At the high-end French Quarter restaurant, beautifully seared tuna, grilled swordfish and seafood cioppino share the menu with a rotating selection of delightfully novel offerings, such as a meat lover’s pizza featuring charcuterie fashioned from swordfish or tuna. Want a muffuletta? Nelson layers a mini appetizer with “swordfish cold cuts.” He tops a bluefin tuna “cheeseburger” with swordfish bacon and serves it on a brioche roll with onion rings.
Nelson, who has seen the restaurant weather the floods that followed Hurricane Katrina and the pandemic over 19 years, remains as enthusiastic about dishing out inventive approaches to seafood as ever.
“Oh yeah … a little more,” he said as he turned up the heat under the Italian swordfish sausage that would go into a deconstructed lasagna. He sliced into seafood mortadella with pistachios and pepperoni with chunks of smoked fish belly fat to prove his assertion that “swordfish is the pork of the sea.” And he plated a dark-crusted, bone-in, dry-aged bluefin tuna “rib-eye,” served deep-red rare inside, with a béarnaise, drizzled with a house-made Worcestershire sauce. The large cut filled the plate like a tomahawk steak’s dainty cousin.
In 2001, Gary Wollerman and now-retired executive chef Tenney Flynn, both of whom worked on the business side of Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse, created GW Fins with the philosophy that seafood deserves the same careful attention beef gets at high-end steakhouses. When I met Nelson in 2016, he had recently been promoted from his longtime role as chef de cuisine to executive chef and was enthusiastic about making GW Fins a no-waste kitchen, as well.
At the time, he had just created “fin wings,” a cut of meat from just behind the fish’s gills that U.S. seafood restaurants and fishermen commonly toss. Limited by the labor it took to butcher the fish, Nelson offered the wings only on special. The chef has since streamlined that process, so the item has become a regular offering, turning former waste into one of the most popular appetizers on the menu at $14 a pop.
“If it doesn’t make dollars, it doesn’t make sense,” he said of his efforts to reduce waste and use the whole fish, even boiling fish scales to create a neutral gelatin and turning fish skins into cracklins. “We’ve proved that it does.”
As he led the kitchen, Nelson began to realize that more than half the fish was ending up as waste, and he set out to change that. Because the restaurant now deals almost exclusively in whole fish butchered on-site — 700 to 1,000 pounds per day — Nelson has easy access to all parts of the creatures. In addition to using the fish, nose to tail, he challenges his employees to use their imagination and keep their approach to seafood fresh and surprising.
Nelson takes sourcing, butchering and cooking seafood seriously, but when it comes to creating and naming dishes, his playful side emerges. That’s how his labor-intensive “seacuterie” board was born, with its andouille, smoked sausage, chorizo and bacon all made from fish.
He started by making a simple swordfish bologna. “I said, let’s just grind this up and see what happens. It was so damn good. So I was like, let’s make mortadella and fancy this up a bit. And then we went to the pepperoni and kielbasa. Then we made the hot dogs. Oh my God, the hot dogs were so good. … I did it for a wine dinner, and it was so funny. It was a high-end wine dinner, and the hot dog was the biggest hit.”
His latest passion is dry-aged fish, which he first thought might be just a gimmick. During the pandemic, when the normally frenetic pace of the restaurant slowed, he found time to experiment with the process, similar to the one commonly applied to beef. The butchered fish go in glass-fronted, commercial refrigerators programmed for specific temperature and humidity levels. The air inside circulates through UV light, which kills bacteria and other microorganisms.
The dry-aging process, which Nelson said he learned through trial and error, has been embraced elsewhere, perhaps most notably in the United States by Liwei Liao, or as he is known on social media, “The Dry-Aged Fish Guy,” at the Joint in Los Angeles’s Sherman Oaks neighborhood, which sells dry-aged fish to restaurants and consumers.
If it’s well cared for, fish — like beef — actually tastes better as it ages, Nelson said. With dry aging, the connective tissue begins to break down, Nelson said, releasing amino acids that create tender, more intensely flavored protein. The flesh shrinks and drops about 20 percent of its weight, creating meat with rich umami.
Some, such as his tuna, remain in the coolers for as long as 14 days.
Nelson sees this as a natural evolution of efforts to use the whole fish and reduce waste.
“Previous to this, we weren’t able to buy larger species because we just couldn’t use them fast enough,” he said. “If I was to buy a whole yellowfin tuna, that’s typically around 100 pounds of tuna, so to try to move all of that in a three-day period, is kind of tough. So just as much as this is a flavor-enhancing method, it is also a preservation method.”
Weather and the tides affect the availability of the large species of fish, so now, when they are available, he can stock up, use the fresh portions right away, turn less commonly used portions into charcuterie and, several weeks later, begin using the dry-aged fish.
While many of the creations at GW Fins require butchering fish and accessing specialized equipment, such as dry-aging refrigeration, sous vides and smokers, Nelson encourages home cooks to think of fish, especially meaty species, like swordfish, as just another flavorful protein.
Nelson recognizes that it can be difficult for consumers to determine which fish are sustainably caught. Because of the volume of fish he buys, he can be selective, vetting his sources, even boarding boats and watching processing at times to ensure that the seafood he buys is properly harvested and cared for.
For Nelson, it’s essential to take a use-it-all approach for each creature he brings into the kitchen.
For most of his charcuterie dishes, such as his housemade “bacon,” Nelson takes his recipe inspiration from classic charcuterie and smoking preparations and techniques.
“We take the belly cuts off the swordfish,” he says. “It’s the flap on the belly. You can’t really utilize it into a portion, but it’s super fatty.”
It’s smoked, sliced and fried, and as Nelson notes: “If I didn’t tell you it was fish, you wouldn’t pick it up. You would get halfway through and say, ‘This is fish?’ It’s pretty shocking.”
