In the United States, it is estimated that up to 90% of the seafood that we consume is imported from abroad. And so if you're looking for live, locally-sourced fish in California, Chinese restaurants are probably your best bet.
Chinese restaurants in California have always had a relationship with local fishermen.
Most of our live seafood, with the exception of crab and lobster, is locally sourced in California, Gary Ye says. Ye is the owner of Lunasia, a Cantonese dim sum and seafood restaurant in Alhambra. He has been in the Chinese restaurant business for 30 years now and has kept his pulse on the ebb and flow of the seafood market during all of those years. Lunasia's focus on local seafood isn't unique; most Chinese seafood restaurants in Los Angeles have a section dedicated to live seafood. Whole, fresh fish is at the center of Chinese cuisine, especially for the people whose ancestry hail from coastal provinces.
Chinese people here used be excited for live, whole catfish, he says. As long as it was fresh and alive, that's all that mattered. Now because of rising incomes, more people want crab and lobster from Canada and Alaska.
At Lunasia, spot prawns, rock cod, and thornyhead fish are all bought from California fishermen. The fish are kept in tanks and slaughtered just moments before they are saut ed or steamed. Customers must order the rock cod in advance because it is not guaranteed that the fish will be in stock.
Live fish are packed into a tank awaiting customers orders. | Photo: Gina Ferazzi/Los Angeles Times/Getty Images
More About Seafood
Alfredo Gurrola, The Man Behind the Delicious Seafood Plates at L.A.s Premier Restaurants
Weekend Recipe: California Fish Tacos
Weekend Recipe: Cioppino
1 of 21
next
Chinese restaurants in California have always had a relationship with local fishermen. In the early 1990s, Chinese restaurant seafood suppliers were buying live shrimp and fishes up and down the California coastline from the fishermen, Sam Wong, a long-time Chinese restaurateur in Los Angeles says. At one point, a Chinese gang called the Wah Ching got involved and demanded the suppliers pay them a fee. Those who refused to pay were beaten and gasoline was poured into their live fish tanks, he says.
What used to be a consistent business is now more unreliable because of rising prices.
When I first started in this business, we'd have a consistently full tank of fish, Ye says. But now, local seafood is getting more expensive. Ye cites competition from Chinese buyers in China.
As China's income has risen, so has their appetite for fish from abroad. Because of overfishing, China has virtually no fish left in the East China Sea and yet, according to 2015 figures, China accounted for 35 percent of the world's seafood consumption in 2015. The United States is currently China's second-largest seafood supplier, after Russia.
Some products have become so expensive because the Chinese in China are willing to pay more of them, he says. For example, right now I can't get any sea cucumbers from my supplier in Mexico because they've been sold out to China.
The California spiny lobster is another great example of this. It is estimated that 95% of all commercially-caught spiny lobsters in California are shipped directly to China. What used to be a $10 a pound commodity is now $30 a pound.
Spiny lobster. | Photo: Universal Images Group/Getty Images
The amount of Chinese people in Los Angeles willing to pay the exorbitant prices of those luxury items pales in comparison to the Chinese people in China. Ye simply cannot compete. His lobster is sourced from Maine.
He stresses that the Chinese in America have different spending habits than the Chinese in China.
In China they will use their business expense account and splurge on the luxury seafood items like lobster and crab. In America, they are more modest because they've adapted to the price levels here. They want a more reasonable price, he says.
--
--
It is becoming nearly impossible for Ye to get his hands on the luxury seafood items that his Chinese customers prize: Pacific geoduck clam and Dungeness crab from Canada, rock lobster from Australia, and Alaskan king crab.
In Vancouver, for example, most of the Dungeness crabs are shipped directly to China to feed the crab-hungry dinner tables of Shanghai. Prices have nearly doubled, reaching up to $60 a pound.
To cope with the unreliability of live seafood, Ye says most of his business is now focused on the dim sum portion of his menu, which utilizes frozen seafood. Unlike live seafood, which is usually U.S.-based, frozen seafood comes from all over the world and is significantly cheaper.
Frozen crabs. | Photo: eltpics/Flickr/Creative Commons License
Most of my stuff comes from Latin America these days, Sunny Wan says.
Wan is the owner of Swan Enterprise, a frozen seafood distributor to Chinese restaurants in America. He has a client base of up to 300 Chinese restaurants in California and 20 Chinese supermarkets. When he started in the business, twenty years ago, the majority of his fish came from China. Today, because of health scandal scares, nearly nothing is imported in from China. From Asia, he mostly sources from Malaysia, Vietnam, and Thailand.
Swai fillet is sourced from Vietnam, he says. Shrimp comes from Honduras. He estimates that 80% of his shrimp is farm-raised and 20% comes from the wild.
Like Ye, Wan is an industry old-timer and has seen the growing appetite of the Chinese in China change the seafood market. When I went to the Seafood Expo in Boston, I noticed that a lot of the vendors had hired Chinese-speaking staff to talk to the Chinese buyers.
Workers unload fish from the boat in Vietnam. | Photo: Linh Pham/Getty Images News/Getty Images
Frozen seafood is o
Most recent headlines
06/10/2025
France T l visions, France's leading broadcaster, has received the 2025 EBU ...
04/09/2025
Monumental Sports & Entertainment (MSE), in collaboration with Dalet, has been a...
30/08/2025
WASHINGTON The Federal Communications Commission has adopted its FY 2025 Regulatory Fees Order that establishes the regulatory fee rates for the broadcast stati...
29/08/2025
Australian Red Cross and SBS launch training to help workplaces in the fight aga...
29/08/2025
The National Film and Video Foundation (NFVF), an agency of the Department of Sp...
29/08/2025
L3Harris Technologies has concentrated decades of expertise across the entire enterprise to develop affordable and reliable best-of-breed solutions to rapidly c...
29/08/2025
BURBANK, Calif. The CW Network and the Pac-12 Conference have announced a new media rights deal that will extend their broadcast partnership beginning with the ...
29/08/2025
NEW YORK Gracenote has released a new analysis of its global video dataset showing that the number of FAST channels grew nearly 14% from Q1 2025 and 76% since 2...
29/08/2025
SAN JOSE, Calif. Harmonic has announced a series of improvements to its live sports streaming solution that the company said will improve fan engagement, protec...
29/08/2025
NEW YORK and LOS ANGELES Fox Corp. and YouTube TV last night announced a renewal of the full portfolio of Fox networks, including Fox News Channel, Fox Business...
29/08/2025
Budapest, Hungary, August 2025 - The integration of Microsoft Teams Rooms (MTR) with Lightware's Taurus universal matrix switchers delivers a new level of f...
29/08/2025
Frequency, the engine behind many of the world's best-known streaming television channels, today announced it will launch Studio Live, a next-generation uni...
29/08/2025
In an era when AI and cyber resilience are essential, Scality will mark the 10th anniversary of Scality Day on October 16, 2025 in Paris. This flagship global e...
29/08/2025
Disguise's In-House Creative and Technical Teams Pre-Visualised, Programmed and Delivered Content for the Experience, All Powered by EX 3+
Technology solu...
29/08/2025
Disguise will be demonstrating the latest workflows for TV, film and live events on a number of partner booths at the show
Disguise, the industry-leading tech...
29/08/2025
STOCKHOLM, Sweden Accedo will showcase Accedo Compose, its AI agent-powered modular orchestration layer that assists streaming providers in transitioning client...
29/08/2025
LOS ANGELES Cineverse has announced that it is working with Xperi to bring four of its streaming channels to automobiles for the first time as part of the DTS A...
29/08/2025
DALLAS & ATLANTA Gray Media has announced an agreement with the sports streaming service Victory+ to simulcast 17 Dallas Stars NHL games in 15 television market...
29/08/2025
NEW YORK AND CULVER CITY Comcast NBCUniversal and Amazon have announced new and extended distribution agreements that will expand the content available on their...
29/08/2025
FOOTHILL RANCH, Calif. RED Digital Cinema will feature its Cine-Broadcast Module supporting live broadcast workflows during IBC2025, Sept. 12-15, at the RAI Ams...
29/08/2025
29 Aug 2025
Kyivstar Rings Opening Bell at Nasdaq Marking Landmark Listing and ...
29/08/2025
More than half of all NFL games live on Sky for the first timeFriday 29 August 2025
Sky Sports has announced a new three-year deal with the NFL, extending its ...
29/08/2025
Back to All News
RIV4LRIES: The Trailer of the New Series With Samuele Carrino ...
29/08/2025
Get ready for an inspiring and emotional insight into the world of competitive Irish dancing with My Story: Tomi Champion of the World airing on RT 2 this monda...
29/08/2025
RT has today announced that David McCullagh is to be the new presenter of RT Radio 1's flagship Today programme, which airs every weekday at 10am, replaci...
28/08/2025
By Kristin Feeley, Director, Documentary Film & Artist Programs
If you want to tell untold stories, if you want to give voice to the voiceless, you've got ...
28/08/2025
Directed by Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert, Sundance Institute-supported Amer...
28/08/2025
Corridos have been a cornerstone of M sica Mexicana for generations, telling stories rooted in everyday life. Now, a new chapter is taking shape: motivational c...
28/08/2025
Los corridos han sido un pilar de la M sica Mexicana durante generaciones, contando historias enraizadas en la vida cotidiana. Ahora, un nuevo cap tulo est tom...
28/08/2025
Earlier this month, we promised our Verano Forever party would bring the heat, a...
28/08/2025
L3Harris will provide the Polish F-16V fleet with the Viper Shield electronic warfare system as part of an upgrade program....
28/08/2025
Bilbao, August 26, 2025 - AgileTV, an international television and video technol...
28/08/2025
Ken Wilkinson is an Emmy Awards nominated New York audio engineer who specialises in production sound mixing for film, commercial, episodic and documentary work...
28/08/2025
NEW YORK FuboTV today announced that it will launch Fubo Sports, a skinny bundle that focuses on sports with a subscription price of $56 monthly....
28/08/2025
NEVADA City, Calif. At IBC2025, Sept. 12-15 at the RAI Amsterdam, Telestream will debut its new Global Ingest strategy, introducing a next-generation ingest arc...
28/08/2025
Dr. Rhoda Bernard Releases Groundbreaking Debut Book on Accessible Arts Educatio...
28/08/2025
TAG Video Systems, the leader in software-based IP end-to-end workflow monitoring, deep probing, and real-time visualization, has named Oliver Gappa as Sales Di...
28/08/2025
AI-based voice enhancement will be among a series of innovations making their IBC 2025 debut on the DHD stand B46 in Hall 8 at the RAI Amsterdam Convention Cent...
28/08/2025
Telef nica Servicios Audiovisuales (TSA), the leading system integrator and service provider in the media sector in Spain, with the support of Appear, the globa...
28/08/2025
To fully immerse sailing fans in the world's biggest offshore yacht race, production company, Optical Media turned to LiveU's On-site Production solutio...
28/08/2025
Working with Calrec on its most recent overhaul, radio and television broadcaster, WNED has migrated to a fully IP infrastructure with multiple Type R consoles,...
28/08/2025
Cleeng, the Subscriber Retention Management (SRM ) inventor, has unveiled Cleeng Pro, the first-ever direct-to-consumer (D2C) subscription management platform t...
28/08/2025
Zixi, the industry leader in live broadcast-quality video over IP, today announced that French media distribution platform OKAST has selected Zixi to enable rel...
28/08/2025
Solution offers a streamlined, speaker-free architecture to optimize integration with premium external loudspeakers and advanced loudness metering
Nixer Pro Au...
28/08/2025
Cinegy, the premier provider of software-defined television technology, has announced a strategic partnership with Vision One Touch Film Production Services L.L...
28/08/2025
Telestream, a global leader in media workflow technologies, will debut its new Global Ingest strategy at IBC2025, introducing a next-generation ingest architect...
28/08/2025
Tier 1 operator selects Broadpeak to power high-performance, unified CDN solution across Norway, Sweden and Finland
Broadpeak, a leader in streaming and moneti...
28/08/2025
Leading video software provider, Synamedia, today announced that 24 Frames Digital, one of India's leading live event streaming service providers, has chose...
28/08/2025
Meet VisualOn at IBC2025: See What's Next in AI-Powered Video Streaming Join VisualOn at IBC2025 and discover how our AI-driven Optimizer and advanced media...
In the United States, it is estimated that up to 90% of the seafood that we consume is imported from abroad. And so if you're looking for live, locally-sourced fish in California, Chinese restaurants are probably your best bet.
