Monterey Fish Market
They buy straight off local boats rather than through the wholesale chain, and have since 1979. The Hopkins Street counter is the retail half.
Why go
The business states its own terms: small enough to provide personalized service, we're large enough to buy directly from local boats and producers nationwide, enabling us to bring you the freshest seafood available.
1 It runs as both a wholesaler and a retailer across San Francisco and Berkeley, which is why the same name turns up on delivery invoices and on a residential corner in North Berkeley. Their stated obsession since 1979 is healthy fisheries,
which is a sourcing claim rather than a menu, and it is their claim rather than anybody else's.
Order this / avoid
- Order: whatever landed that morning, and ask the counter how they would cook it.
- Avoid: going to the wrong half of the business. The wholesale side is in San Francisco; Hopkins Street is where you buy dinner.
What locals & experts say
- Monterey Fish Market, on itself: the commitment to healthy fisheries
has been our obsession since 1979.
1 Nobody independent has published on this counter in anything we could reach, so this is the whole of the record here.
Good to know
- Booking: walk-in.
- Getting there: Hopkins Street in North Berkeley, on the shopping strip rather than a main road.
- Not to be confused with Monterey Market, the Berkeley greengrocer, which is a different business on a different street.
Verdict
could-visit — A fishmonger that has bought straight off local boats since 1979 instead of going through the wholesale chain, which is the single thing that decides whether a fish counter is worth walking to. The business says so itself and nothing else says anything, which is the honest limit of this entry: no critic, no chef crediting them on a menu, nothing independent at all. The Hopkins Street counter in North Berkeley is the retail half of a wholesale-and-retail operation split across two cities. Worth a stop if you are cooking that night, and a rung higher the moment somebody outside the business writes about the case.