Profiles

Caroline Bennett

Caroline Bennett is owner of the critically acclaimed restaurant Moshi Moshi based in London, England. Sustainability and environmental stewardship are at the core of business at Moshi Moshi. The restaurant fosters direct relationships with independent fishing families, securing their livelihood while at the same time being able to guarantee a strict environmental policy and top quality seafood. Caroline works to make incremental improvement, year after year, aiming to consistently increase the sustainability of the menu at Moshi Moshi and setting a standard for restaurants in the U.K. and beyond.

What is your favorite thing from the sea?
Sea urchin, or 'uni' in Japanese, which is where I first came across it. It’s one of those foods that people either love or hate. Uni has a strange, slightly spongy texture, amidst the overall sensation of creaminess, and an extraordinarily fresh hit of iodine. (On the other hand, uni that’s not fresh is really revolting… so watch out!) We used to have a wonderful Spanish man that came to the restaurant for five months a year, and we never had any contact details for him, he just left us wonderful uni from Spain that we paid for in cash, and each year eagerly awaited his return. Then one year, he just stopped coming. I was never sure why, though I suspect it was because as Japanese food became more popular he found a more lucrative place to sell his wares. The most memorable dish I have ever had uni in though was in fact in a French restaurant in Tokyo, where it was served in a chilled jelly consommé soup with layers of uni and cream. It’s hard to make that dish sound appetizing… but it truly was!

What’s the most popular dish that you have on your menu?
Salmon nigiri sushi – pure and unadulterated. A dish that exhibits all the best things about sushi: a parcel of warm, vinegared sushi rice topped with dash of wasabi horseradish and a slice of succulent salmon. There’s no messing around. The salmon is sliced expertly (it takes 10 years in Japan to train to do this) to maximize taste and texture on your tongue, and little parcels of subtly flavored rice to set it off. Loch Duart (Scottish) was the best farmed salmon we could find from a sustainability point of view and it tastes so good that we received complaints from customers when it was temporarily unavailable– we were delighted that our customers noticed!

How did you get interested in the issue of sustainable seafood?
I grew up with David Attenborough influencing me to feel that humans are fortunate to be sharing the planet with the other creatures. Nature as he showed it to us was so spectacular, that to feel superior towards it seemed conceited and naïve. So I suppose I was an easy target! Though when I first opened the restaurant I gave no consideration at all to ecological things, which when I look back on it seems odd. It was a summer’s day in 1998 when we first started having difficulties getting supplies of the highly prized ‘ toro’ or belly of the blue fin tuna. It took only a few phone calls to suppliers and NGOs to realize that rather than being just a blip in the supply chain I was witnessing an ecological disaster first hand. Actually, looking back on it, it is amazing to reflect on how thin the veil was between knowing and blissful ignorance…just a few phone calls away!

How would you describe your philosophy on ocean conservation?
Knowing that problems existed, I have subsequently learnt, was just the beginning of the larger problem at hand. Finding solutions has been much harder. We took blue fin tuna off our menus in 1999, and the worry now is that as I familiarize myself with the problems and hear the NGOs’ concerns of the oceans, I fear I should be reducing our menu options to locally grown vegetable sushi! So my philosophy is to make incremental improvement year after year. I won’t introduce anything new to the menu, however deliciously tempting, if I don’t know about its sustainability criteria. Each year my aim is to remove a dish we can find a more sustainable alternative for, maybe through introducing products certified as sustainable by the Marine Stewardship Council for example. Our main point of differentiation however is that we buy directly from a wonderful fishermen, Chris Bean, based in Cornwall. We met through Slow Food and have never looked back; the quality and freshness of his fish is unrivalled.I still have a couple of embarrassingly unsustainable things on my menu – farmed seabass for example or worse still, intensively farmed Tiger prawns from mangroves in Bangladesh…but when a workable solution presents itself they’ll come off. In my heart of hearts though I know that there is precious little time to waste and that nature won’t be able to put up with our abuse for much longer…

Have your customers noticed?
We do a survey for people joining our members scheme and one of the questions is about our environmental policy. Compared with results from the survey 3-4 years ago our customers rank our policy now much higher, so it seems that increasingly it does matter.

Do you feel it limits what you can offer?
Yes, definitely! There are many items we can’t serve from a Japanese perspective; blue fin tuna and yellow tail are the two most obvious. Eel and fish roes are two more dubious examples. Japanese food is all about fish so it’s not possible to substitute it for a meat or vegetable dish. It means that our chefs have to be super skilled – it’s so much easier to slice a fillet of succulent blue fin that really speaks for itself than to find interesting ways of preparing and serving locally caught white fish, though they have the advantage of being super fresh (and nutritious).

Have your seafood suppliers worked with you in getting sustainably caught fish?
One supplier has always been sustainablyminded and is helping us to get MSC products at the moment. The biggest issue is having the time to spend finding these new sustainable supplies… all the time knowing that nature can’t wait forever.

What trends have you noticed in seafood in the past 10 years?
In Japan my friends ate sushi only rarely, in the two months I lived with a Japanese family they ate sushi only twice, once for my farewell party (because they saw I liked it!) and once for granny’s 80th birthday. My friends in the UK however believe you can eat sushi as a substitute for a sandwich three times a week… small wonder our seas are in such a mess.

The other notable change is the size of the big fish, you now see tuna in Billingsgate Market not much longer than 35cm, and weighing less than 30kg; that fish will certainly not have had a chance to breed.

Why are you involved with Seafood Choices Alliance?
SCA makes everything so much easier! It is a really informative organization and its wonderful to be plugged in to all the things going on in the fish world, and best of all, they work with you in making change. Everybody needs encouragement from time to time.

(Photo credit: Andrew Crowley)

Updated August 5, 2008