Chef Thomas Hishon Highlights Sustainable Seafood

Auckland chef Thomas Hishon grew up living an idyllic life most people would envy, Forbes contributor Lizzy Saxe writes.

“I’m from rural New Zealand … both sides of my family were quite involved with farming and breeding sheep,” Hishon tells Saxe. “My granddad was one of the first people to go into the wild and bring deer back and farm deer … My grandparents and aunties and uncles would grow a lot of vegetables, so I was always around food.”

That nostalgia is tainted by the environmental realities of life in the anthropocene and so last October, Hishon and his business partners opened kingi, a Britomart restaurant devoted to highlighting sustainable seafood.

Hishon knows that sustainability is difficult to define, so he simplifies things by only using fish that are caught in very specific ways by people he knows and trusts. He works with oyster and mussel farms, humane longline fishermen who “are very selective about which fish come onto the boat”, and even divers who go after treasures like scallops, paua, and butterfish.

Original article by Lizzy Saxe, Forbes, June 25, 2021.

Photo by Troy Goodall.