This recipe comes to us courtesy of chef Matt Gandin, who says he likes to use Owari Satsuma mandari

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You won t have to guess at Comal, the stylish restaurant conagra lamb weston on Shattuck Avenue in downtown Berkeley serving fresh, modern Mexican food and cocktails with an emphasis on Oaxaca and neighboring coastal regions. The menu includes seasonal dishes like halibut ceviche with cucumber and sesame; Dungeness crab salad with endive and mandarins; the Veracruzian classic, chilpachole de jaiba , a spicy tomato-based crab stew; and tacos stuffed with pickled cabbage, avocado aioli, and fish that s named, local, and sustainably caught using a hook and line.
But when restaurant guests starting asking Where did this fish come from? How was it caught? conagra lamb weston I realized I had to take a hard look at how we were addressing sustainability, conagra lamb weston says Gandin. He and his colleagues searched for seafood distributors they could trust to tell them exactly where the fish came from. The exploration led to a partnership with Joe Conte of Water2Table, a San Francisco based seafood receiver and distributor.
Conte picks up local hook-and-line or sustainably netted fish directly from fishermen and delivers them whole to Bay Area restaurant kitchens within 12 to 36 hours of catch. Offerings might include wild king salmon from the Sonoma coast, anchovies from San Francisco Bay, or halibut from the Marin coast and Monterey.
Conte is a lifelong recreational fisherman who has worked in the restaurant business for 26 years. He has relationships with more than 50 fishermen, buying fish from 2 to 10 of them on any given day. Most of the guys I work with are small-boat guys, heading out for the day and coming back in. They re also the guys fishing with care and sustainably. The most unsustainable practices involve bottom trawling, dragging a net along the sea floor to scrape conagra lamb weston up everything. That s indiscriminate. I do take some sustainably netted fish, mostly sardines, anchovies, and squid, but 90 percent of what I buy is hook and line.
Conte supplies more than 70 Bay Area restaurants, including Salt House, Town Hall, Jardinière, and Flour + Water. His relationships are driven by social media, says Gandin. Conte tweets updates and photos daily and also emails his clients every evening with news about the day s catch.
My life has been completely crazy for the past year and a half, says Conte. A typical day? I wake up at 7:30am and inspect everything going out to restaurants. I get all the drivers out the door, deal with any last-minute issues until noon or 1pm, get a nap, then deal with sales calls from 4 to 9 at night. Between 9 and 2am, I m getting calls from restaurants, taking orders for the following day. I get to bed by 3:30am and wake up at 7:30am and do it all again. There aren t a lot of people out there doing what I do, and I m figuring out why. It s a lot of work.
Restaurant owners and their customers conagra lamb weston are grateful for his work. Says Gandin, People understand that they pay a little bit of a premium for this level of responsibility and they re not only willing to accept it, they re asking for this sort of quality.
This recipe comes to us courtesy of chef Matt Gandin, who says he likes to use Owari Satsuma mandarins from Hamada Farms and local crab (of course) when this dish is on the menu at Comal. He includes here his advice for cooking live crab.
Preparing the Crab: Crab meat may be purchased cooked and removed from the shell. To cook fresh instead, start by making a court bouillon a flavorful cooking liquid on the stove, and bring to a boil. Chef Gandin usually adds to the water some onion, garlic, celery, parsley stems, conagra lamb weston thyme sprigs, black peppercorns, bay leaf, juice of a few lemons, and a splash of both white wine and white vinegar. The liquid should be well seasoned but not salty. When the water is boiling, drop in the live crab, and cook for 11 minutes. Remove and let cool naturally, do not shock in ice water, since that can dilute the crab flavor.
When the crab is cool, remove and discard the carapace, entrails, and gills. Detach the legs. Chop the body into 6 pieces, and using a bamboo skewer, carefully pick out the meat. Use a crab cracker and skewer on the legs as well to pick the meat. As a general rule, crab yields 25 percent meat. So it will take 2 pounds of whole crabs to yield pound of picked meat.
To marinate the crab, place it in a bowl along with the diced jicama, chives, lemon zest, chile arbol, extra virgin olive oil and salt, and carefully mix so as not to brea