- Michael Gebert
Over the past 40 years Villa Park-based Supreme Lobster, which supplies fresh fish to many of the top restaurants and retailers in Chicago, from Grace to Eataly, as well as vast quantities of frozen product in the food-service sector, has grown into the largest fish distributor in the U.S. A few years ago I shot video of its massive warehouses and spent a good deal of time talking with Carl Galvan, a former chef and line cook who handles the high-end restaurant accounts and made a name for himself back then pioneering the use of some new gadget called Twitter to let chefs know what was fresh off the boats (by way of O’Hare).
- Michael Gebert
- Serve-yourself king crab
Things get more intriguing still with the wall of cured and smoked products from every seafood culture—everything from high-end smoked salmon from Scotland and Ducktrap in Maine, to pickled and creamed herring from Chicago-based deli supplier Noon Hour, to bacalao, aka salted cod, a common ingredient in Italian and Spanish dishes. There’s a lot more to how seafood is used in world cuisine than entree-portion fillets, and Galvan reels off some of the seafood products that you’ll be able to find in the store (and rarely if ever outside it, in the Chicago area)—”Daniel Boulud smoked salmon, the Browne Trading caviar line, Spanish mojama [dried tuna], tuna bottarga, bottarga di Muggine, that we sell to restaurants but retailers have no call for, they have no source.”
