DIVING DEEP FOR WILD SEAFOOD: Local dive fishers harvest delicacies
- Cinda Chavich
- Oct 6
- 10 min read
B.C.’s geoduck, sea urchin and sea cucumber are prized in Asia, but local fishers are hoping they catch on more at home, too.
By CINDA CHAVICH
Have you ever cleaned a slimy Pacific sea cucumber, cracked open a spiky urchin or peeled the gangly siphon of a giant geoduck clam?
No surprise if the answer is no, but if you live on the West Coast, there’s a good chance that this kind of seafood has turned up on your plate, or that you have encountered it while paddling or fishing in the Salish Sea.
That’s because we’re living right in a rugged region that’s teeming with these creatures and, like a modern-day incarnation of Captain Nemo, there’s a whole community of commercial fishermen who regularly dive to the bottom of the sea to deliver them for dinner. We have large phallic-shaped clams, bulbous, red sea cucumbers and equally exotic red or green urchin. There’s also a large community of discerning Asian diners who are happy to pay for the chance to sample these luxury foods.
In Vancouver, you can have a traditional Hong Kong–style hot pot featuring dried Pacific sea cucumber, visit a Japanese uni bar for an Omakase menu with sea urchin in every course or have a hyperlocal clam linguine made with B.C. geoduck at a modern Italian eatery.
And now some creative city chefs are joining forces with commercial fishers for a special Divers’ Catch Gala, an event designed to introduce more adventurous eaters to this oft- overlooked local bounty.
EXOTICS ON THE PLATE
All of these invertebrates are considered delicacies in the Chinese and Japanese restaurant world. At the sushi bar, you can find geoduck (mirugai) or sea urchin (uni) atop nigiri sushi, while top Chinese chefs serve geoduck slivered to dip in soy sauce, and slippery sea cucumbers in elaborate hot pots with winter melon and shiitake mushrooms.
But be prepared for sticker shock. At iDen & QuanJuDe Beijing Duck House, Canada’s only Michelin-starred Chinese restaurant, Peking Duck is the specialty, but it’s also the place to indulge in fresh seafood from local waters, whether the Beijing Style Braised Sea Cucumber starter ($58) or a $298 course of geoduck sashimi with XO sauce.
At Kirin, the double-boiled soup of “Dried Seafood Delicacies” has a price tag of $1,694 while a whole sea cucumber, braised in dried shrimp roe sauce, is $231.50.
“These are the delicacies in Chinese cuisine — the foods for celebrations that people love, and are lucky to get once a year,” says chef Will Lew, who helped open iDen & QuanJuDe and is now a chef ambassador for the Ocean Wise sustainable seafood program.
Hand-harvested by B.C.’s commercial divers, this seafood gets the green light from the Ocean Wise and Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch programs, though remains largely unknown to western diners and chefs. Lew says it’s a delicious and sustainable resource, and simply needs more culinary champions to win new fans.
That’s what chef Bobby Milheron is doing at Folietta, a chic new Italian restaurant in East Van, where his version of linguine vongole is made with housemade pasta and a geoduck clam sauce.
“It’s one of our top selling pastas,” says Milheron. “It’s not something everyone’s worked with, so it requires a little bit more training than any other type of shellfish, but the flavour is so unreal.”
Fanny Bay Oyster Bar & Shellfish Market has geoduck, uni and sea cucumber on the menu, too — whether Geoduck Sashimi, Geoduck Aguachile and uni-topped oysters at the raw bar, or live geoduck, frozen geoduck or sea cucumber meat, and Geoduck Chowder to go.
Still, Chinese restaurants may be the best place to experience these rare foods.
At the latest Chinese Restaurant Awards, food critics bestowed Signature Dish awards on Chef Tony Seafood Restaurant for its Stir-fried B.C. Sea Cucumber with barbecued pork and green beans, and to Chef Bo Li of The Fish Man (one of the chefs featured at the Diver’s Gala) for his Typhoon Shelter Geoduck, the big clam diced, lightly breaded and quickly fried with chilies, garlic, fresh scallions and fermented black beans.
There was a time when serving a whole, head-on spot prawn was a non-starter in a Canadian restaurant.
But times and tastes change with spot prawns, once largely exported, now a coveted local treat. Though geoduck (pronounced “gooey-duck”) suffers from its less-than- appetizing name — some have suggested a rebrand to King Clam — and the spongey texture of sea cucumbers is an acquired taste, Lew imagines a time when these local and largely unsung heroes are equally esteemed by all.
“I think cultures and palates will sort of reform and remould themselves,” he says, “so then it becomes more normal for anyone to think, well, oh, we’re having a sea urchin tonight, or we’re having sea cucumber tonight.”
DIVING FOR DOLLARS
While most local fishermen bring in their catch with “hook, line and sinker”-style fishing gear, harvesting sea urchin, geoduck clams or sea cucumbers is an entirely different story.
The “dive fishery” targets these rare species on the ocean floor. Geoduck fishermen don wetsuits, breathing apparatus and weighted belts to bring them down some 10 to 20 metres to dig for big clams, while sea cucumber and urchin divers scour the seabed in SCUBA gear to collect each animal by hand.
It’s a highly skilled and dangerous job, and the price reflects that risk. It’s a job that usually takes place in the fall and winter months, bringing in this valuable catch in time for Christmas and Lunar New Year, when such prized and luxurious ingredients are featured at elaborate banquets.
“Being a commercial diver involves a lot of skill, to find the right areas for fishing and where the best quality is found,” says Katie Lindsay, marketing manager for the Underwater Harvesters Association. “A lot of our divers do harvest all three species.”
Geoduck alone is a $60 million fishery, though most of the catch is exported to Asia. The Diver’s Catch Gala is designed to introduce these products to a wider domestic audience and, like the local spot prawn or Dungeness crab festivals, could become an annual event.
“The average person has never tried geoduck or sea cucumber,” Lindsay says. “They may recognize it, but the local demand is still pretty low for these three niche products.”
“I would like to see more food service and retailers and chefs distributing these products.”
Though the total allowable catch for these fisheries has remained fairly stable, weather and market conditions can affect the total landings, and recent trade wars and tariffs have cut prices paid to fishers by 25 to 50 per cent.
BIG IS BEAUTIFUL
On the West Coast, “giant” is often the operative word for these exotic species.
The geoduck, dubbed gweduc or “dig deep” by coastal First Nations, is the largest burrowing clam on the planet.
The big clams live all along the B.C. coast in sandy beds, burrowing deeper as they grow larger over the years. It’s that large, phallic-shaped siphon muscle, which the clam uses to feed while embedded beneath the seabed, that sets the geoduck apart in the clam and culinary world.
A geoduck can live for 200-plus years, unless a diver arrives to dislodge it from the ocean bed, using a “stinger,” a high- powered blast of water, to spray away the surrounding substrate. It’s the tip of the siphon or a dimple in the sand that reveals where the big clams are buried, but they’re not easy to find. Once collected, they’re transferred to a packer boat and taken to one of seven federally registered B.C. shellfish plants, ready to export.
“It arrives at the plant in the middle of the night — fresh and live — and it’s on a plane to China the next morning,” Lindsay says.
If you’ve seen one in a burbling tank at a seafood market or in a fancy Chinese restaurant, you’ll know why this giant clam has such a unique reputation — the shell up to eight inches across, and the prized meaty siphon up to a metre in length. Once peeled and thinly sliced, the raw, translucent clam meat tastes sweet and briny, with a tender but crisp texture.
The average geoduck weighs one to three pounds, but can weigh up to 6.5 pounds and at $45–$50 a pound, it’s a valuable catch. Canadian geoduck are top drawer specimens.
“In China, they like to have the clams in live tanks and you want to pick the clam that you want, so it’s a whole show,” Lindsay says, “typically for a special occasion, or if you’re trying to treat somebody.”
THE STARS
Canadian sea cucumbers and sea urchins — both echinoderms related to sea stars with five internal segments — are also known for their impressive size.
Sea cucumbers are found worldwide but the torpedo-shaped Pacific red sea cucumber found in B.C. coastal waters can be 12 to 16 inches long. The limbless invertebrates are considered “living fossils,” having inhabited Earth’s oceans for 600 million years.
The sea cucumber’s elongated body is covered in soft red spikes. It’s prized in China for its shape — mimicking a male body part — and its chewy texture.
Picked from the ocean floor by divers in scuba gear, sea cucumbers go to B.C. processing plants. Some simply clean and salt the whole spiky animal for drying, while others process the leathery skin and white meat separately. The thin layer of muscle meat is scraped from the skin and frozen, and the skin is cooked, salted and dried.
It’s an unusual ingredient, though Lew says he’s tried some Western techniques to introduce it to restaurant diners — from making dehydrated sea cucumber chips or braising it in red wine.
Dried sea cucumber is prized for its perceived health benefits and rarity, a delicacy that commands high prices. In Chinese herbal shops in Vancouver and Richmond, a pound of dried Canadian sea cucumber can sell for $200-$300 while specimens from Korea and Japan may cost more than $2,000 a pound.
Sea urchin, meanwhile, is beloved by most who try it. Dubbed “the foie gras of the sea,” uni is sweet and buttery, a delicate, creamy addition to top sushi, slices of Japanese wagyu steak or freshly shucked oysters.
In B.C., divers harvest large red and much smaller green sea urchin in winter, from October to May, delivering it directly to chefs or to processors. The spiny shells are cracked open to expose five lobes of orange uni, which is often called “roe” or “caviar” but is actually the animal’s reproductive organs.
Uni spoils quickly and the best way to eat it is raw, cracked open live on the boat, when it’s freshly caught. Green sea urchins are shipped, whole and live, to Japan while most red urchins go to B.C. processing plants, where the larger lobes are extracted from the shells, brined or treated with potassium aluminum sulfate, and packaged in shallow trays to sell as a fresh product. Having a shelf life of seven to 10 days means some local processors sell trays of frozen uni and frozen uni- based sauces or purées, extending the season and availability.
A Vancouver company has also developed a chemical-free process to preserve fresh sea urchin that is finding new customers in Europe, where aluminum sulfate is banned. Its product, Uni Fresco, is packed in sea water and cold pasteurized using high pressure processing to extend the shelf life to an impressive 28 days.
A few Vancouver chefs and retailers such as Fujiya are using the product.
DO TRY THIS AT HOME
Start with fish mongers or Asian supermarkets, which often have live B.C. geoduck, fresh uni and dried or frozen sea cucumber meat and salted skins.
The PUHA “Fresh on Friday” program delivers live sea urchin to local restaurants and retail fish stores, with dockside sales from local vessels every Friday at False Creek Fishermen’s Wharf and the Steveston fish sales dock in season (October to May), when the urchin roe is the highest quality.
Seaworthy’s Sea Urchins is set up at Steveston Wharf with live urchins for sale, and you can buy geoduck and uni from The Lobster Man and Vancouver’s Fanny Bay Shellfish Market.
F.I.S.H. (Fresh Ideas Start Here) offers fresh and frozen from its eatfish.ca website, including frozen red uni roe and its own uni pasta sauce.
For inspiration, the The Coastal Forager's Cookbook, the Deerholme Foraging Cookbook and The Sobo Cookbook all have suggestions for at-home cooks.
Sea cucumber may be a bit more challenging for home cooks and western diners. It’s the texture — described as gelatinous and chewy, or sticky and spongey — that makes sea cucumber such a prize in Chinese cuisine.
As most sea cucumbers are salted and dried, they need to be rehydrated in several changes of water for several days before boiling until tender.
One recipe for sea cucumber “sashimi,” instructs to soak and boil it until tender (“a good bounce” and “not too firm”), then serve sliced and chilled with soy sauce and wasabi for dipping. Lew says, once rehydrated, it’s also often sautéed, with greens such as bok choy and oyster sauce, or simmered in a flavourful Chinese master sauce.
A GO TO GALA
The Divers’ Catch Gala, set for September 20, is another way to taste these local delicacies, right at the beginning of the prime harvesting season.
Top Vancouver chefs Ned Bell, Dez Lo, Welbert Choi, Bo Li, Bobby Milheron and Will Lew will create a multi-course modern menu, showcasing geoduck, uni and sea cucumber in creative new ways.
Lew says bridging Asian and Western cultures in the kitchen, while focusing on sustainably fished, Ocean Wise, local ingredients, is his goal.
“What I find, as a chef and as an artist, is that whatever the medium, you need to know who the audience is, and open them up to the next piece, the next style,” he says.
“Doing an event like this with people in the industry, pushing ourselves forward, that’s what excites me the most.”
This story originally appeared in Edible Vancouver magazine
©CindaChavich2025
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