Damon Gordon, a fine-dining veteran and cooking show competitor, was recently promoted to the position of culinary director of the King Signature Group, with authority over the kitchens of two steakhouses, 555 East in Long Beach, Calif., and Lou & Mickey’s in San Diego, as well as Water Grill, which has three locations in Southern California.
King Signature Group is part of King’s Seafood Company, which is based in Costa Mesa, Calif., and operates 11 King’s Fish House concepts, as well as King’s Distribution Company, a seafood distributor.
A native of the United Kingdom, where he cut his teeth working for chefs Michel Roux, Alain Ducasse, Claude Troisgros and Marco Pierre White, Gordon has been in the United States for 15 years, mostly on the East Coast. But he moved to Los Angeles three and a half years ago to join Water Grill and help expand the concept.
In 2014, Gordon was a contestant during Season 18 of the Food Network show “Chopped.” He discussed West Coast seafood trends and his approach to putting seasonal fish on menus with Nation’s Restaurant News.
Is there a particular seafood you’re excited about these days?
We just had some great local white sea bass. That’s fantastic, and literally just off the shores here. And we’re just getting into the season of Morro Bay Pacific swordfish, which is literally an hour, hour-and-a-half away from where we are. We are driven purely by what’s the best product out there. That’s really what makes us very excited when we purchase seafood, like the live Santa Barbara spot prawns. They’re, like, half an hour away from where we are. And when wild Alaska salmon season opens, we have such a buzz in our restaurants, and we’re fortunate because we get some of the first salmons that come to California.
Does the seasonality of seafood require you to change the menu a lot?
Yes. A perfect example of that would be wild Alaska halibut. We only have a couple weeks left of that, and once the wild season is finished, then it won’t be on our menu. The menu’s obviously driven four times a year seasonally, as most menus are, but then we’ll do maybe six or seven changes [smaller changes] in between. It’s definitely driven by what product is available, the major changes being wild salmon season, wild halibut season and things like that.
And I guess white sea bass season?
Yeah, right now. So we’ll get a very small amount of it and we’ll reach out to restaurants with dishes I’ve created for it, and we’ll be like, ‘OK, we’re going to have availability of maybe 30 portions of California white bass,’ and we’ll put that on the menu. We print our menus daily. We develop our servers and give them fantastic training, so they’re very knowledgeable about provenance of seafood: if it’s local, if it’s not local, if it’s wild. And it’s a great selling point. They say, ‘Oh, we just have X amount of pieces,’ so it creates excitement in the restaurant.
You buy the whole sea bass. How do you portion it? Do you sell things like sea bass cheek?
When we buy the sea bass, it will come in with the head and guts removed. They do that on the boat. But one of the items that we use now is halibut collar. For many years, people have used hamachi collar and salmon collar. We take the Alaska halibut collar. We grill it and then we serve it with a roasted tomato salsa, some pickled mangos, avocado and grilled tortillas. So it’s a sharing item, where people take this nice, beautiful, fatty and dense meat of the halibut and make little tacos out of it. That’s using as much of the fish as we can, and it’s proved to be something that sells very well. In the past, when we’ve had monkfish in, we’ve used monkfish liver and put that on dishes as well. We’re always looking to use every part of the fish.
What did you do with the monkfish liver?
We did it very similarly to a foie gras dish, with a little pain perdu [French toast] underneath, and then we seared off the liver and topped it with some candied orange and daikon, and then did a soy–orange glaze around the plate. It was very nice.
Are there particular fish that your customers insist on having all the time, like salmon?
We do. I think we’re in an era now where people are very health-conscious and are aware that an item like salmon is great for Omega-3s. During wild salmon season, we have that on the menu, but we have salmon all year round. In the off-season for wild salmon, we use an Atlantic salmon from the Faroe Islands. We found that with their practices, run by an agency called Bakkafrost, they farm it in its natural habitat in the ocean. It’s an absolutely fantastic product, and a product that people love. Tuna’s another one, obviously, that we have year round, and swordfish, too. We get it [swordfish] from Morro Bay when we can, or from farther south into Mexico. But it’s all line caught.
Preferred tuna, grilled swordfish, more
What kind of tuna do you like to use?
Right now we use a big eye tuna from Tahiti. We also get some from the Marshall Islands. Again, line caught and an absolutely fantastic product.
Do people like it seared medium rare?
They do, and also out here everybody loves to eat it raw. We slice it and serve a warm fennel, coriander and tomato salad on the top. So you’ve got this beautiful raw tuna and a slightly warm salad on the top, with some candied lemon in there as well, and people love that.
Tuna is such a beautiful product that the less we do with it, the better.
We do a tuna poke as well, and people love that. We’ve done a very traditional Hawaiian one with limu seaweed and Maui onions and tobiko. The fish is the star of the plate, and we don’t want to mask anything because we go to such great lengths to use the best product. We don’t want to hide anything.
Poke’s becoming really popular in California, isn’t it?
It has gotten very popular. It goes back [the fact that] it’s very healthy. People are using tuna and salmon, and it’s one of those things that people will pick up and have for lunch, and you can eat it on the go if you need to.
How do you like to prepare swordfish?
Right now we grill it and then serve it on a bed of marinated zucchini with a little fennel seed and olive oil, and then we serve a brown butter caper and lemon beurre blanc with it. Very simple.
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