Made a resolution to stick to sustainable seafood? Here’s one yummy place to start: Bluewater Grill.

Eco-pescatarians in L.A. will have to go a ways south to enjoy Bluewater Grill’s delicious fare, but the trip — especially when combined with a visit to the Aquarium of the Pacific, is well worth the trouble. Bluewater Grill’s very committed to sustainability — so much so that the restaurant hosted a small sustainable seafood summit late last month.

I made the trip to hear from local ocean sustainability experts, pepper Bluewater Grill’s owner and chef with all sorts of eco-foodie questions, and of course, enjoy delicious seafood while testing my own palate. The first dish let diners try out four different types of salmon — farmed and wild king salmon, farmed Atlantic salmon and a wild sockeye. The two kings were impossible to tell apart — but both perfectly cooked and delicious!

Bluewater Grill’s one local seafood restaurant that’s made a strong commitment to sustainability — with the help of The Aquarium of the Pacific’s Seafood for the Future program. As a partner restaurant of the program, Bluewater Grill’s made a serious effort to eco-fy its extensive menu of seafood dishes. “Currently Bluewater Grill’s menu is 85% certified sustainable, by Aquarium of the Pacific or the Monterey Aquarium,” says Bluewater Grill’s founder Jim Ulcickas, “but we won’t be satisfied until we reach 100%.”

What’s in that last 15 percent or so? It depends on the time of the year, but the biggest culprit is shrimp, which Jim says is still tough to source sustainably.

But there are so many delicious, sustainable seafood options here that you won’t miss the shrimp. Going beyond the simple green-yellow-red lists that group entire species of fish into one general category, Bluewater Grill does a lot of research to find smaller sustainable seafood companies — even finding sustainable options for oft red-listed fish. At this restaurant, you can get a sustainable Chilean sea bass — cooked to juicy and delicious perfection in butter and olive oil. Plus, there’s local swordfish sustainably harvested with no bycatch, delicious raw oysters from Washington, and much much more.

Plus, Bluewater Grill also offers sustainable wines to go with your sustainable seafood — like the organic and biodynamic King Estate Pinot Gris, a fruity wine great to enjoy with salmon. And for tequila fans, there’s an organic margarita — made with 4 Copas organic tequila and organic agave nectar — on the drink menu.

Stop by to dine at Bluewater Grill through Sep. 5, and you’ll get a free adult admission ticket to the Aquarium of the Pacific if you order from sustainable seafood menu. Enjoy –

Bluewater Grill. 665 N. Harbor Dr., Redondo Beach. 310.318.3474. Other locations in Newport Beach and Tustin.

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Can’t afford the $37 sustainable Sunday brunch at Inn of the Seventh Ray? Then I’ve got a deal you’ll like. The healthy Mediterranean spot Savyon Cafe offers an all-you-can-eat Sunday brunch — for just $12.99 a person.

This tiny, relatively new restaurant on Pico is a humble little spot, squeezed in next to a pizza joint with outdoor seating that looks unattractively jailed in by the bare metal scaffolding. However, the eatery’s Sunday’ spread’s a delicious, all vegan, 90 percent organic indulgence.

Of course, there’s the usual Mediterranean fare — so you can nosh on fresh hummus, falafel, dolmas, and babaganoush to your heart’s content. But the brunch’s real highlights are the vegan comfort foods, like the rich and sumptuous chickpea soup! (more…)

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Eating sustainable seafood can be a serious foodie challenge. Sure, you can refer to the Seafood Watch guide like a fishy bible — but a lot of fish appear on multiple categories (“best choices,” “good alternatives,” and “avoid”) depending on where and how they were caught or farmed. Trying to find out the nitty gritty details on a seafood dish in a restaurant (Is that salmon King or Chinook or something else? Farmed or wild caught? Where from?) can be a really trying experience — both for the diner and the poor actor-waiter subjected to your inquiries. Plus, restaurants sadly aren’t always honest about where their seafood comes from — sometimes even swapping out one fish for another!

Want to enjoy freshly-grilled seafood — without grilling the waiter? Spend your dining dollars at a restaurant committed to sustainable seafood that’s done the fishy research for you.

In Southern California, this task’s gotten a little easier, thanks to the Aquarium of the Pacific in Long Beach. That aquarium’s got a Seafood of the Future program — which includes partnerships with local restaurants that have promised to commit themselves to sustainable seafood.

Of course, Aquarium of the Pacific’s list isn’t a complete list of all SoCal restaurants committed to sustainable seafood. Among the missing favorites: Border Grill, known for its commitment to buying only Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch program approved fish. As you may have guessed, Border Grill shows up on that aquarium’s list of partner restaurants — along with a bunch more, mostly from central and northern California.

But even combining those two won’t give you a full roster of the good pescatarian dining options around you. M Cafe de Chaya, for example, has made a pretty impressive commitment to sustainble seafood — but doesn’t appear on either list because the restaurant’s worked on its seafood policy on its own, not under the umbrella of an aquarium program.

Looking for a one-stop website that’ll give you a comprehensive list of sustainable seafood restaurants in L.A.? Give up now, because it doesn’t exist.

One hopeful website might become just that in the future though: Fish2Fork offers rankings on seafood sustainability for restaurants. However, the site is currently tough to use because it doesn’t let you search by city — let alone zip code — to find the sustainable seafood restaurants near you. That said, if you have a particular restaurant in mind, you can search for it by name — and cross your fingers that it’s one of the ones listed and rated in the database.

Another possibly promising mobile app is Project FishMap, Monterey Bay Aquarium’s effort to crowdsource sustainable seafood dining info. Unfortunately, non-iPhone users can’t access this info at all — which is why I can’t tell you whether it’s helpful for hungry Angelenos.

As for cooking seafood at home, you can choose to shop at the supermarkets known to offer sustainable seafood by using Greenpeace’s Supermarket Scorecard (Safeway, Target, and Wegmans are actually better options than Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s), or use Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch Guide to point you toward more sustainable species wherever you shop.

Seafood lovers: How do you go about picking sustainable options, whether dining in or out?

Earlier: A Sustainable seafood guide for the digital age

Photo of M Cafe de Chaya’s Miso Salmon Macro Lunch — with miso marinated organic farmed salmon

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Fans of Real Food Daily, rejoice. Ann Gentry, the woman behind the famous vegan restaurants in L.A., is out with a new book — “Vegan Family Meals: Real Food for Everyone” — pitched as a can-do cookbook for anyone who wants to enjoy more nutritious, vegan meals.

Does this cookbook indeed make vegan cooking easy and doable for everyone? Yes — if we limit that to everyone who has lots and lots of time to spend in the kitchen.

Ann, who reveals she eats dairy and seafood in this cookbook, isn’t all vegan herself — but recommends eating more plant-based meals for all. Her restaurants are all vegan, with a heavy macrobiotic bent — and “Vegan Family Meals” too also reflects that style with rich, well-cooked dishes like Maple-Dijon Tempeh and Vegetable Stew and Lasagna Rolls with Tofu Ricotta and Everyday Tomato Sauce.

I’ve enjoyed eating these types of dishes as a frequent diner at Real Food Daily. Little did I know how much time and effort creating these dishes takes! The recipes, to the simple cook, are dauntingly involved and time consuming — many requiring dozens of ingredients, multiple components that mandate lots of pre-planning, and a huge variety of kitchen tools I don’t even own.

I was excited to see a “Simple Meals” section — but quickly discovered Ann and I have extremely different definitions of simple. Even the simple-sounding One-Pot Vegetables and Tofu with Sesame Rice got quickly complicated. You first have to cook brown rice, then turn it into sesame rice by sauteing with three more ingredients — at which point you can actually get started on the recipe, which requires 15 more ingredients and a lot of chopping, roll-cutting, coring, slicing, and stemming — not to mention grating ginger into a sheet of cheesecloth to hand-extract ginger juice.

Also, Ann is apparently a huge fan of the oven — the humvee of the kitchen, according to some green cooking experts. Most recipes — including those for the salads! — required turning on the oven.

Well, it’s very hot in L.A. right now, and my apartment has no air conditioning — so all those oven-happy recipes were out, which left me with few options indeed. Luckily, raw food is also very hot in L.A. right now — so much so that even Ann the oven-friendly macrobiotic-loving chef dipped her toes into this trend with a few uncooked recipes in “Vegan Family Meals.”

So I made Ann’s uncooked dishes, starting with the simplest, the Super Vegetable Dinner Smoothie — which still required locating a dozen ingredients but limited the prep to hitting a button on a blender. The result? A rich delicious green soup — that balanced the freshness of organic veggies with the sweetness of coconut water and carrots with the savoriness of dulse and miso with the creaminess of avocado.

Feeling bolder, I made the Living Wrap. Having done so, I must warn you — Making these live snacks is frightfully time consuming! You have to first make a red pepper-sunflower seed spread in a food processor, then whip together a citrus dressing from scratch to toss a green salad with, cut up veggies into stick-like formations, then finally roll everything up in collard wraps! That said, these wraps were so divinely delicious, fresh and flavorful — that I hope they’ll show up on Real Food Daily’s menu soon so I can order them next time.

Want to make these dishes yourself? Keep in mind — These raw delights are not at all representative of “Vegan Family Meals” in general, which focuses largely on heavier, richer, baked-and-roasted vegan meals. If you’re looking for cool raw dishes, you’re better off buying a good raw cookbook.

But if what you want to do is spend your morning making your own Maple Tempeh Bacon from scratch with the help of a stovetop smoker and oven, your afternoon mashing, shaping together, and cooking Black Bean Veggie Burgers from 18 different ingredients, then an evening caramelizing onions, whipping together a dressing, tossing a salad, and assembling everything in a pretty fashion so you can enjoy Ann’s Burger in a Salad with your family for dinner, then “Vegan Family Meals” is for you.

“Vegan Family Meals” is now available in hardcover for $15.

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I’ve gotten better at following through on goals I set, but I too am shocked at how fast I achieved this one. In just three weeks after the opening of The Veggie Grill’s newest restaurant at The Original Farmers Market, I’ve tried every single salad offered at the spot!

Granted, The Veggie Grill only makes four salads — but they’re all delicious!

I think my favorite right now is the Chop-Chop Chef (above), a cool romaine salad with green onion and roasted corn salsa made creamily decadent by the rich chipotle ranch dressing. This salad generally comes with tempeh as well as gardein steak and chickn’, but as you know, I’m not a faux meat kind of person, so I asked for tempeh only. That request appeared to confuse my order taker, who for some reason gave me my dressing on the side. I used it all!

For dark greens, go for the All Hail Kale salad (below) topped with blackened tempeh, which I’ve already hailed in a previous post. The marinated kale and red cabbage salad comes perfectly dressed in a zingy ginger-papaya vinaigrette — and the agave-roasted walnuts add a delicious sweet touch.

I love this salad so much I’ve already had it twice, the second time as part of a soup and salad combo. I opted for the bean chili and added blackened tempeh to the salad. The salad was yummy as usual; the chili was passable but too heavy right before a hike!

For a fruitier, tropical flavor, there’s the Baja Fiesta salad (below) — a refreshing dish that not only comes with papaya, but arrives doused in a tasty ginger-papaya vinaigrette. I asked for mine without tortilla strips.

Last but not least: The Thai Chickin’ Salad (below) is pretty good too, with sweet mandarin oranges, savory toasted sesame seeds, and spicy roasted corn salsa. As you may have guessed, I substituted tempeh for chickn’. The one drawback: I find the spicy Thai dressing too sweet, and hope they’ll reformulate to keep the spicy kick without all the sweetness.

I love how The Veggie Grill makes substitutions easy for picky healthy eaters. What’s your favorite salad at The Veggie Grill?

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