Will Gilson, chef and co-owner of Puritan & Company in Cambridge, Mass., grew up with a farm-to-table ethos.
His father’s farm in Groton, Mass., is the location of The Herb Lyceum at Gilson’s, which serves dinner on Fridays and Saturdays, and was originally designed as a school to teach about useful plants.
Gilson started cooking at 15 years old, when he was an apprentice under chef Charles Draghi at Marcuccio’s in Boston’s North End. By 17 years old, he was also cooking at The Herb Lyceum.
Gilson later attended Johnson & Wales University in Providence, R.I., and staged at restaurants in Massachusetts, as well as the Lanesborough Hotel in London, before opening Garden at The Cellar in Cambridge, Mass. In 2011, he left to open pop-up restaurants in his home state.
He then opened Puritan & Company, a 100-seat restaurant inspired by The Herb Lyceum, which is open for dinner seven days a week and serves brunch on weekends.
Gilson extends the philosophy of working with local farmers to seafood as well. He discussed his approach, plus strategies and challenges for marketing lesser-known fish, with Nation’s Restaurant News.
What is your strategy for sourcing seafood sustainably?
The biggest thing is a dialog between us and our purveyors — asking them questions about where the product comes from. And the thing that helps us the most is that our guests are always asking where the product’s coming from, so it creates this kind of transparency between the questions we ask our purveyors and the answers that we give the guests. We like it to be as direct as possible. …. Most of them have tracking codes now, so you can see where the product is coming from.
So the impetus starts with your customers?
They want to know where it’s coming from, that it’s being taken care of and that it’s not coming from a source that’s not going to be able to replenish itself. There are so many strict guidelines for these fishermen, and we feel for them, and we know what it’s like when all of a sudden the government says, “You can’t fish for this anymore,” or, “The season’s only going to be this long.” Making money in coastal New England off of fish is a very different business than it used to be.
Most of the seafood used in the United States is imported, though. Do you use much of that?
No. We try to keep everything to coastal New England and write the menu based on what’s seasonally available. We try to pull mostly from the waters here. One of the things that can be tough is making sure that we’re keeping up with the purveyors and asking where it comes from, because if they can’t find the supply locally they’ll try to get it elsewhere [and we don’t want to use that].
But we’re lucky enough with our menu, that we’re able to change it often and only feature what we want. We can be a little bit more fluid when the availability changes.
So none of your customers are demanding that you always offer bluefin tuna, for example?
Exactly. It’s much easier to be a seasonal New England restaurant than it is to be a sushi restaurant.
What about things that everyone loves but are hard to come by in New England, like shrimp?
We’ve tried to focus on getting it stateside, from the Gulf [of Mexico] area. Those guys have a fishing industry that’s not too dissimilar to what we have here, so we try to find ways to support them as well. It’s so much easier to buy a frozen bag of tiger shrimp from Thailand, but once you start researching how that’s prepared and where it comes from, not to mention the carbon footprint to even get it here in the first place, you’re pretty quickly turned off from whatever the price difference is.
Do you buy any farm-raised seafood?
We do. It’s usually more based on local practices. For salmon, there’s a company in Maine that’s raising them up there, and if we want to feature salmon we use that rather than some of the ones from Scotland, even, or Arctic char from Iceland. We try to keep things as stateside as we can.
And you’re supporting local farms that way.
When some people ask about supporting local farms, well, that’s great in the summer, but in the winter you can’t really get anything out of the ground. There’s only so long a root cellar can work, and for a seven-day restaurant, even just one of them, it’s almost impossible to do that. So we like to look at aquaculture as a farming method as well. We’re supporting the local farming community whether it be through oysters or clams or anything like that.
Now, if we have a hard winter, like we did last year, it’s incredibly difficult to pull that stuff out of the water, which is all the more reason to support them. They’re not going out just on your command, they’re going out anyhow.
So if they’re going out, you want to buy some of their seafood?
Exactly. We’re not a restaurant where we want to feature a fish that’s only available on the other side of the world and know that that fish had to be caught at sea, or farm-raised and then frozen and shipped all the way across the world just to be able to have it hit the plate, and then maybe have somebody not like it and write a Yelp review. It’s a little ridiculous to think how many miles something might have to travel to still have someone not enjoy or appreciate it. I would rather charge more for something that’s only available for a small window locally, knowing that I can put a story behind it and people can really understand why we’re serving it to them. Then, even if it’s not their cup of tea, at least they appreciate why it’s there.
Under-utilized fish
We’re in Alaska salmon season now. Do you serve it?
We don’t. It’s never really been a part of [what we do]. When I’m sourcing fish, I try to keep it to the boats of the guys who are local.
Don’t get me wrong, when I go out and someone’s featuring it I think it’s absolutely delicious, but we like to work with “trash fish” and local stuff that we know people are really going to be into.
What sorts of those under-utilized fish do you like to use?
Sheepshead, tautog and [especially] redfish from Maine that’s absolutely gorgeous. I feel like for the price per pound that we pay for it, it allows me to put a lot of it on the menu, and people can enjoy it. I’m paying $4 a pound for fillets of beautiful, colorful fish that come out of the Gulf of Maine.
It’s just not as charismatic as some of the more mainstream species.
And it’s much smaller as well. So it tends to be one of those things that people don’t look at as an entrée. One of the biggest problems we have with sustainable seafood in this country is portion size. Everyone wants to be able to get a big piece of fish that’s a square cut or a fillet so they can charge what they have to for their margins. But we’re in an ever-changing dining world now, where you can put a couple pieces of very thin, small fish on a plate and charge less for it [than an entrée] and call yourself a trendy small-plates restaurant.
Are your customers into that?
I think it depends on how we sell it. If we’re trying to put that off as a cheap entrée, I don’t think it’ll work, but if you have the staff talk about where it’s from and how it’s being prepared, they’re okay with trying it as an appetizer, and then maybe having a fish mid-course and a locally sourced meat as an entrée.
Trying to get someone to commit a lot of dollars to something they maybe have never heard of is an incredibly difficult thing to accomplish.
Some of the best servers in some of the best restaurants in the world have become incredibly good at dropping magic dust on a customer and saying, “You should definitely try this. It’s exotic.”
But when it’s not exotic, it’s more difficult to convince them. You’re saying, “We have a really tasty fish and it’s a bycatch.”
“What’s a bycatch?”
And that becomes a little bit more of a different sell. So I think you have to entice everyone by what it’s going to taste like and how economical it is, and also the story of what they’re doing for the environment.
Contact Bret Thorn at [email protected].
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