At the upscale French Quarter restaurant, beautifully seared tuna, grilled swordfish and seafood cioppino share the menu with a rotating selection of delightfully new offerings, such as a meat-lover’s pizza featuring swordfish or tuna sausages. Would you like a mufflet? Nelson orders a mini appetizer of “swordfish cold cuts.” He tops a bluefin cheeseburger with swordfish bacon and serves it on a brioche roll with onion rings.
Nelson, who has seen the restaurant weather the floods that followed Hurricane Katrina and the pandemic for 19 years, remains as enthusiastic about offering inventive approaches to seafood as ever.
“Oh yeah… a little more,” he said as he turned up the heat under the Italian swordfish sausage that could have gone into a deconstructed lasagna. He sliced pistachio pepperoni seafood mortadella with chunks of smoked fish belly fat to prove his claim that “swordfish is the pork of the sea.” And he lined up dark-skinned, bone-in, dry-aged rib-eye bluefin tuna served deep red inside, with béarnaise drizzled with house-made Worcestershire sauce. The big cut filled the plate like a fancy cousin to the tomahawk steak.
In 2001, Gary Wallerman and now-retired chef Tenny Flynn, both of Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse, founded GW Fins with the philosophy that seafood deserves the same careful attention that beef receives at high-end steakhouses. When I met Nelson in 2016, he had recently been promoted from his long-standing role as head chef to head chef and was enthusiastic about making GW Fins a zero-waste kitchen.
At the time, he had just created “fin wings,” a piece of meat just behind the fish’s gills that American seafood restaurants and fishermen usually throw away. Limited by the labor required to break up the fish, Nelson only offered the wings at a special price. The chef has since streamlined that process so the item has become a regular offering, turning the former waste into one of the most popular entrees on the $14 menu.
“If it’s not making dollars, there’s no point,” he said of his efforts to reduce waste and use whole fish, even boiling fish scales to create neutral gelatin and turning fish skins into crackers. “We proved it to be the case.”
While running the kitchen, Nelson began to realize that more than half of the fish ended up as waste, and he set out to change that. Because the restaurant now deals almost exclusively with whole fish butchered on site — 700 to 1,000 pounds a day — Nelson has easy access to all parts of the creatures. In addition to using the fish nose to tail, he challenges his employees to use their imaginations and keep their approach to seafood fresh and surprising.
Nelson takes the sourcing, butchering and cooking of seafood seriously, but when it comes to creating and naming dishes, his playful side comes through. Thus was born his painstaking “seauterie” board with andouille, smoked sausage, chorizo and bacon made from fish.
He started by making a simple swordfish bologna. “I said, let’s just grind it out and see what happens. It was damn good. So I thought, let’s make mortadella and spice it up a bit. And then we went for pepperoni and kelbas. Then we made the hot dogs. Oh my, the hot dog was so good. … I made it for dinner with wine and it was so funny. It was a fine wine dinner and the hot dog was the biggest hit.”
His latest passion is dry-aged fish, which he initially thought might just be a gimmick. During the pandemic, when the restaurant’s usually frenetic pace slowed, he found time to experiment with a process similar to the one typically applied to beef. Butchered fish go into commercial glass refrigerators programmed for specific temperature and humidity levels. The air inside is circulated by UV light, which kills bacteria and other microorganisms.
The dry-aging process, which Nelson said he learned through trial and error, has been adopted elsewhere, perhaps most notably in the United States by Liwei Liao, or as he’s known on social media, “The Dry-Aged Fish Guy.” at the Joint in Los Angeles’ Sherman Oaks neighborhood, which sells dry-aged fish to restaurants and consumers.
If cared for well, fish — like beef — actually tastes better as it ages, Nelson said. With dry aging, the connective tissue begins to break down, Nelson said, releasing amino acids that create a tender protein with a more intense flavor. The meat shrinks and drops about 20 percent of its weight, creating a meat with rich umami.
Some, like his tuna, stay in coolers for up to 14 days.
Nelson sees this as a natural evolution of efforts to use the whole fish and reduce waste.
“Before, we couldn’t buy larger species because we just couldn’t use them fast enough,” he said. “If I were to buy a whole yellowfin tuna, it’s usually about 100 pounds of tuna, so trying to move all that over a three-day period is pretty difficult. So just as it is a method of enhancing flavor, it is also a method of preservation.
Weather and tides affect the availability of large fish species, so now that they are available, he can stock up, use the fresh portions immediately, turn the less frequently used portions into sausages, and a few weeks later start using dry aged fish.
Although many of GW Fins’ creations require butchering fish and access to specialized equipment such as dry-aging refrigeration, sous vides and smokers, Nelson encourages home cooks to think of fish, especially fleshy species such as swordfish, as just another aromatic protein.
Nelson acknowledges that it can be difficult for consumers to determine which fish is sustainably caught. Because of the amount of fish he buys, he can be selective, checking his sources, even getting on boats and watching processing at times to ensure the seafood he buys is properly caught and cared for.
It’s essential for Nelson to take an approach that uses everything for every creature he brings into the kitchen.
For most of his sausages, such as the house-cured “bacon,” Nelson draws his recipe inspiration from classic sausage and smoking preparations and techniques.
“We take the cuts from the belly of the swordfish,” he says. “This is the flap of the abdomen. You can’t really use it in a serving, but it’s super greasy.
It’s smoked, sliced and fried, and as Nelson notes, “If I didn’t tell you it was fish, you wouldn’t buy it. You’re going to get halfway there and you’re like, “That’s a fish?” It’s pretty shocking.
