10 Top Trends in Seafood

1. It’s great grilled. The mania for grilled proteins—particularly those wood-grilled exhibition-style over an open flame—has set fire to the seafood menu. Grilled seafood is appreciated as healthful, upscale and trendy, bringing out the flavor of top-quality fish and crustaceans. Restaurants have rolled out new seafood entrées incorporating grilled shrimp, salmon, tilapia, mahi mahi or even lobster tails. To subtly enhance the grilled flavor, the fish may be brushed with garlic butter or lemon-infused olive oil before grilling.
2. Fish tacos take on new tastes. Similarly, we’re now seeing new variations of the Mexican Baja-style fish tacos that have taken the country by storm. Grilled fish or shrimp tacos are increasingly competing with traditional fried versions, while Mexican restaurants have upgraded to fried shrimp tacos made with flavorful batters such as beer batter or chile-lime batter. In the quick-service realm, restaurants that have had success with wraps featuring crispy chicken are now creating similar fried-fish wraps.
3. Sushi gets spicy. Sushi has gone mainstream, but now it’s going international, with rolls featuring hot peppers and other Latin flavor notes. No longer restricted to big-city menus, restaurants in places like Oklahoma are serving Nirvana Rolls with crab cakes, cream cheese, avocado, jalapeños and blackened tuna, topped with eel, sesame seeds, scallions and creamy habanero sauce.
4. Lobster is the New White Fish. It’s all about affordability in today’s economy, without sacrificing flavor. Restaurant chefs are introducing new tactics to make sure those more expensive seafood items don’t get sunk in the process. This explains the emergence of dishes such as lobster mac‘n cheese and lobster ravioli on menus. Using a little bit of a precious commodity can yield a whole lot of flavor without imparting too high of a cost.
5. Surf & turf 2.0. One of the most venerable traditions on upscale menus, the surf & turf combo, is back—but in new forms, sometimes including more complex ethnic-inspired dishes, or a seafood topping for a steak. Newport Seafood Grill offers a Build Your Own Surf & Turf option, pairing a sirloin steak with a choice of stuffed garlic prawns, seared scallops or stuffed sole.
6. Small plates from the sea. Though seafood is usually thought of as premium fare, it’s making an excellent showing in moderately priced small plates, bar-menu bites and bargain snack items—fried-fish or crabcake burgers and sliders, taquitos, oyster shots, seared scallops. One chain even offered a limited-time offer of three coconut shrimp for 99 cents.
7. Southern accents. There’s been a resurgence of interest in authentic regional American seafood styles—from New England to San Francisco to Hawaii. What really stands out, though, is the cornucopia of Southern-style seafood, particularly Cajun and Creole fare from the Louisiana Gulf Coast and Low Country cuisine from the southern Atlantic Coast. A midscale chain’s Big South Shrimp Fest promotion ranged from Low Country shrimp with cheese grits to New Orleans shrimp over Creole rice. For more information on shrimp trends, click here.
8. Fruit-of-the-sea plus fruit. Seafood dishes and fruit sauces are two key trends; together, they’re a marriage made in heaven. Examples include orange-and-chipotle-glazed grilled salmon or Chilean sea bass topped with warm mango salsa. For a slightly more exotic touch, there is coconut mahi mahi with passion fruit sauce and Maine lobster salad with yuzu orange sauce.
9. Mighty Mediterranean. Latin and Asian notes are everywhere on the seafood menu, but we’re also seeing increased interest in more subtle Mediterranean flavors and ingredients. Examples include roasted salmon stuffed with sun-dried tomatoes and baby artichokes, and crab-stuffed eggplant, consisting of a crabcake sandwiched between two eggplant slices, lightly battered and fried, served over angel-hair pasta and topped with shrimp and crawfish au gratin.
10. Sustainability. Depletion of the world’s commercial fisheries is a real and growing problem. Some seafood restaurants have gone so far as to announce that they will no longer offer seafood species that have been overfished. Both the restaurant industry and the dining public have a vested interest in keeping delicious seafood available for the future, so interest in sustainable sourcing of both farmed and wild-caught seafood is growing rapidly. For more information on sustainability, click here to view the article "Seafood: Why Sustainability Matters".