The Urchin Tide

A passion for diving to the bottom of the ocean has made a successful business of bringing sea creatures to the top.

BY D. HEIMPEL

It has a super slimy consistency and tastes a bit like the salty sea. But uni, the Japanese name for the roe-producing gooey organs that are extracted from spiny sea urchins, is prohibitively expensive and very popular, and was once seen as a delicacy reserved only for Japanese consumers. However, one entrepreneurial California urchin diver and processor—among others—has helped add uni to the menus of American restaurants, providing the US with the chance to develop its own clan of devoted uni connoisseurs

Dave Rudie, owner of Catalina Off shore Products, is sitting at one of San Diego’s hottest sushi bars, Zenbu. “No live uni today,” says Matt Rimel, the restaurant’s owner. “The weather was too bad,” Rudie explains. But the tides of the sea urchin market can be much more capricious than dark clouds and heavy wind. Despite a volatile market, Rudie has ridden out the tide. He has turned his love of diving into an entrepreneurship, and now, couldn’t imagine doing anything else.

SAN DIEGO’S ZENBUSince the ’70s, uni divers have gone from nothing to boom to bust to stabilization. The Department of Fish and Game (DFG) and a hungry Japanese market fostered an industry that saw hundreds of divers making a ton of money up and down the California coast. “There used to be armies of [urchins],” Rudie says. “They would form up and then march over to the kelp and munch away.”

During the 1900s, poachers ravaged the sea otter population. Urchins are on the otters’ food chain, so without sea otters, the urchin population exploded. This abundance of urchin led to the species being blamed for eating away kelp forests and destroying the habitat of the much-cuter sea otter.

In 1978, Rudie read an LA Times article about how the Japanese, heady on a booming economy, had a voracious appetite for the armies of spiny invertebrates that littered the sea floor.. So he decided to become an urchin diver. Diving since his teenage years, he had already fallen in love with the forest-like kelp beds where urchins feed, and was soon selling uni to brokers at the Tsukji market in Japan, an auction house of sushi-grade seafood. He understood the Japanese market, and he’s a lover of uni as well.

By the mid ’80s, the industry was in full swing. Rudie started his company in 1982, selling uni he had collected or pooled from the San Diego divers he knew well. According to Rudie, divers were making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. “It was a crazy time. Everyone was grabbing everything they could,” he says. The 900 divers and the handful of uni producers raised a clamor for regulation to protect their stocks. The DFG listened, setting size limits and a calendar for the fishery.

By 1988, more then 50 million tons had been hand picked off the sea floor. Then, the Japanese market collapsed. “We lost money for four years,” Rudie says. “My wife wanted to pull out of the business so many times, but I was patient and determined.”

Rudie’s company rode out the first shock of the Japanese market crash in 1989 by playing American inflation against a constrained yen. But things got worse. With the fall of Communism, the Russian markets opened up, providing the Japanese with a flood of cheap urchin. In 1991, Rudie’s $15 million business started hemorrhaging by the hundreds of thousands. And the high-end grade A market that Rudie had developed from the bottom up was wiped out by the canceling of company credit cards that had been traditionally used on Japanese corporate dinners heavy on sake and uni.

To add to troubles, Rudie and the other divers who provided him with uni had to go further out and dive deeper. “Everything was totally fished out,” says Kristine Barsky, a marine biologist for the DFG. “There were no virgin landings left .” California’s 900 divers dwindled steadily. Barsky says that today, only half of the remaining 321 permits are actively used. The average diver’s age is 51, and the average personal earnings in the neighborhood of $40,000 —if they’re lucky.

But Rudie made it work. He’s had to diversify with other fish products, filling his factory with live tanks of lobster and rock shrimp. There are freezers with tuna from Hawaii and eel from Mexico, and, of course, long tanks where 45 of Rudie’s workers process uni. He sends uni to restaurants and fish dealers all across the country. And aft er a long fight to bring back his beleaguered business, profits stand at a little more than $11 million. Lucky for him, as Japan’s sushi market declined,

Lucky for him, as Japan’s sushi market declined, America’s exploded. “There are about nine sushi restaurants on this street,” says Rimel, whose restaurant Zenbu has been around for six years. Rimel, who also owns two other restaurants, says the sushi industry has been growing at 20% since the mid-’90s. That means more business for Rudie, everywhere.

Grades of uni are broken down into three categories: CA Gold, Premium and Select. The rankings are based solely on color; the vibrant yellow (CA Gold) costs $60 per lb. Each urchin weighs a pound each, but only 5% to 10% is edible roe. It takes 20 urchins for one 9-oz. tray.

The overhead is immense, and, while Rimel enjoys profit margins of 10%, Rudie says he is lucky to extract 1% to 2% from the urchins. But he still sticks with uni; it accounts for 30% of his products and is his No. 1 seller.

In the dark days, Rudie thought about giving up. But he wouldn’t have known what to do. Spending weeks out in his 50-foot boat with three or four fellow divers working the backside of Catalina Island was the only life he knew. Diving and the rolling swells of the Pacific were too much a part of him.

And now, seated across from Rimel, one of his biggest local clients, he has reason to enjoy the sake, beer and uni. “The divers are just coming in now,” he says to Rimel. “Cool, I’ll come down and check out the pull tomorrow,” Rimel replies.

The next day Rimel will show up at Rudie’s processing plant with its huge freezers and long rows of uni processing tables. He will peer into the tanks, grab one of the spiny invertebrates and crack it open. If the roe is bright, he’ll buy enough to fill the tanks at Zenbu and make a killing at the tables

Beyond Sushi

Sea urchin can be found outside of the Japanese kitchen as well. Many restaurants with New American menus are including it in their dishes. Italians, however, have been in on this secret of the sea for years, calling it frutti di mare (fruit of the sea). The following restaurants serve uni, minus the seaweed and rice:

Taranta
BOSTON
Spaghetti with sea urchin and grey mullet roe, basking in peperoncini-infused olive oil
www.tarantarist.com

Picholine
NEW YORK
Sea urchin panna cotta with chilled ocean consommé and Ossetra caviar
www.picholinenyc.com

North Pond
CHICAGO
Crab and uni salad with crabmeat, honey gelée, East Coast sea urchin and American sturgeon caviar cream
www.northpondrestaurant.com

Farallon
SAN FRANCISCO
Peeky-toe crab and truffled mashed potatoes with sea urchin sauce
www.farallonrestaurant.com