Still Here - Caitlin Carney

Caitlin Carney is co-owner of Porgy’s Seafood Market in New Orleans.

Caitlin calls herself the “Lady Monger.” Her business, Porgy’s Seafood Market, is a purple storefront on a busy corner in Mid-City New Orleans. It feels like a cross between a fish shop, a lunch joint, and a neighborhood bar.

It’s a market with a mission: to reconnect New Orleanians with Gulf seafood. A lot of the fish sold in the city is not from the Louisiana coast. Most shoppers are getting their seafood from big supermarket chains, which don't always make buying local a priority. And those shoppers often choose the fish that's most familiar, like salmon or tilapia, which are not from the Gulf of Mexico. Meanwhile, Caitlin says, it's getting less and less profitable for independent fishers to harvest seafood from the Gulf.

Caitlin is trying to educate consumers and also trying to make it more profitable for fishers in Louisiana to keep working. One way she does this is by selling bycatch, which is unintended, non-target catch. Often bycatch is thrown away, even when it’s delicious, and the fisher makes no profit.

“We love what we call hot fish, which are hot fish—you know, they're sexy,” she says. “Whenever we get bycatch, and they come in and they're gorgeous, we're like, ‘Damn, that's a hot fish!’ 

“One of our favorite bycatch is scorpionfish, which is really fantastic as a sashimi,” she adds. “We got some long tail bass in the other day that I didn't even know you could get. So, yeah, it's always an adventure.”

if Caitlin can buy it and then convince her customers that it's worth trying, that means additional revenue for the fisher.

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