Forty years ago, Julia Child told Roger Berkowitz about a delicious fish she ate that had been flash frozen on a boat in Seattle. Berkowitz, a fishmonger, was unconvinced that a frozen fish could be that good.
Fast forward some 30 years, and Berkowitz, the former president and CEO of Legal Sea Foods, was at a Tazmanian oyster farm. The farmers there used nitrogen to freeze oysters, then ship them to customers in Japan. “There’s no way in hell this is going to be any good,” Berkowitz remembers thinking. He did a blind taste test with the farm's frozen and freshly shucked oysters, and his initial reluctance turned into marvel. “I could not tell the difference.”
Now, Boston’s seafood king has launched a new marketplace to order fresh frozen seafood and meals. Berkowitz told Boston Public Radio on Wednesday that the pandemic and rising costs influenced the creation of his seafood distributing company, Roger’s Fish Co.
During the pandemic, people started eating out at restaurants less often. Then as staffing shortages and rising costs of labor, supplies and utilities pushed restaurant prices upward, eating at home became the better financial deal.
“The paradigm of eating out is changing,” said Berkowitz. He aims to meet that change by giving people the option of high-quality New England seafood that can be shucked and slurped at home. Eliminating the additional costs of full-service restaurants helps make these products more affordable, said Berkowitz.
Roger’s Fish Co. delivers fresh-frozen seafood, including lobster, oysters and cod, plus prepared meals like double clam chowder (more clams than his original recipe), crab cakes and lobster pizza anywhere in the continental United States. The secret to delivering seafood at its freshest state, said Berkowitz, is a proprietary freezing process inspired by Japanese technology.
It’s normally expensive to freeze food with nitrogen, said Berkowitz, but the gas's ability to preserve the structure and texture of food can't be beat. Versus freezing food in a large freezer, Roger's Fish Co. sprays pressurized liquid nitrogen onto the seafood to freeze it immediately and create a thin crust of ice that protects the flavor, texture and color of the product, according to the company's website.
Berkowitz began his career in seafood working at his family’s fish market in Inman Square in Cambridge. While working for Legal Sea Foods, he also maintained a mail-order seafood business. But with Roger’s Fish Co. he can now focus on commerce full time. “For me it was sort of getting back to something I hadn’t fully consummated,” he said.
