By Walter Geiger
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Sports fishermen and fishing guides who concentrate on inshore or flats fishing don’t care much for celebrity chef/restaurateur Emeril Lagasse. He has done well enough at the celebrity chef business that he is just Emeril - no last name needed. That puts him right up there with Herschel and Elvis, at least in some circles.
With all due respect to the late Julia Child, the first of the genre, I’m not much into cooking shows but I am into eating. One of my favorite dishes is blackened redfish. Emeril introduced that delicacy to the masses and, in just a few short months, the masses fell in love with it. This simple creation put Emeril on the map and blackened redfish began to appear on every upscale - and many low scale - menus around the world.
Suddenly, the lowly redfish, whom many had viewed as a trash fish for generations, was - sorry, Charlie - King of the Sea. Demand for redfish went up.
Commercial fishermen with long lines and nets targeted them in order to cash in on the craze and, you guessed it, redfish populations which had thrived since creation rapidly declined.
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