Sea Forager Seafood & Tours
Kirk Lombard spent seven years as a catch monitor for the California Department of Fish and Game before he started selling fish himself. Sea Forager buys off small hook-and-line boats, mostly from Bay Area fishermen, and delivers a share of whatever they land. You do not choose what is in it.
Why go
Soleil Ho took the subscription in March 2020, when she was the Chronicle's restaurant critic. She wrote a year later about what it involves. Two portions arrive in a bag every other week. The fish comes mostly cleaned. Live Manila clams want several soakings, and she scrubs the shells with a toothbrush. She runs her fingers down the fillets to find pinbones and tweezes them out. On Mondays Lombard emails to say what is likely coming.
Lombard's own subject is the fish nobody sells. He calls himself an intertidal harvester. He goes after moon snails, monkeyface eels and piddock clams. Heyday Books published his guide to the Northern California coast in August 2016, with his wife Camilla's recipes inside it. Tara Duggan wrote then that he was still running regular foraging tours. He still carries those tours in the name. The current site is a subscription and I have not found a schedule on it.
Order this / avoid
- Subscribe: to Neptune's Delight for whole small fish and shellfish, or The Slab if you want fillets.
- Avoid: signing up if you need to plan a menu in advance. The share is whatever came in.
What locals & experts say
- Kirk Lombard, to the San Francisco Chronicle in August 2016, on the guide he wrote:
I didn't want to write another serious tome on how to kill things.
He says the most humorless part is the first two pages.4 - Lombard on the bay's least-loved fish, to 7x7 in February 2013: herring is
the great, ugly, red-headed step child of the bay,
and about 2,000 tons a year goes to Japan.2 - Soleil Ho, San Francisco Chronicle, March 2021, on what the bag does to a cook: the products arrive mostly cleaned, with
a faint DIY element to them that I've come to delight in.
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Good to know
- Price: from $32 a delivery for two in September 2026, with a four-delivery minimum.
- Getting it: pickup points around the Bay Area, or home delivery inside San Francisco.
Verdict
could-visit — Subscribe if you cook fish twice a week and can take whatever lands. Two people should start on the smallest share.