Buying Quality Fish for Restaurants

Buying quality fish: the dangers of anisakis.

Buying quality fish for a restaurateur, if we want, is even more important than for a final consumer.

The success of a restaurant owner is related to the quality of his fish.
A great way for an entrepreneur or manager dealing with restaurant supplies, etc., can be to buy from reputable sellers and distributors who sell high quality products at competitive prices.

Being able to obtain maximum satisfaction from a customer who tastes a fish dish is very important, especially if your business is mainly based on the creation of fish-based dishes.

Tasting a fish dish is not only a pleasant experience, but it is also an experience that can positively influence your customers' opinion of you. For example: if they like what they eat and have fond memories associated with their meal, then there is a much greater chance of repeat business or referrals than if the customer was not impressed with the taste or quality of presentation
To ensure this doesn't happen, try using different cooking methods when preparing fish dishes, such as steaming rather than boiling, so that people feel less forced to waste food, as some may finding yourself too full after having only two small portions!

To be delicious, fish must be of good quality, which means you need to buy fresh fish daily.

You need good quality, so you need to be sure it's from a trusted source with frequent inventory turnover and not something stored too long in cold storage before being sold or prepared for consumption as freezing changes the structure on which bacteria can grow causing spoilage (or "freezer burn")
A poor quality could also make your meal unappetising; while some people may say that this point is not worth doing because they are not willing to eat anything other than their favorite kind anyway!

This does not mean that you cannot buy frozen fish, rather it is necessary to choose the one with better characteristics and nutritional values.

Whether you decide to buy it fresh or already frozen, it must first of all be healthy and not put your customer's health at risk. It is essential that the fish you store is not contaminated with anisakis.

You can also buy frozen fish, but it must be of high quality and pay attention to nutritional values. You must not forget that buying fresh or even canned varieties will provide you with much better results than those available on store shelves because they are less processed and contain more nutrients for your body
A lot has changed regarding how people get their omega 3s since Dr. Oz made headlines by blowing up fast food restaurants over concerns about our health; however today almost all grocery stores sell "fresh" seafood options - which are either fully cooked (omega 3).

The latter is a nematode worm whose "habitat" is fish such as cod, sardines, tuna, hake, salmon, but also mollusks such as squid, cuttlefish, octopus and squid. The damage caused by this parasite to the client's health is manifold, even leading to the removal of portions of the affected intestine.

Tragic inconveniences which however can be avoided with the right precautions. To eliminate anisakis from fish it is best to freeze the fish in your warehouse at temperatures of -15° C for 96 hours, -20° C for 60, -30° C for 12, -40° C for 9.With this simple measure you will protect two subjects:

1. your customer from damage to health above
2. your restaurant from the foreseeable damage to reputation and legal troubles

Buying quality fish: the legal risks

Buy quality fish

And it is precisely on the legal risks of not having quality fish that we will focus in this part of the article.

When a customer, a few hours after the meal, feels ill and unfortunately ends up in hospital, the complaint will be inevitable. The responsibilities of the restaurateur are in fact divided into:

1. contractual: which the customer can demonstrate from the order placed and/or from the receipt paid
2. extra-contractual: which instead consist of the medical report after hospitalization following intoxication.

Furthermore, spoiled fish is in all respects a defective product, therefore the customer will be entitled to compensation when:

1. will have proven, through analysis, that the fish eaten is a defective product which has in fact made an attack on his health
2. will have demonstrated, through his lawyer, the connection reason between the nature of the fish consumed and the food poisoning suffered
3. again through a lawyer will have established the nature and the figure to be obtained as compensation

But there's more: a ruling from the Milan Supreme Court in July this year, reported in the "Sole 24 Ore", even convicted of commercial fraud a Milanese restaurateur guilty of not having indicated on the menu that the fish was not fresh but purchased already frozen. On this last question, however, the legislation is still a little uncertain, so we hope for a dialogue between the Associations Restaurateurs, Eurofishmarket and the institutions.

Buying quality fish: information labels.

Another very important and underestimated step to verify the quality of the fish is check the label. In fact, it must trace in detail the entire "process" of treatments that the fish has followed from the waters of origin in which it was caught up to your warehouse.

And it was traceability of fish the hot topic of Slow Fish 2017. The fair, held in Genoa, announced a new initiative: that of information labels. Without symbols that are incomprehensible to consumers, they will have to trace in detail the entire "history" of the fish product from origin to the final destination (be it the supermarket or the warehouse of a restaurant). Obviously the labels will also be equally detailed on production.