Obviously, fish don’t have wings. Then again, neither do buffalo, and that hasn’t held back the richly sauced, addictive fried chicken wings we all know and love. Fish “wings,” of course, refer to the pectoral fins of the fish, and at the seafood-centric GW Fins in New Orleans, executive chef Michael Nelson butchers these cuts so as to include a generous amount of meat from the fish’s side. They then get tempura fried, slathered in a Korean-spiced glaze, and dusted with sesame seeds. Sweet, crunchy, meaty, and a little spicy, one bite, two at most, and they deliciously disappear.
Much like their poultry counterparts, these fried wings could easily accommodate the vast number of spice and sauce variations on offer at all the national wing-focused chains, or the somewhat smaller array of approaches Southerners have taken to frying chickens. Imagine: Buttermilk fried fish wings. Cornmeal-dusted fish wings. Sweet tea–brined fish wings.
What stops fish wings from having the same crowd-pleasing connotation as their chicken cousins is their supply and demand problem. On the supply side, the fish houses that provide most restaurants with pre-butchered fish generally discard the wings as soon as they’ve been separated from the fillets. They aren’t seen as profitable enough to justify the extra processing time. On the demand side, there are two things Americans usually require of their fish: that they be boneless and that they not taste “fishy.” The boneless part is the issue here. While the wings make for good eating, they’re not what the average diner expects.
GW Fins’ wings aren’t boneless, but they are butchered so that the meat is easily accessible. (The fins function as a nifty handle.) Nelson would love to see fish wings become wildly popular—and not just for the sake of his restaurant. If we can get more edible bites out of every fish, he reasons, that will lead to boosted profits for restaurants and help ease the strain on our already overfished oceans.
That’s why nearly fifteen years ago, Nelson decided that he would buy only whole fish. That meant he’d have to pay his staff to do the butchering. How to afford that extra labor? Boneless fillets can account for as little as 25 percent of a fish’s weight. So if he could find uses for at least some of the parts that are typically discarded, his in-house butchering could keep the bookkeepers happy.
“Sustainability is really important to me,” he says. “But if it doesn’t make dollars, it doesn’t make sense. Unless you can show people that you can do it and make money, you’re just yelling into the wind.”
GW Fins cuts the usual fillets from the fish, but then the butcher sets aside the wings and the bellies. At the end of the shift, the wings get trimmed into the one-bite delights that appear on the appetizer menu, and, in the case of larger fish, the bellies become entree-sized portions.
“My guy uses his last hour and a half to process all those extra cuts,” Nelson says. “If I were to add up the amount of sales we generate from the work that he does at the end of the night, it makes a ton of sense.”
About five years ago, a chicken wing shortage gripped the nation. It wasn’t an officially declared disaster, and those suffering from wing withdrawal received no federal assistance. But in the spirit of preparation, perhaps the country needs to create a strategic stockpile of alternatives. Fish wings would toothsomely fill the role of chicken wing understudy. And, who knows, the understudy may even prove to outshine the star.
