Luxury for locavores

Those who like their food grown or harvested nearby can treat themselves to a sumptuous feast with halibut

At Hamersley's Bistro, roasted halibut is served with clams, braised greens, white beans, and black trumpet mushrooms. (Wendy maeda/globe staff)

ROCKLAND, Maine - At Jess' Market here, fish buyer Jamie Johnson buys halibut right from the source. "Most of the guys are lobstermen. They fish close to shore, keep the halibut in live wells, and call me when they're on their way in," says Johnson, a former lobster and scallop fisherman. The fish get to Johnson so quickly, he has to let them sit for a couple of days, he says, "buried in ice until they've gone through rigor mortis. These halibut smell so sweet and so fresh and so much like the ocean. The chefs go nuts."

Johnson is pleased to see lobstermen bringing in halibut. It means they will be able to make money this year, instead of losing or breaking even. While New Englanders and tourists crave Maine lobsters, the catch has been tapering off since a historic high in 2002. At the same time, prices for gear, fuel, and everything else keep going up. To make ends meet, many Maine lobstermen are going after the halibut that swim off their coast. The luxurious fish is in demand, and some is shipped to Boston, where you'll find it at fish markets and on high-end restaurant menus.

On the plate, halibut is very firm and white as milk, not as flaky as haddock or cod. Like sole or turbot, halibut is delicate and has a tendency to turn dry and chewy if overcooked. Gordon Hamersley, chef and co-owner of Hamersley's Bistro, likes to pair the fish with New England flavors. He gently roasts the halibut and serves it with clams, bacon braised greens, white beans, and black trumpet mushrooms.

At Meritage, in the Boston Harbor Hotel, chef Daniel Bruce grills Atlantic halibut over a wood fire and serves it with a tomato, saffron, and lobster broth. "Halibut has almost no internal fat content," he says. "I like to cook it just until the flesh turns white and starts to go a little bit firm. With halibut it's much better to undercook than to leave it on too long."

Halibut is fished on both coasts. In this region, you're likely to see the fish from eastern Canada; it's been widely available from there for years. Maine halibut, which is plentiful, has always been brought in by some lobstermen. But when the lobster catch was up, they didn't need to fish for halibut. Recently, more lobstermen, looking for the premium price halibut brings them, are out on small boats within site of the rocky coast. It's a romantic context, and it provides fine eating for chefs and diners who want to be locavores and dine on what's grown or harvested around them. In restaurants, you'll see halibut entrees priced as high as $38 and combined with other luxurious ingredients. Cooking halibut at home is a splurge - it costs about $20 per pound - but it's versatile and satisfying, thick and rugged enough for the grill, but delicate when poached or slow-roasted in the oven.

Maine halibut are caught with a tub trawl, a 1,200-foot-long line anchored on one end, buoyed on the other, and studded with 50 silver dollar-size round hooks, each baited with a whole herring, alewife, or mackerel. The fishermen set halibut trawls in the morning, haul lobster traps all day, and then pull the halibut lines into their boats on the way back home. "Right now most of the guys are selling their fish, but some keep them for the grill, or hand them out to elderly neighbors," says Trisha Cheney, a scientist with the Maine Department of Marine Resources.

The big flat fish - they weigh between 20 and 100 pounds - have eyes on the topside of their bodies. The blind side faces the ocean floor and is white in color to match the waterline. The seeing side ranges from brown to olive green to slate gray to blend in with the gravel or sand of the ocean floor. Swimming close to the bottom, halibut are invisible to predators and prey. They mosey along and with their large mouths and sharp teeth, chomp anything that swims their way - fish, shellfish, even seabirds.

Until August, Kim Marden, owner of Captain Marden's Seafoods in Wellesley, will receive shipments of Maine halibut a few times a week. The fish arrives whole and Marden slices it into thick steaks, which have a center bone, or he bones the fish to make fillets. He also sells Atlantic halibut from Canada, but not from Alaska. "There's not a heck of a lot of difference between the two," he says, "and why stock something from 5,000 miles away when I can get fish from right here?"

Like Hamersley's pairing of halibut with clams, other chefs combine seafood and local delicacies. Great Bay's chef, Adam Fuller, is pan-roasting boneless halibut and serving it with a briny puree of oysters and brown butter, a bright yellow Meyer lemon coulis, and sautéed fiddlehead ferns.

Michael Leviton, chef and owner of Lumiere, and executive chef of Persephone, buys Atlantic halibut from Ingrid Bengis, an essayist and novelist turned fishmonger in Stonington, Maine. Leviton loves digging into a piece of halibut but also seems to enjoy just being around the impressive fish. "These Maine halibut come in covered with slime and still smelling like ocean algae," he says.

"Of course, I love to eat halibut, but I also just appreciate them as beautiful specimens," Leviton says. "It is a joy to break down the local fish. They are so firm, so pristine, and so beautiful."