Royal Red Shrimp Are the Latest Craze in Local Seafood

Shrimp are the best selling seafood in the United States, by far.

They are also one of the dirtiest — in more ways than one.

Most of the shrimp consumed in the United States are imported from China and countries in southeast Asia, where harvesting practices are scantly regulated, environmentally destructive and often conducted on the backs of people working under slave-like conditions. The bulk of them are grown in farms, where they are raised on antibiotic-laced feed and then treated with chemicals to make them more appealing to the eye — when they are defrosted many months later.

Even the bulk of the shrimp caught in the wild in waters off the United States can be environmentally problematic. For every pound of shrimp caught in the Gulf of Mexico — where more than half of the domestic shrimp supply comes from — nearly 5 pounds of other fish are killed and discarded as “by-catch,” one of the highest ratios of waste in any fishery anywhere.

But on the East End, shrimp ARE the by-catch.

For East End seafood connoisseurs who are interested in both their personal health and environmental health, there is a little known alternative worth seeking out when shrimp is what you are looking for, either in a seafood shop or on a restaurant menu.

Royal red shrimp, as they are known, are found throughout the Eastern Seaboard and are growing in popularity both for their sweet, tender meat, brilliant colors and for their local-only sustainability, environmental and health responsibility and farm-to-table chops.

Royal reds are the same shrimp commonly boasted about on menus in Florida as “Florida red shrimp.” But they are not some new climate change transplants to our waters. They’ve always been here. Fishermen have been picking the large, robustly red — almost scarlet — shrimp out of their trawls for decades, mixed in amid the whiting and ling that they are more commonly trying to catch in their nets. They’re caught nearly year-round along the edges of the continental shelf so they are landed fresh and can be on a plate within a day or two.

But because they are mostly caught as by-catch, not a specifically targeted species, they are still relatively rare. For years, most fishermen typically didn’t have enough at the end of a voyage to be worth sending to market and have just kept them for themselves to take home for dinner and give to friends. The scant few that have made it to market, have never come with any sort of spotlight indicating their local roots to catch the attention of locavore chefs or diners.

The sustainable seafood distributor Dock-to-Dish is looking to change that.

As it presses for more restaurants, more seafood markets and more consumers to prioritize locally caught seafood, delivered directly by local fishermen to the mouths of diners, Dock-to-Dish is constantly in search of new products to diversify its offerings and keep customers trying new things.

An opportunity to tap directly into the single largest segment of the seafood market, directly from the docks in Montauk, was an exciting discovery for K.C. Boyle, the managing partner of Dock-to-Dish, which was recently taken over by a consortium of commercial fishing families from Montauk.

“They’ve always caught them, but you just never saw them — it’s kind of unbelievable,” Boyle said. “Most fishermen are not chefs, they’re used to fishing for a specific thing that they know they can sell and sending it to market.

“These only came onto our radar about four months ago,” he added. “I saw some come across the dock in a carton and I was like ‘What are these!?’ I tried one raw and it was incredible and I said we have to get these out there and they have absolutely caught fire already.”

Boyle has royal reds on the menus — typically as a nightly special, since supplies are small — at restaurants from the hyper-casual Clam Bar in Montauk to Michelin-starred Gabriel Kreuther on Fifth Avenue in New York City, where chefs are using them for everything from the classic peel-and-eat and fried shrimp, to elegantly constructed tartare with cayenne tuile and caviar. Lulu Kitchen & Bar in Sag Harbor and Duryea’s both have them as specials on a regular basis, as does Nick & Toni’s, Inlet Seafood and Leon’s 1909 on Shelter Island.

Discerning customers have been picking them off the ice at a few local seafood shops for a couple years now, with the help of fish mongers who have long showcased their local options.

“I equate them to the knuckle meat of a lobster,” said Wesley Peterson, a former commercial fisherman who now runs Montauk Seafood Company on South Etna Avenue in Montauk and Bostwick’s Seafood Market on Pantigo Road in East Hampton, where he has a heaping pile of royal reds in the locals only section of his refrigerated case, next to delicate white fillets of turbot and meaty blowfish tails, each dropped at his doorstep by the fishermen who caught them.

“It’s got a softer bite to it than gulf shrimp,” he said. “They’re a very good shrimp, they’re wild caught locally and they have a great color. I just dip them in butter and eat them just like that.”

Peterson said that he sells the shrimp with peels on because they peel so much easier than the pink shrimp — that’s an actual species of shrimp not just a color — that most people buy for shrimp cocktail or to throw into pasta.

Peterson sells his royal reds with the heads removed, because it helps maintain their freshness. But most restaurant chefs and some customers like them with the heads on to be cooked to a crispy crunch and eaten whole.

“They are sweeter and the texture is more tender than other shrimp,” said Philippe Courbet, the executive chef at LuLu Kitchen & Bar in Sag Harbor, where he was toasting royal reds over a wood burning grill on a recent weekend.

He plucked a handful of shrimp out of ice and dropped them directly onto the iron grates of the grill, above a stack of flaming logs. He reached for a small cast-iron skillet and turned to a container of pale yellow escargot butter — garlic, shallots and white wine — and dolloped two heaping spoonfulls into the cast iron before setting the entire thing directly into the fire chamber of the grill.

“I like to eat the heads and everything,” he said, watching the butter melt into a glistening pool of liquid. “We serve them head on, peel on. I want people to get their hands dirty. Eat them.”

Courbet, who is also the executive chef of the Duryea’s restaurants in Montauk and Orient, moved the cast iron to the tip of the grill and set the now-blackened shrimp in. A dash of Pernod briefly engulfed the entire dish in flame and then it was done, ready to be served.

It’s a scene that Boyle says he hopes will be seen more and more in the coming months and years. Some Montauk fishermen are trying to figure out if and how the shrimp can be caught in greater numbers, in the hope of feeding a broader market — literally.

“At Dock-to-Dish, we are always trying to identify species like this coming off our boats and say, ‘Hey, we might be onto something here,’” Boyle said.

“It really speaks to the potential that Dock-to-Dish has to offer in terms of under-appreciated and more sustainable species. Montauk has more than 70 species of fish and shellfish and the more we spread around the diversity, the more sustainable everything becomes,” he said. “It’s all about connecting the dots.”