At California's Asian fish markets, freshness is everything

Rafael Anguiano takes his corners gingerly. He has to -- he's driving an aquarium on wheels, a lumbering delivery truck carrying 3,000 pounds of live fish in large, sloshing tanks.

One sunny afternoon, he sweats freely as he hustles hundreds of flopping fish into the Lucky Seafood Market inside a rolling rubber trash can. Breathless, he dumps five buckets into the store's tanks, the sturgeon, catfish and carp slashing and struggling like salmon surging upstream.

For eager Chinese and Vietnamese customers, Anguiano can't move fast enough. And there's never enough of the daily catch to satisfy everyone.

"C'mon, make me full," a Lucky market worker pleads. "One more bucket, one more."

Anguiano's cellphone rings. It's Johnson Cheng, owner of Yet Sun Market six blocks away. Customers are demanding their fish, he says. Wincing into the receiver, Anguiano asks wearily: "People are already waiting for me?"

Cheng, Anguiano says, is a ruthless negotiator: "He wants all my fish and won't take no for an answer. I'm going to have to cut somebody bad today."

Anguiano, 33, is a critical link in California's ethnic food chain. He works for The Fishery, a Central Valley aqua farm that's one of a handful statewide catering to a unique niche: California's Asian markets.

In Asian cuisine, live fish are a delicacy. Asian diners insist they can distinguish on the plate between a fish freshly plucked from a tank or stream and one previously gutted and languishing on ice.

Ken Beer, Anguiano's boss and founder of The Fishery, once believed the Asian live-fish venture would be short-lived. His older ethnic customers would die off, he figured, and new generations would adopt American habits and take to buying fillets in Styrofoam packages.

Instead, new immigrants kept demand high for the dozen California fish farmers who raise product for the state's Asian customers. Small neighborhood markets catering to Asian tastes have expanded outside traditional Chinatowns to suburbs such as the Sunset District in San Francisco and Monterey Park in Los Angeles.

About 25 years after Beer and several others began supplying Asian markets, business is swimming across California.

According to several aqua farmers, the Asian appetite for finned fish -- sturgeon, large-mouthed bass, tilapia, catfish, carp -- comprises 70% of the estimated $50-million California aquaculture industry, not counting algae and shellfish. That's a whopping 20 million pounds annually.