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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