Event

Feast of Seven Fishes

Join us for a wood-fired holiday seafood feast! We'll be serving seven types of fishes - maybe more, if we get really crazy - from our wood-fired oven.

Here's what Melissa Clark, of the New York Times, has written of a typical Feast of Seven Fishes:

"It's a Southern Italian (and now Italian-American) custom in which a grand meal of at least seven different kinds of seafood is served before midnight Mass. The fish part comes from the Catholic practice of abstaining from meat on Christmas Eve, while the number may refer to the seven sacraments. Or it could be the Seven Hills of Rome. No one is sure, but the tradition has stuck fast.

I picked it up from an old friend. At his house, the meal actually consisted of 12 fishes (for the apostles, they told me). It went on for hours, with one fabulous garlic-scented seafood dish following another, including braised eel in tomato sauce, scungilli salad, baked clams oreganata, fried calamari and seafood stew. Everyone ate until we collapsed on the couch with glasses of amaro or Sambuca to help digest it all."

Brandon is busy interrogating all the Italian grandmothers he can find in the home country (New Jersey, of course) to make this feast as authentic as possible, with a Pacific Northwest twist. Michelle Magidow, our staff wine guru, is collecting special wines for the occasion.

We'll start at Essex with antipasti and prosecco before heading to Delancey for a multi-course wood-fired seafood dinner with wine pairings. The menu will be finalized the week of, based on what our fishermen procure: Brandon & Co. are hoping to catch some of the fish themselves! But you can start daydreaming already: oysters on the half-shell, wood-roasted Dungeness crab, Hama Hama clams, Penn Cove mussels...

We're looking forward to celebrating the holidays with you.