Subscribe
Jobs
Cars
Real Estate
Apts
Classifieds
Shop
The menu said “Walleye.” The waitress called it walleye. The bill at the end of the meal said walleye. One restaurant even said you may never taste its walleye’s equal.
But at four restaurants out of 10 visited recently by The Journal Gazette and Indiana’s NewsCenter, the fish that was served after ordering walleye was not walleye – it was a completely different species of fish.
In two restaurants, Club Soda and Hall’s Triangle Park, the fish the restaurant called walleye when ordered by newspaper staff was zander, an eastern European fish that wholesales for about 7 percent less.
In two other restaurants, Liberty Diner and The Oyster Bar on Dupont Road, the fish received was likely crimson snapper, a relative of the red snapper popular at sushi bars, tests show. Crimson snapper sells for about the same price as zander.
A Don Hall’s official told Indiana’s NewsCenter he has knowingly purchased zander for years and sold it to customers as walleye but argues zander is a higher-quality fish. However, the restaurant chain says it has now switched to walleye.
Purdue University’s Peter Waser, a biology professor who specializes in DNA fingerprinting and genetics, said substituting zander for walleye is like ordering a bison burger and getting a hamburger instead. Beef cattle and bison are related but are different species.
“The question is, as a consumer, do you consider bison generally equivalent to beef or not?” Waser asked.
In a special joint investigation, The Journal Gazette and Indiana’s NewsCenter sent staff to 10 restaurants in Fort Wayne between Oct. 2 and Oct. 4 and ordered walleye. Samples from each order were then packaged in test tubes and sent by overnight mail to Therion International, a private DNA analysis lab in Saratoga Springs, N.Y.
Therion analyzed the samples using DNA sequencing to see which species it was – or wasn’t.
“We’ve been in the DNA business for 20 years,” said Therion International managing member Will Gergits. “We’ve never had our DNA results rejected by a court or refuted by a court or thrown out by a court.”
Walleye is a North American freshwater fish popular with sport fishermen. Most restaurant walleye is commercially caught in Canada and shipped here; there is almost no commercial fishing of walleye in the United States.
Zander, by contrast, is not native to the Americas. Both zander and walleye are in the same scientific genus – both are related to perch – but are different species. Zander is sometimes called “pike-perch” in Europe.
Crimson snapper is not even a freshwater fish – it’s a tropical fish native to the Pacific and Indian oceans.
Even if zander and walleye are related, they are different species of fish, government regulators say, and one cannot be marketed as the other.
The federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act prohibits selling food under the name of another food, and the FDA’s list of fish species does not allow zander to be called walleye.
Jeff Hall, co-owner in charge of purchasing for Don Hall’s Restaurants, declined to speak to The Journal Gazette but told Indiana’s NewsCenter he has knowingly substituted zander for walleye for years. He incorrectly said the two are the same species and called any differences between the two genetic “hairsplitting.”
He maintains zander is a higher-quality fish.
“I’ve known that the European version of walleye is not domestic walleye. I mean, I knew that all along,” he said in an on-camera interview. “It never crossed my mind except to offer the best walleye-monikered product that I could.”
The Almond Crusted Walleye at Don Hall’s Triangle Park Bar & Grille, 3010 Trier Road, is $14.99.
Hall also maintained that he paid more – not less – for zander and that the FDA’s distinction between the two is only because of lobbying by Canadian walleye fishermen. He also said North American walleye has become a genetic mishmash, unlike zander.
“If through a lobbying effort, (the FDA) decided to hocus-pocus, whipso-fatso overnight make this walleye more of a walleye than mine, I will maintain that it will be a bigger challenge for the FDA to prove that their walleye is more of a walleye than my walleye (zander) is less of a walleye.”
Still, Hall said in the Nov. 13 television interview that Hall’s restaurants were switching from zander to walleye.
“I’m changing to satisfy whatever documentation I need to,” Hall said. “I’ve changed over effective today.”
Steve Gard, owner of The Oyster Bar, said it is simply not possible that The Oyster Bar North, 1509 W. Dupont Road, served crimson snapper instead of walleye.
But the DNA test showed the fish definitely was not walleye and had a 78 percent match to crimson snapper. The Oyster Bar’s Signature Walleye sells for $18.95.
“I think you guys have gotten a bogus report here,” Gard said. “From where I’m sitting, either the wrong piece of fish was sent or there was something wrong at the lab. You guys did not get snapper from my restaurant. It just didn’t happen.”
Gard said The Oyster Bar has served snapper on occasion as a special, but it had not had any in the restaurant since August. He said it is not possible that someone grabbed the wrong piece of fish, thinking it was walleye.
“Even frozen, it would be gone in three to five days,” he said.
Gard provided documentation showing dates he ordered snapper and letters from suppliers saying they had not delivered snapper near the time of testing.
“The fish that was purchased from The Oyster Bar on Oct. 3, 2007, was definitely not crimson snapper,” Gard wrote in a letter to The Journal Gazette. “As the documentation shows we did not even have snapper in our inventory, let alone serve it to your reporter.”
The newspaper repeatedly asked Gard for documentation showing he had purchased walleye, but none was provided.
Therion’s Gergits said the lab stands by its results.
Officials at Club Soda have dumped the wholesaler that sold them zander and are considering legal action against the company.
Co-owner Noelle Reith said the restaurant switched to Sysco Food Service for much of its foodstuffs two years ago and ordered walleye. Unbeknownst to restaurant officials, they were given zander, she said.
“They were assuring us we were getting an identical product at a better price,” Reith said. “We had no idea.”
Then a year ago, Sysco suddenly changed the way it described its walleye. The item numbers, price and invoice numbers stayed the same, but the description changed from “Walleye Fillets Euro” to “Pike Perch Fillet Zander.” The box and the fish inside it were the same, and Club Soda officials said they did not notice the description change.
The pan-fried walleye at Club Soda, 235 E.Superior St., sells for $19.95. The menu says the restaurant has had “guys who fish for a living tell us that they’ve never had its equal.”
“We are no longer doing business with Sysco,” Reith said. Now, the restaurant uses Gordon Food Service, which has sent letters certifying that its Canadian walleye is exactly that. The box is clearly labeled “Walleye” and “Product of Canada.” It costs $5 more per 11-pound box than the zander did.
Paul Nasir, president of Sysco subsidiary Sysco Food Services of Indianapolis LLC, said he cannot speculate on what happened when the restaurant ordered walleye and got zander instead, but he said that since November 2006, the product description has been clear to anyone who reads it.
“(Zander) is what’s on the box; that’s what’s on the invoice,” Nasir said. “From that point forward, every customer has been invoiced ‘pike perch zander.’ ”
He said he could not speculate on why zander previously was called “walleye fillets Euro.”
“I don’t know how and why it got named that,” Nasir said. “It was probably a marketing term.”
Another Sysco subsidiary, Sysco Food Services-West Coast Florida Inc., is under investigation by the Florida attorney general for allegedly mislabeling fish. In that case, Sysco is alleged to have supplied Florida restaurants with fish represented to be grouper that tests showed were not. The attorney general’s office tested the grouper at 20 restaurants and found 17 that were a species other than grouper.
Liberty Diner owner George Smyrniotis said he has no idea why the walleye served to a Journal Gazette reporter Oct. 2 was actually crimson snapper.
“I’m very surprised by that,” Smyrniotis said. “Thanks for telling us that so we can check on it.”
Smyrniotis said he gets his fish from a fish market in Chicago and planned to find out what had happened.
“It’s the price for walleye,” he said. “I pay for that kind of fish; that’s what we’re supposed to get.”
People who have tasted both walleye and zander say it is difficult to tell the two apart. Journal Gazette reporter Emma Downs, who had zander at Hall’s Triangle Park and the walleye sandwich at Park Place on Main, said the different preparations at each restaurant made it impossible to know whether one was different. The only difference in the fish she could note was the Hall’s seemed to be more moist.
Club Soda Executive Chef Jesse Arnold said he prepared both fish the same way and served them side by side to the restaurant’s owners. They had trouble telling any difference between them, he said.
Carmen McGee, manager at Joseph Decuis in Roanoke, said restaurants have to be vigilant about what they’re getting off the back of the truck. The walleye at Joseph Decuis was tested and found to be walleye.
“It’s hard to know where your stuff comes from, and they’ll switch it up on you,” McGee said.
Bryan Adams, chef and co-owner of Chappell’s Coral Grill & Seafood Market, said it is a constant battle to make sure restaurants are getting the products they ordered. Chappell’s was one of the restaurants tested where the walleye ordered was walleye.
“That’s why we open every single box and we check every single thing. You don’t have a dishwasher checking things in,” Adams said.
Staci Schneider, spokeswoman for Indiana Attorney General Steve Carter, said the agency might investigate whether the state’s Deceptive Consumer Sales Act was violated.
“You have to have some pretty strong evidence that this was a knowing violation or an intentional type of act,” Schneider said. “If you have a person that can show it was a mistake, you would treat that differently.”
