Program aims to promote 'underappreciated' fish

(NECN: Amy Sinclair, Portland, Maine) - Catch limits have been an important tool in helping sustain some fish species in the gulf of maine, now there's a new solution on the menu.

     An innovative partnership called "Out of the Blue" that aims to promote over the next five months the tasty but 'underappreciated' fish through the places that most people experience seafood: restaurants.

"We tend to gravitate toward what our parents had served and what we're familiar," says Adam White, executive chef of The Salt Exchange in Portland Maine, which is doing creative things with Acadian redfish.

With cod and haddock overfished and limits placed on their catch, restaurateurs are turning to something plentiful, tasty, and inexpensive.

"You know, redfish, they're allowed to catch 7,000 metric tons annually right now," said  Sam Grimley of the Gulf of Maine Research Institute. "And last year they only caught 30 percent of that."

The hope is that consumers start to ask for the fish by name and that species like redfish will take their rightful place alongside cod and haddock.