By Georgia Freedman via San Francisco Chronicle

This holiday season, Bay Area cooks can turn to a new kind of fishmonger for access to some of California’s best seafood, including abalone, spiny lobster and live sea urchin.

Stephanie Mutz and Harry Liquornik, sea urchin divers from Santa Barbara County, have provided seafood to Michelin-starred restaurants like N/naka in Los Angeles and Single Thread in Healdsburg for years. But when the pandemic shut down many of their customers, they turned their business, Sea Stephanie Fish, into a kind of pop-up shop.

The pair partnered with other area fishermen and women who were also looking for ways to keep their businesses afloat, and the group began selling each other portions of their catches. After starting out in her area and Southern California, Mutz now brings seafood to Bay Area customers during monthly and bimonthly pop-ups in Cupertino, Emeryville, San Francisco and Napa. Customers follow the company’s Instagram to see what’s available, then order online a couple days in advance. The next will be Dec. 23.

“We bring what we sell, so nothing goes to waste,” says Mutz. “That’s a huge reason to do direct marketing: so we know our products are appreciated and not wasted.”

Mutz and Liquornik aren’t the only seafood purveyors who have started offering home cooks items that were previously reserved for chefs during the pandemic. San Francisco company Water2Table opened a retail operation to sell the local salmon, halibut and other fish they used to send to restaurants. Four Star Seafood, also in San Francisco, has begun delivering and shipping chef-approved fish directly to customers and opened an oyster bar and store, Billingsgate, in Noe Valley this week.

What makes Sea Stephanie Fish unique is its focus on seafood from the Central Coast and the access to hard-to-find specialty ingredients like Santa Barbara spiny lobster, rock crab, farmed abalone, red and purple urchin, whelks and keyhole limpets. Offering their catch directly to consumers also allows Mutz and the other fishermen she works with the ability to be more discriminating in how and what they catch than they can be if they’re selling to distributors.

“We treat our seafood a little more gently because it’s got to last and be fresh when it reaches the consumer,” Mutz says. “We’re less aggressive when we’re picking the (red) urchin; we don’t stuff our bags as much. We call them ‘princesses.’”

Keisuke Akabori, the chef behind the Oakland pop-up Casa de Kei, started buying the company’s seafood at the beginning of the pandemic and appreciates that it’s unique and from independent fishermen and women.

“It’s fresh, just straight out of the ocean. You can tell the difference by the texture and how much you can really taste the seawater,” he says.

Sea Stephanie Fish’s focus on quality goes hand-in-hand with another goal: maintaining the sustainability of local fisheries. Mutz and Liquornik hope that focusing on catching and selling fewer, higher-quality fish and crustaceans will help ensure they can have long careers as divers and pass on a healthy fishery to the next generation.

One of their most popular items, for instance, is their “purple hachi” urchin, which Mutz dives for off the Santa Barbara coast. Purple urchins are decimating California’s native kelp forests because of the recent die-off of most of their natural predators, the sunflower sea stars. There hasn’t been a commercial incentive to fish for these urchins because they’re often empty in the wild. Mutz solves this problem by partnering with the Cultured Abalone Farm on Dos Pueblos Ranch outside of Santa Barbara: She brings up healthy, but mostly empty, urchins and owner Doug Bush and his staff feed them until they’re full, buttery and sweet.

Sea Stephanie Fish also sells Bush’s abalone, which he grows by pumping in water from just offshore and feeding them giant kelp and red seaweeds. He sells them when they reach about 3¼ inches long.

“People who have gotten big ones will remember them being really tough,” says Bush, who recalls seeing people tenderize wild abalone with cricket bats. “You don’t have to do that with ours. They’re smaller and a lot easier to work with.” He suggests just wiping the abalone down, putting some butter on them, and grilling them in their shells.

Mutz and Liquornik offer cooking tips on Instagram and videos on IGTV to show customers how to cook the abalone and other less-common products like limpets, which can be eaten raw or cooked sous vide until they have a texture and flavor that reminds Mutz of foie gras. Some of their regular customers also contribute videos, like Brenda Ton of San Pablo, who demonstrated how to cook whelks, which are boiled or blanched and can then be stewed in their shells or removed and sauteed or fried like popcorn shrimp.

The partners round out their offerings with seafood from fishermen up and down the coast, like Pacific Gold oysters from Morro Bay in San Luis Obispo County. They are sometimes willing to pay above market rate to ensure they’re getting the best quality available — and to ensure that fishermen and women are being paid fairly for their work. For rock crab, for instance, (which are a bit smaller than Dungeness crabs but have larger claws relative to their size and can be sweeter), Mutz pays 25% to 30% more than other buyers. For that price, she asks her supplier to provide specimens that are heavy and full of meat and don’t have any barnacles on them.

This can result in slightly higher prices for her customers, though for some items cutting out the middleman keeps her prices down. Prices can change from week to week, but at the time of publication her red urchins cost $12 each and the purple are $8; the rock crab are $7.50 to $10.50, depending on size; and spiney lobster start at $52 for a small lobster due to extremely high demand from the Chinese market.

“What she catches, the quality of the product is so special,” says Paul Einbund, founder of the restaurant the Morris in San Francisco. “Also, it’s not coming from a nameless distributor or importer, it’s coming from Stephanie. And I think that’s a big deal in this day and age, that we can put faces to the suppliers.”

So far the pop-ups have proved wildly popular. Customers who have pre-ordered line up for their boxes at the appointed times or have them placed directly in their cars for contactless pickup. In November, the Bay Area pop-ups sold out less than an hour after the online ordering form was opened.

“It’s amazing that we get to have this. California has such a bounty, and when you’re hunkered down like this, there’s a lot that you miss,” says Kato Banks, a regular customer in San Francisco. “It’s an explosion of California seafood on your plate.”

Sea Stephanie Fish’s next Bay Area pop-ups are Dec. 23 in Cupertino, Emeryville, San Francisco and Napa. Online ordering will open at 3:30 p.m. Dec. 21 with locations for pickup. Visit www.seastephaniefish.com/store and sign up for their email list to be notified when ordering opens; supplies sell out fast.