as slipper limpets and jellyfish – but unfortunately not sardines.

The Unsung Heroes Festival at Blue Water Café + Raw Bar is back and better than ever. Celebrating its 14th year and running until the end of February, the festival menu features 14 small, sharing-style plates ($12.50 to $15.50) made from sustainable species that are often overlooked and difficult – sometimes impossible – to source.

This year, executive chef Frank Pabst has given his menu a distinct fun factor. In addition to the urchin hot dog (which develops a slightly musky flavour when poached), there are terrific smelt tacos (deep-fried in a golden beer batter so the silver skin and tiny bones melt away to mildly briny tenderness) and a standout matjes herring poke bowl.

The latter, served on warm sushi rice, strewn with lacy ogo seaweed and sprinkled with volcanic-clay sea salt, is a must-try. The cubed fish from the Northern Sea is so rich and spring-loaded with fat it practically bounces around the mouth.

More adventurous eaters might want to try slipper limpet paella. The crunchy sea snails from France look like little outie belly buttons and taste like clam. Or the plumper East Coast whelks, cooked au gratin with ham and bitter knobs of endive in a bubbling Mornay cheese sauce. And a luscious, locally farmed sturgeon-liver pâté, blended to silken creaminess with great lashes of brandy and butter.

Wine director William Mulholland has done a great job of pairing each dish, should you choose to dine that way. The crisp Abbazia di Novacella Gruner Veltliner stands up particularly well to a remarkably fluffy dulse seaweed gnocchi with grey mullet bottarga and artichoke barigoule, which is always tricky to match. But an easy-breezy Kirin Ichiban lager goes down just as swell with a leisurely bowl of pick-and-dip periwinkles boiled in kombu broth.

Beyond offering great taste and good value, the Unsung Heroes Festival plays an important role by making us think hard about the seafood choices we make. Sure, we all know that we should be eating more sustainable options and steering away from species that are overfished or harvested with methods that are damaging to ocean beds. And it's certainly nice that 10 per cent of the menu's proceeds are contributed to the Vancouver Aquarium's Ocean Wise program.

But dive a bit deeper – as I did this week by questioning what's not on the menu – and it challenges common assumptions.

Let's take Pacific sardines, for example. Where did they go? I'm always railing on about how we should be eating more sardines. Not just because they're a dark and delicious nutritional powerhouse, but also because they swim lower down the food chain and are abundant in our coastal waters.

Ha. Not so. Contrary to popular belief, locally caught sardines are not all being exported overseas. There are none to be had. The fishery has been closed for three years, up and down the entire West Coast from here to Mexico.

Sardines are highly migratory schooling species that thrive in warm water and are subject to natural boom-and-bust cycles related to ocean conditions. Locally, the sardine boom peaked in 2011, when the B.C. fishery was harvesting around 20,000 tonnes annually and the Ministry of Agriculture put out a news release touting it as the province's "newest and fastest-growing seafood export." Four years later, the fishery had completely collapsed.

Why did they disappear? That depends who you ask.

Oceana, an international advocacy group, which says the natural decline was made worse by overfishing, has been fighting for lower sardine catches and stricter regulations. In the report Hungry Oceans: What Happens When The Prey Is Gone, the group argues that the overfishing of forage fish (much of which is turned into fishmeal for aquaculture) is starving their natural predators, namely dolphins, striped bass and whales.

So does that meaning eating lower down the seafood chain isn't necessarily as sustainable as we thought? A more recent study, published in Fisheries Research by a University of Washington professor, contradicts the earlier findings, saying they ignored the natural variability of forage fish, which fluctuate greatly from year to year.

Regardless, there are no local sardines to be had right now and I've become a little obsessed about whether I should eat them if and when they return. Are we screwing up the food chain by going lower and lower? Is the idea of cheap and abundant seafood even possible anymore? Is there no easy moral way out? Should we even be valourizing Blue Water's so-called unsung heroes?

"It's all about having a well-balanced diet," Mr. Pabst reassures. "One day you go for the unsung heroes, the next day you eat vegetables and the next day you eat halibut, if you can afford it."

And if you're really still worried, you could always eat jellyfish. Yes, jellyfish. During my deep dive into sardines, I discovered that the gelatinous blobs, blooming like invasive aliens in oceans all over the world (largely because of rising ocean temperatures, pollution and the overfishing of natural predators) could be versatile saviours in an icky disguise. Besides being nearly fat-free, packed with protein and rich in vitamins, they are now being tested for unconventional uses such as fish feed (the GoJelly Project in Germany) and being manufactured into biodegradable diapers (by the Israeli company Cine'al).

On Blue Water's Unsung Heroes menu, they're being served in napa cabbage rolls with kimchi. "They're taking over the world," Mr. Pabst says, "we might as well eat them."

At the very least, it's an interesting food for thought, which, in my mind, is what this festival is all about.