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Salish Sea Chef’s Dinner at Ray’s November 14!

Sustainable Seafood Celebration is joining forces with five incredible Northwest chefs with a passion for seafood, for an evening focused on sustainable seafood practices and successes in the Salish Sea. Guests will learn about the many success stories of local seafood from excellent runs of Baker River Sockeye in 2019 to expanding tribal fishing practices and more. They will meet the people who are driving this forward and making changes from fishermen and women to chefs and activists.

Five featured chefs will create a multi-course dinner with each preparing one course that highlights local seafood including: Salish Sea Dungeness Crab, Baker River Sockeye Salmon, Salish Sea Halibut, reef net Salish Sea Pink Salmon, and fresh oysters.

Featured Chefs
Paul Duncan, Ray’s Boathouse
Renee Erickson, The Whale Wins
Kevin Davis, Blueacre Seafood
Wayne Johnson, FareStart
Adam Stevenson, Copperleaf at Cedarbrook Lodge

Salmon Safe Wines
Brickhouse Vineyards Chardonnay Ribbon Ridge, OR 2016
L’Ecole No. 41 ‘Perigee’ Estate Red Seven Hills Vineyard, Walla Walla Valley, WA 2015
Sokol Blosser Estate Rosé of Pinot Noir Dundee Hills, OR 2018

“We’re extremely excited to share the many successes coming out of the Salish Sea with folks. We are facing perilous times in our environment and it’s important for people to see and understand that visible progress is being made and that our salmon and halibut runs can get stronger”, said Riley Starks, Salish Sea fisherman, founder of Salish Center for Sustainable Fishing Methods, co-founder of Sustainable Seafood Celebration.

The dinner event is Thursday, November 14 at 6 p.m. at Ray’s Boathouse in Ballard (in the Northwest Room) where the Salish Sea has been their backyard for 46 years. The evening will be co-hosted by Sustainable Seafood Celebration co-founders Riley Starks and Larry Mellum, owner of Pike Place Chowder.

Each chef will dine at a table with guests for more intimate conversation about protecting and nurturing the bounty of the Salish Sea and why sustainable fishing practices is important to them.

Tickets
Tickets are $125 per person and inclusive of multi-course dinner, salmon safe wine and gratuity. Reservations are required to attend and tickets must be purchased online by Friday, November 1, 2019. All guests must be 21 years of age and older to attend. Ticket proceeds benefit Sustainable Seafood Celebration and its partners in the fight to restore sustainable fishing practices, wild salmon runs and local waterways. Tickets available for purchase here.

About Sustainable Seafood Celebration
Sustainable Seafood Celebration is a nonprofit group launched in 2018. Its mission is to raise awareness of the fruits of the Salish Sea – encouraging efforts to keep our local waters healthy despite rapid population growth; rebuilding healthy populations of wild salmon from the Salish Sea; supporting the survival of the Orcas; and highlighting the successful results of good policy and responsible management. More at sustainableseafoodcelebration.org.

About the Salish Sea
The Salish Sea is one of the world’s largest and biologically rich inland seas. Its name pays tribute to the first inhabitants of the region, the Coast Salish. The Salish Sea is an inland sea that encompasses Puget Sound, the San Juan Islands and the waters off of Vancouver, B.C. The area spans from Olympia, Washington in the south to the Campbell River, British Columbia in the north, and west to Neah Bay and includes the large cities of Seattle and Vancouver.

About Riley Starks
A Washington native, Riley Starks took the less traveled fork in the road for the first time when he eschewed law school and bought his first fishing boat in 1973. He has been a commercial fisherman all of his life, and along the way explored other uncharted territory on Lummi Island by building Nettles Farm in 1992, buying and operating the Willows Inn in 2001, founding Lummi Island Wild, a reefnet salmon business, and finally owning and operating Nettles Farm B&B in 2013.

About Larry Mellum
Larry Mellum is the founder and owner of Pike Place Chowder in Seattle’s historic Pike Place Market. In the 1990s he and a partner opened the Charlestown Street Cafe in West Seattle where they held a weekly chowder contest that drew fans from all over the state and lead to first-place wins in several national chowder cook-offs. In 2003 Larry opened Pike Place Chowder where eight varieties of chowder are served daily. Four years later a second eatery was opened in the Pacific Place Shopping Center. In 2018 Pike Place Chowder’s New England Clam Chowder was acclaimed by Yelp, “The Most Popular Dish in America”.

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A Lesson in Salish Sea Salmon Restoration

Sustainability and the health of our Salish Sea and waterways has long been an area of focus for the ownership and staff at Ray’s Boathouse. We’ve always worked to educate our team about what they are serving, where it came from and how it was caught or harvested. We visit our fishermen and women and other purveyors to see where our product comes from and how they run their businesses.

In the last year we partnered with non-profit Long Live the Kings (LLTK) to take an even larger role in the welfare of our local salmon runs so that generations to come can enjoy fresh wild salmon as we have. We are shifting our focus from one of sustainability to one that ensures our salmon populations increase as our city and infrastructure continues to grow and change.

Everything LLTK does is on behalf of improving the health and habitats of local salmon including three main areas: advancing science, improving management and implementing solutions.

Recently our team had the opportunity to sit down with the Executive Director of LLTK, Jacques White, for a lesson in salmon sustainability and the current state of our local runs, as well as updates regarding the Southern Resident Killer Whale Recovery Task Force which is helping to ensure they have enough wild salmon to survive.

In the early 1980s there were nearly 1,000,000 Chinook salmon harvested here compared to about 200,000 in 2010. The biggest factors affecting Salish Sea salmon populations are:

  • Food sources (zooplankton and other salmon friendly nutrients)
  • Pollution
  • Noise
  • Predators
  • Infrastructure

Each of these plays a role in the reduction of salmon for various reasons and when compounded it’s easy to see why our local salmon are suffering.

There is no quick solution to this issue, but they have seen positive results in recent years including the ongoing restoration of Hood Canal summer chum. These fish were nearly extinct by the early 1990s but with the help of LLTK operating a conservation hatchery program to increase the abundance of naturally spawning summer chum, the number of adults returning to these rivers annually has increased from the 100s to well over 2,000.

LLTK is also actively involved in the Southern Resident Killer Whale Recovery Task Force developed recently to address population concerns for these whales. The task force made recommendations to Governor Inslee to protect orcas and aid in their recovery with 11 of the 36 recommendations influenced by LLTK’s Salish Sea Marine Survival Project!

Ray’s is dedicated to this cause and doing what we can to increase the populations of our local salmon. For us it starts at the team level getting everyone at Ray’s to understand the issues at hand and to be able to educate our guests.

We invite you to learn more and get involved in this journey with us at LLTK.org.

Images courtesy of Long Live the Kings.