This Week at the Market: Gaby's Red Coral Seafood

Chefs know that the key to cooking delicious seafood is not the recipe; it’s in finding the freshest fish. To that end, chefs usually work with special fish distributors whose value is their ability to get the fish off the boats and into their kitchens in the shortest possible time.

Well, that’s all swell for chefs, whose weekly standing orders (and buying power) grants them market muscle. The rest of us are stuck with buying fish at the supermarkets where it’s already several days old by the time it’s all wrapped up in plastic and left to sit in an ice bed. And speaking of that plastic wrap and styro tray, all that wrapping is a bit of a cheat. It’s only at home when we crack into the packaging that our nose informs us that we might have made a mistake.

Cue Red Gaby’s Coral Seafood, a regular at the New Rochelle GrandMarket. All of Gaby’s seafood comes from Pura Vida Fisheries, a Hampton Bays (L.I.) fishery that also supplies seafood directly to restaurants. At Gaby’s Red Coral Seafood, you’ll be getting the same superfresh fish that those powerful chefs get. Go ahead and take a whiff at the market: all you’ll smell is the fresh scent of the sea.

Look for Gaby (Gabriella Zavala) to offer a changing array that frequently includes any and all of the following, all sparklingly fresh and hours off the boat: scallops, oysters, clams, mussels, squid, trout, bass, bluefish, hake, tuna, flounder, swordfish, grey sole, porgy and whiting. Stop by the GrandMarket and make Saturday night Seafood Night.