The Sale Thread

We finally bought from Universal Seafood after finding them about five years ago. They seem to have their pros and cons:

  • Their Faroe Island salmon prices were about comparable with Luxe’s Scottish salmon (difference of $.50/lb depending on the options you choose). That price includes bones and head if you buy a whole fish. They knock off a dollar/lb if you fillet it yourself. Since I don’t love paying for filleting and trim I’ll likely break down the fish myself next time. I believe they would still gut and scale for you if you opted to break it down yourself but I actually can’t confirm that in my notes.

  • You can pick up on Saturdays between 9AM-12PM. That seems unusual in that a lot of the other wholesalers require visiting early in the morning and frequently not on weekends…?

  • They’re located in the valley (North Hollywood) unlike many of the other DTLA wholesalers. They’re actually not too far from Kim Thai Food and Epicurus so we’ll definitely be visiting those places with our next order since it’s a little out of the way for us.

  • You have to call in an order and make changes no later than 24 hours ahead of time which gives you kind of a small window since price lists only seem to exist for a day or two at a time

  • Speaking of price lists- you have to have the type of seafood you’re buying in mind ahead of time. That’s reasonable since their inventory changes frequently but they don’t seem to forward even their current inventory with prices the way Luxe was doing.

  • Because of the preceding bullet points I found placing our order a bit tricky. It really seems like you need to have all the details of your order in mind ahead of time and be VERY clear when placing it over the phone. It would be a lot easier if they were willing to just send a price list but since retail is clearly not their normal customer base I can’t really hold this against them. We were just REALLY spoiled by Luxe.

  • We only bought on the one occasion recently which will hold us for a while but they do have what appear to be live fish tanks and were selling oysters at $12.99/dozen - about as good as I’ve seen these days. Sorry, I don’t recall where the oysters were from but I believe I recognized it as a common Pacific Northwest type/source

EDIT
Sorry, forgot a couple important details in retrospect:

  • When I asked what their minimum order was (meaning dollar value) was told “two pounds”. When I asked again that was the answer I got so that’s a bonus if true.

  • Our specific order was for Faroe salmon only (two whole fish totaling about 25lbs). We used this as a test case because it’s extremely likely they would have salmon, theoretically it would be safe to consume raw, we could compare the prices to elsewhere, the source is rated “a good alternative” by the Monterey Bay Aquarium Seafood Watch, and we could compare the quality against other places (within my limited abilities to do so). I believe the salmon is sold only as whole or fillet but their fillet really was just the whole side of salmon that had been gutted, scaled and boned.

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