It’s Tuesday morning, crab season has just opened, and Adrian Hoffman has a reason to be stressed. “I've got a thousand people asking me for crab,” he says. “If I can get it, I don't know what I'm going to have to pay for it. There's just not as much out there. It's a mess.”
But as one of the founders of Four Star Seafood, Adrian has learned to ride the waves of the local seafood market. When Adrian and his partner, Ismael Macias, made the leap from chefs to fishmongers five years ago, it was a steep learning curve getting to know the players and the politics, what locally available and sustainable, and what’s in season when.
And in the last year, they’ve managed to survive by completely rethinking their business model, in response to the pandemic. “Our niche had really been chef-to-chef. Right now, we're learning how to do direct-to-consumer,” says Adrian. “It's been an interesting nine months as we've tried to figure that out.”