Fish Shop DC
BY: Craig Stoltz
The lobster roll is perfectly composed: sweet, lush meat tossed with caramelized onions, celery, and a bit of dill and parsley, with just enough mayo to hold it together, all tucked into a glossy brioche roll.
The surprise isn’t the execution—it’s the sourcing. This sandwich is served at one of the mid-Atlantic’s most sustainable seafood restaurants, Fish Shop at the DC Wharf, where the lobster is genuinely local, trapped along a steep, frigid undersea shelf 60 miles off Ocean City.
“I know, people hear about Maryland lobster and go, ‘What?’” chef Ria Montes says with a laugh.
THE WRANGLERS
After working at the forefront of locally sourced, ethical, and sustainable cuisine in the DC area since she arrived from New York City in 2017, Montes knows a lot of remarkable seafood suppliers, like the purveyor of her Maryland lobster, a charismatic former chef who goes by the name Top Hat, who, indeed, wears a top hat as he plies his trade. She maintains personal relationships with each of them.
Fish served at Fish Shop must be line-caught, gill-caught, or pound-or drift-netted—all harvest methods which limit ecosystem damage.
The people who do this careful and environmentally respectful work—many of whom Montes knows from her former work as chef de cuisine at the acclaimed local seafood eatery Estuary in CityCenterDC—have extraordinary stories.
There’s Spike Meatyard, whose family has been operating from Herring Creek, Maryland, for six generations, and provides the meaty, delectable Tall Timbers oysters that Fish Shop presents on ice.
And there’s Bucky Hobbs of Southern Maryland, who, from his iconic Chesapeake dead-rise boat, harvests rockfish, mackerel, bluefish, cobia, and blue cat that Montes turns into seasonal fare.
Then there’s Ty Walker of Smoke in Chimneys, who holds the single exemption from Montes’ no-farmed-fish rule. Walker raises renowned trout in the Shenandoah Valley in a run of pure mountain stream, using no electricity or pumps; the fish eat what the stream provides for them naturally, with a supplement of natural feed.
“I don’t know how Ty does it,” Montes says. “The way he treats those fish… He’s some kind of trout whisperer. He must play music to them or something. They’re beautiful.”
ORIGIN STORY
Montes uses some of that beautiful fish in the restaurant’s signature dish, a smoked trout crumpet. It’s a gorgeous bite, a tapered swirl of trout, potato, and crème fraîche crowned with a scatter of trout roe, perched on a buttered crumpet, and a nod to Fish Shop’s sister restaurant in Ballater, Scotland.
The Scottish Fish Shop was named in the World’s Best New Restaurant’s Hot List by Condé Nast Traveler in 2024. Like its DC sister, it’s devoted to ethical harvesting, sustainability, and local sourcing.
Both restaurants are operated by Artfarm, the hospitality arm of international art gallery giant Hauser & Wirth. DC’s Fish Shop is decorated with creative works from ceiling to barstool, some by artists Hauser & Wort represents.
When Artfarm was looking to expand, DC’s buzzy wharf, with its generations-old urban fish market, was a perfect location—and Montes, who had long since established her creative, high-end, sustainable cooking cred, was the ideal candidate to lead the kitchen.
“When I came here, I worked at Blue Duck Tavern, one of the O.G.’s of the local farm-to-table movement,” Montes says. There, sustainability dictated that instead of sourcing to fit a menu, chefs built dishes from what was in season and ensured that nothing went to waste.
At the Line Hotel’s A Rake’s Progress, the approach went further. “We didn’t have lemons or pepper because they weren’t local,” she says. “We’d see what purveyors dropped off and build the menu right before service. That’s where I learned to cook with what’s given.”
By 2023, Montes was applying the same philosophy to Mid-Atlantic Seafood as chef de cuisine at Estuary, and also layering in the Filipino influences of her own heritage. The same year, she won Capital Food Fight, and in 2024, she was a finalist for the RAMMY Awards Rising Culinary Star.
After Ben Crofton, Artfarm’s director of U.S. operations, hired Montes as chef for its DC restaurant launch, the payoff came quickly: Less than a year into its run, Fish Shop landed a mention in the DC Michelin guide.
“When you have fish this good, there’s not a lot you need to do to it.”
—Ria Montes
WHAT’S BITING
Farm-to-table is one thing; tide-to-table is another. While there’s some uncertainty in agriculture, harvesting seafood can be wildly unpredictable: Montes may need 50 lobsters a day and get none, depending on factors as fickle as the wind. Keeping a 140-seat restaurant supplied under those conditions is no small feat.
The menu at Fish Shop changes with the weather and migration patterns along the Atlantic Coast. “People don’t realize there’s seasonality with fish,” Montes says. In October, the Bay is rich with rockfish. Summer brings tuna and mackerel. In winter, she may have to reach as far as New Jersey or New York for monkfish.
This spring is Fish Shop’s first full run at this bountiful season. There are soft-shells, of course: “You can’t do spring without fried soft-shells,” she says.
But in spring, smelt run, too. The small, oily fish swarm from ocean to freshwater streams under cover of darkness; they’re often intercepted in bulk and sold for animal feed. “That’s really wasteful” of some excellent seafood, Montes says. She does a play on the traditional rustic preparation of smelt, where the fish are simply tempura fried and eaten whole with a picatta sauce.
IT’S ABOUT THE FLAVOR
None of Fish Shop’s commitments to seasonality and sustainability would fill its many seats if the food on the plate wasn’t worth the visit.
While ingredients are local, Montes’ culinary influences are international. She serves her gill-caught monkfish in a rustic potage de vigilia, a Spanish chickpea casserole, swapping in local seafood for the traditional cod. Rockfish crudo is a wild sensory explosion: cured in umami-rich kombu and presented with pickled chanterelles (sourced by area forager Daniel Kemp), salsa verde, and puntarelle, a bitter Italian green. Rockfish also ap- pears in a Thai Massaman curry.
Meat is always on the menu, ensuring there’s something for all diners, and sometimes to fill in seasonal seafood gaps. Silky disks of venison car- paccio come from the woman-owned Millbrook Farms in Pennsylvania, the pork from the Shenandoah Valley’s Autumn Olive Farms, where the pigs forage for acorns and corn planted just for them.
GILL TO TAIL
In keeping with the tenets of sustainable cuisine, Montes and her team strive to pull off their culinary magic with minimal waste. There’s aggressive composting and a focus on squeezing every edible bit from each product. The bar makes “super juice” by using zest to stretch a few pieces of citrus into a dozen quarts of drink mix. In the kitchen, much of the fish catch is butchered whole, which allows her to push seafood waste toward zero.
“We use the bones for stock, and when I don’t serve the skin on a fish, I fry it up and we serve it at the bar as a snack,” she says. On a tour of the kitchen, a member of her team is working on a whole fish with a sharp, narrow blade; he’s removed the fillets and is digging for other treats. The fish’s eye is vividly clear and the only smell in the air is of saline and, from the burners behind, the luscious aroma of simmering stock.
In a room behind the kitchen, whole fish and fillets dry age in a chilled box.
Contrary to the common belief that the best fish is served “right off the boat,” Montes dry ages most of her fish. “It’s like dry aging meat—it tenderizes it and concentrates the flavors,” she says, and the dry skin makes for a crispy sear. This allows her to offer the catch whole or in fillets, simply and with minimal intervention, aside from an eclectic range of slyly matched accompaniments: a mushroom ketchup with halibut, for instance, or a scatter of herbs, tamarind, and lime with porgy.
“When you have fish this good, there’s not a lot you need to do to it,” she says.
MAKING EXCELLENCE ACCESSIBLE
Holding down waste and using the entire fish also controls costs, allowing Fish Shop to keep some menu prices within reach of casual diners. The restaurant offers a daily three-course lunch menu for $25 and the gorgeous smoked trout crumpets go for $7 each. A memorable catfish sandwich with hand-cut fries is $17.
“It’s really important to us” to have some low-priced items, Montes says. “Part of sustainability is economic sustainability, of being able to serve the people who live in your community.”
But despite all that careful planning, the serendipity of the catch is always in charge. Montes’ phone goes off and she looks down at a text.
“Yay, we’ve got swordfish!” she exclaims. “I swear, about 70% of the texts I get are like that. I’m always hearing about what these guys have caught.”
You can see her wheels turning: Now what’s she going to do with that swordfish?