There have never been so many sea urchins on tables in Quebec as in the last week. The Round Table, a group of restaurateurs formed this year, organized the supply of the order of several tons of this mainly exported marine animal. The collective continues its quest for citizens to appropriate, species by species, products from the St. Lawrence River that are still little or not consumed in Quebec.
“When we received them, they had been fished for less than 24 hours,” says the chef and co-owner of Vin Mon Lapin, Marc-Olivier Frappier, happily, raving about the quality of the sea urchins featured in this time on its menu.
Sitting on a banquette in his cozy gourmet restaurant, he makes a hat-shaped incision on one of the spiny-covered green echinoderms to show how to open and clean them.
“They’re really beautiful, so the most interesting way to eat them is raw,” says Frappier. The latter serves the gonads, the orange part of the beast eaten by humans, on a fried tomato bun. He also sometimes uses them in pasta. “We make our sauce with sea urchins and we put raw ones on top. It’s a great way to get started,” he says.
This is the first time that so many restaurant owners from here — 105 in just over a week — can serve sea urchins from Quebec, a resource that is nevertheless abundant in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Until this year, establishments had to go to great lengths to obtain these somewhat forbidding-looking sea urchins. They had to approach the fishermen themselves, who often work in Newfoundland or the northeastern United States, and pick up the harvest at the airport. An investment of time and money that was not within everyone’s reach, underlines the Secretary General of the Round Table, Félix-Antoine Joli-Coeur.
To remedy this situation, the collective reached an agreement with the Wolastoqiyik Wahsipekuk First Nation of Cacouna. This Maliseet community of Bas-Saint-Laurent harvests about 20% of the sea urchins caught in Quebec.
“It’s the cleanest fishing that exists, highly selective. Divers are hired to locate the richest sea urchin beds. You have to be able to read the vegetation cover to detect which ones will have the most gonads inside,” explains the First Nation’s commercial fisheries director, Guy-Pascal Weiner.
Until now, his entire harvest of sea urchins was sold in the United States.
The exported St. Lawrence
“This project is possible because, on the one hand, we have seasoned restaurateurs who want to serve this product, which is still complicated and special to present, and, on the other hand, there are fishermen who want to keep some for the indoor market. The wholesale distributor was missing, so that we had a single invoice, and we found it,” underlines Mr. Weiner. This is the distribution company Norref, based in Montreal.
The Round Table does not intend to limit its action to sea urchins. It must be said that, according to the calculations of the Blue Fork, a program that aims for the sound management of marine resources in the St. Lawrence, 81% of what is fished in the river is exported. And that Quebecers massively consume imported seafood products.
It is the cleanest fishing that exists, highly selective. Divers are hired to locate the richest sea urchin beds.
This is a situation that shocks Mr. Joli-Coeur. This summer, the Round Table also set up a pilot project to allow restaurants to serve rock crab, shunned by the industry for years. “We thought Quebecers wouldn’t like it because it’s smaller and we’re attached to snow crab. But the flesh is even finer and sweeter,” he says.
A large number of species could soon be in the collective’s line of sight, including several species of fish, but also squid, razor clams and sea cucumbers. According to Mr. Joli-Coeur, the perception must be changed that Quebeckers do not want it.
Chef Marc-Olivier Frappier also notes that rock crab and sea urchin have aroused enthusiasm among his customers. “It’s crazy how popular it is. Sea urchins, we ordered 40 pounds this week, 60 pounds next week, and I will continue to receive a shipment every week until Christmas, if I understood correctly,” he says.
The distributor, Norref, says 5,000 pounds of sea urchins will have been delivered in two weeks, and hopes to supply around 3,000 a week until the end of the season.