The Decibel - Seafood supply changing East Coast menus this summer

Episode Date: June 15, 2026

Summer is peak tourist season for the Atlantic provinces, and many restaurants rely on revenue made during the season to get them through the rest of the year. But this summer, chefs and restaurateurs are facing a challenge: Staples tourists have come to expect, like scallops, haddock, and oysters, will be in short supply. Dakshana Bascaramurty is The Globe’s food culture reporter. She’ll explain what’s causing these shortages, what it means for businesses and customers, and how chefs are adapting to the new landscape. Questions? Comments? Ideas? E-mail us at [e-mail] Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

I feel like non-negotiables for tourists coming to Nova Scotia are dishes involving scallops, lobster, attic. Chris Pine is the executive chef at Lightfoot and Wolfville, a winery and restaurant in Wilfville, Nova Scotia. We get a lot of business in the summer. The influx of tourists coming is great for our business, and a lot of them coming want to indulge in Nova Scotian seafood. I mean, Atlantic Canadian seafood as a whole. Summer is peak tourist season for the Atlantic provinces. And restaurants there depend on revenue from the summer season to keep them going the rest of the year. But this year, iconic seafood staples might be harder to come by.

Restaurants are having a hard time getting their hands on scallops, haddock, and oysters. This summer season is going to be the hardest one in my 19 years of being a chef, I think, to really balance the costs associated with the seafood. Anyone coming to the East Coast this year, I would suggest coming with an open mind. Today we're talking to Daksana Baskaramerti.

She's the Globe's food culture reporter. She'll explain why there's such a shortage of certain types of seafood in Atlantic provinces this year, what it means for these businesses, and how chefs are trying to adapt. We love going and hitting up the beaches and P.I. And ordering more than a couple dozen oysters. But obviously what's going on there right now with the disease and the oysters,

it's getting even harder to not only swallow the price of gas, but indulge in these what are now becoming delicacies. I'm Cheryl Sutherland, and this is the decibel from the Globe and Mail. Hi, Dachshana, thanks for coming on the show. It is my pleasure. So we talked about the importance of sorts of, summer tourist season for the East Coast and the intro. But can you give us some numbers to understand just how important it is for this part of the country? Absolutely. Tourism is so important to the

economies of the Atlantic provinces. In 2024, Canadians spent nearly $7 billion in the four Atlantic provinces, according to some statistics Canada data. And to zoom in on one province in particular, Prince Edward Island, tourism makes up 6.4% of its GDP. If you want to compare that to Ontario, it's 4.1% in Ontario. And in 2024, there were 1.7 million visitors to the province. And, you know, for context, the population of PEI is 180,000. Yeah, that's huge. Yeah, it's enormous. And the total spend in terms of dollars by non-residents during the main tourist season that year was $331.7 million. So, you know, it's bringing in a lot of money to the province of PEI and it's also employing a lot of people. About 11% of the PEI population work in the accommodation and food services sector, which is almost double that for Canada as a whole.

And of course, food plays a big role in tourism, right? Why does it matter whether certain types of seafood are available or not? Well, seafood is a huge draw for tourists to this region. And, you know, again, to look at PEI, I looked up some food and drink receipts totals from June to September of last year. So that's kind of giving you the picture of kind of tourist season. and they totaled $194.5 million. So this is like a big area of spending. And so that also includes, you know, how much money locals are spending, but those are like the four months of the year where a lot of money is spent at restaurants and bars.

And tourists have, you know, this expectation of eating certain types of seafood when they come to this part of Canada, you know, whether it is lobster, oyster, oyster. you know, muscles, fish and chips, scallops. I think it would be very disappointing to spend so much money to fly to another part of the world, you know, for international visitors or to fly to another part of the country, for Canadian visitors, and to have this list of things that you wanted to eat and to find out that they weren't there. So let's talk about what's going on with some of the seafood staples in the Maritimes. Let's start with scallops and Haddock. how have those supplies changed?

So the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, you know, federally, they track the health of various populations of fish and they've been noticing a decline in haddock and scallop stocks. And there are a couple of theories as to why kind of the predominant one is that, you know, as the temperature of the ocean rises, it becomes more acidic. And so that's kind of the main factor contributing to these shortages. So, you know, when you have a more acidic ocean, it alters the way that fish grow and develop. It makes them more susceptible to predators, to parasites. And that has been the case with both scallops and headache.

And smaller fish can also spur overfishing. So you need to catch more fish to get the same volumes you were probably getting in the past. and so this can also deplete stock. And so what the Department of Fisheries and Oceans did was, you know, this past spring, they introduced a quota for Haddock. And so they have changed what the total allowable catch is in some parts of the region. And they dropped it in some areas by 57%. So it's a huge drop.

And similarly, last year they introduced a quota for scallops. And so the total allowable catch is down by 50%. 51% in some areas. So that just means that there is way less haddock and scallops available on the market. Yeah. Okay. So the government's putting the caps on these fish because, of course, they're smaller and that might lead to overfishing. And the quota is supposed to help make sure that there is no overfishing of these two things. Yeah. The idea is that, you know, when you put these quotas in place,

it gives these populations a bit of a chance to replenish. And so you take this break, you can build a healthier population, and then you can resume fishing maybe at the same rate that you were doing before. Something we saw actually in Newfoundland, right, with the cod, which rebounded after. The cod fisheries, exactly. Moratorium. Yes. How has the quota affected prices for scallops and haddock? So it's sent them northward. In a year, the cost for a pound of raw sea scallops has risen from about $23 to $30 or more. With raw haddock, it's gone from $10 a pound to about $12.50 a pound or more.

And for much of this spring, it was actually really difficult to track down fresh headache. A lot of the supply available was frozen. We're going to talk about what restaurants are doing in a minute. But what kind of impact is this quota having on fishermen? It has been really, really tough for fishermen. it's been devastating for some of their businesses. And because there's still Haddock available, you know, in the global market in northern Europe,

and you have scallops available in places like Japan, some suppliers are just importing to make up for the local shortages. It's been hard. What about for locals? Haddock, for example, that used to be seen as an economical fish, right? Like something that everyday people would eat, not just tourists. and then now that's changing. Yeah, absolutely. When you go to a lot of the local fishmongers in Atlantic Canada or, you know, some of the

fish trucks that will park up, you know, in different areas to sell fish directly to customers, Haddock is the best seller at a lot of them, especially here in Nova Scotia. And it's a very kind of humble protein offering. A lot of people will just simply pan-fry it and have it for supper. It is very much the fish of the working class, of the middle class. And so to not have that available has been hard for a lot of people who are just trying to cook their family dinner. Let's talk about oysters specifically on Prince Edward Island, because you can get oysters from across Atlantic provinces. And also British Columbia is the largest oyster producer in Canada.

But PEI has typically been the largest oyster producer in the Maritimes. What's going on with PEI's oysters? So it has been a difficult few years now for the PEI oyster industry, and this one has been the worst so far. So there are these two parasitic diseases called MSX and dermo, and neither of these pose any risk to humans, but they've really devastated the oyster population on Prince Edward Island. And at some oyster farms, they're losing like almost all of their oysters. Like we're talking about a death rate of 98% on some of them. Hold on, 98%.

That is a wild number. It is a wild number. My colleague Lindsay Jones did some reporting on this. And she was even just noting how the smell of, you know, these farms was so different this spring than it had been in years past. Like usually like during oyster harvest, you know, it's just like you're smelling that nice briny ocean smell. And this was the smell of kind of like dead and broading shellfish instead. And I can imagine that when you have 98% of your stock that are dead, I mean, that that just takes a long time also to remove the live ones, right? Sometimes an oyster farmer will be sorting through, you know, what they have in a net.

and there will be a certain number of oysters that are alive. And then they make it to, you know, some sort of distribution point. And then some of them will die then. And then from there, they might make it, you know, a seafood supplier might sell them to a restaurant. And then some of them might die on the way to the restaurant. And so it's not that they're all, you know, dying when they're pulling up these nets. It can be this drawn-out process, which obviously makes, you know, the business of this extra tricky. How are they dealing with the diseases here?

Like what are they doing to try to replenish the stocks? So the plan in PEI is to import oyster seed as it's known, like kind of baby oysters that are disease resistant from the U.S. And to kind of use that to kind of build back a healthy population of oysters that aren't going to, you know, die from MSX and derma anymore. the challenge is that it takes a couple of years for oysters to mature to the point where you are harvesting them. And so it's like three to four years until that happens. So we can see this being an issue for, you know, at least three to four years.

How important is oyster farming to P.E.I's economy? It's really important. You know, as you mentioned, like British Columbia is the biggest oyster producing province. in Canada, but PI still produces one quarter of Canada's oysters and about three quarters of the oysters in Atlanta, Canada. In 2024, the value of the oyster catch was about $27 million, and that catch represents 6% of all seafood caught in Prince Edward Island. And so for the fishing and aquaculture industry, peak season employment is about 8,000 people. people. So again, just like tourism is a big employer in Prince Edward Island, so is, you know, fishing

in aquaculture. Okay. So that's not just for oysters. That's for all seafood we're talking about. Yes. You know, when you mentioned this 98% number, it makes me think about the farmers here. Like, what does this all mean for them? Like, are there supports available for them? Yeah. The province of Prince Edward Island, as well as the federal government, have, you know, created some programs to kind of take this financial burden off them to some degree. But it's still been a really big economic blow to some of these operations. I spoke to Reggie Jamison. He's the owner of MRC foods, and he supplies a lot of PEI restaurants with seafood. And this winter, I mean, he had to make the difficult decision to just stop buying from a lot of the oyster farms in the western parts of the

province that he's worked with for for years and years because almost all of the product that he was getting was dying shortly after delivery. And so he's turned to Nova Scotia oyster farms to fill that gap. And so you can imagine, you know, like PEI takes so much pride in serving, you know, island oysters to island visitors. And this summer, a lot of those island visitors are going to be eating Nova Scotia oysters because, you know, sometimes that's all that's available. we'll be right back. Okay, so let's talk about the restaurants and the chefs that you looked into. Can you tell me a bit about who you spoke to and what the restaurants are like?

So, yeah, I spoke to three different people involved with restaurants. So two chefs, one owner. So there's Chris Pine. He's the executive chef at Lightfoot and Wolfville. It's a winery in Wolfville, Nova Scotia. They do a lot of weddings, but they also have just. tons of people that come through, like I think during peak season, it's about 300 guests a day. I also spoke to Pierre A. Richard. He's the chef owner of Little Louie, which is in Moncton, New

Brunswick, and it is a fine dining restaurant. It's really known for seafood offerings and use of a lot of local seasonal ingredients. And then I also spoke with Steve Murphy, and he's the co-owner of the Blue Muscle Cafe and Prince Edward Island. And it's only open a few months of the year, but it is one of the most popular destinations for tourists in Prince Edward Island. And they're actually changing location, but for the longest time, you know, you could just sit on the patio and you could actually see from the patio the oyster boats coming in. And so you could just see, you know, while you were eating those oysters, how close they were. Yeah, that's such a scene. So what are these restaurants doing? How are they changing their menus? They're getting really, really creative.

Chris Pine at Lightfoot and Wolfville. He was telling me that, you know, one of their most popular appetizers is this dish that they would do with colossal scallops. So these are the really, really big scallops. You could get like 10 to 20 per pound of them. And those are the ones. And those are, you become pretty much impossible for him to source this season. And so there are these like slightly smaller ones called jumbo scallops that are, you know, they come at like 20 to 30 a pound. And when Chris first moved to Nova Scotia back in 2019, he told me that he could go down to the gas station and find colossal scallops for $11 a pound. That is how widely available they were. And now they cost him $32.25 a pound. Wow. And so that is just in seven years that they've gone up that much.

And so, you know, what he has decided to like, the economics of that just don't work for him. So he's reinvented the scallop dish using bay scallops, which are much, much smaller, kind of a different species of scallop. They have a bit of a different taste, a bit of a different texture. These are the scalps that you would find in things like seafood chowder or bubbly bakes. And so, he's putting those in this dish instead. And so the idea is, you know, you can still get like the taste of scallops. You're not going to have that like beautiful big seared scallop. But, you know, if you come there and you ask for scallops, you'll still be able to get them. So those don't cost anywhere near as much for him. They're 876 a pound. And so the restaurant can still make

that dish without losing money. And when it came to Pierre A. Richard at Little Louis, he's like putting broken scallops into a ravioli dish. And so you, again, you won't get that like big, beautiful seared scallop, but you'll still be able to have like the delicious taste of scallops in that dish. And he's also experimenting with some species of fish that he's never worked with before. And so for the first time, he's put spotted wolffish on the menu. I looked at that fish up in preparation. It's not, it's not exactly the most appealing fish. Yes. It has a face only a mother could love. but apparently quite delicious. Some compare the texture to like monk fish, if you've ever had that or to lobsters.

It's got this sort of like buttery but like kind of meaty texture. Okay, the taste is good then. And it takes well to strong flavors. Yeah. And so he has this dish that he put on his menu a few weeks ago and is really hoping that people will be brave and try things that they've maybe never seen before or tasted before and you know you kind of sees this as an opportunity to showcase some some other fish. And then at the Blue Muscle Cafe, you know, they just made the decision this year that they're

not going to have scallops on their menu at all this summer. The challenge of sourcing them is just too huge. You know, the volumes of traffic that they get is just like they could not have enough there. And so the owner of the Blue Muscle Cafe, Steve Murphy, he also owns another restaurant in Charlottetown called Sleighmaker and Nichols. And he says on that menu, they have like a salmon dish and a tuna dish. And they've been really, really pushing those. I'm hoping that, you know, even though there are certain things that have always sold well, just like because they're having trouble supplying them,

they're trying to really like get people to get out of their place of expectation of like, this is what I eat when I'm in Atlantic Canada and try some other types of fish too. And, you know, those are all locally supplied as well. I imagine this is a really tough time for restaurants because, I mean, we know, broadly speaking, that margins are very thin, but of course they'd probably want to keep the customer happy and maybe not like pass on the cost. But I guess, like, what are they weighing here when they decide what to put on the menu and also make sure that the customers are happy? It is such a hard calculation to make. Like, listen, the last couple of years have been tough already for restaurants right across Canada. we've seen a lot of inflation.

The cost of business has just become so, so high for a lot of these places. And then, you know, they've been served up this extra challenge in Atlantic Canada. And so, you know, I think there is a real concern about being perceived as price gouging. If they are changing the prices on their menu to reflect, you know, these increased costs for themselves. They don't want to turn tourists away. They don't want to spoil anybody's vacation. but at the same time to not adjust their prices could just mean not being able to keep their restaurants in operation, not be able to pay their staff.

And I spoke to a few of them about sort of what do you think the ceiling is for how much you could charge for half a dozen oysters? And a couple of them said, like, it's kind of what they're pricing their oysters at this summer, which is, you know, $24 for half a dozen. And like, I wouldn't feel good charging more than that. But even at $24 for half a dozen, you know, you're not making very much money off of them. Dr. Trana, what's your takeaway from reporting on this? Like, I think about, you know, we're talking about the restaurants and how they're really trying to weigh their decisions and their options here.

But how should people who love seafood be thinking about these changes in our oceans and on the menus of their favorite restaurants? Listen, I am one of these people who love seafood. And I love this season and I love living on the East Coast because of the proximity that I have to first seafood. But I don't think that we should ignore the fact that climate change is very real. Our oceans are getting warmer. And we have seen, you know, some fish populations that have migrated further north because there's this kind of famous saying, you know, the colder the water, the tastier the shellfish. And so they just want to move into colder water. But now even our famously cold waters in Canada are warming up. So I don't really know what this means for the sustainability of these various species that we, you know, have made a part of our diets. And we'll say, too, that for tourists that are coming out east this summer, be patient when you're at restaurants and maybe you see that something that you'd eaten on a previous vacation isn't available or it costs a lot more than it did before.

Be patient, but also be curious and maybe get out of your comfort zone and try something that you might not have had before. So if you see that the catch of the day is turbot, maybe give that a shot. If you've never had monkfish, maybe this is your time to try it. There's a lot to try. But I think we should also never lose sight of the bigger picture of kind of what the cost is, you know, beyond what we're paying for this fish when it comes to climate change. on that advice, Akshana, is there an unusual fish or something that you're going to kind of go out of your comfort zone that you might be excited to try this summer?

Ooh, that is a very fun question. I am just really enjoying all of the different types of clams that I've encountered. So I'm planning a trip to Prince Edward Island later this summer. And I have some friends. I do a house swap with them. and they've discovered a really great area for clam digging. And so that is something I'm actually looking forward to. I will learn about that firsthand when I hopefully am successful in my clam digging get to eat a bunch of them. Okay, you'll have to report back to me to tell me how they are. I will.

Dachshana, thank you so much for coming on the show. Really appreciate it. Thank you. That was Daxana Baskaramerti, the Globe's Food Culture Reporter. That's it today. I'm Cheryl Sutherland. Our producers are Madeline White, Rachel Levy McLaughlin and Mahal Stein. Our editor is David Crosby.

Adrian Chung is our senior producer and Angela Pichenza is our executive editor. Thanks so much for listening.