The shop now sells an average of 100 to 150 urchins on a normal Saturday, though that number can rise to upward of 200 on a particularly busy weekend. Sea urchin, freshly harvested, sits awaiting the lunch tray. It was just getting more and more popular, to the point where for the last five years, it’s been a staple item that people are coming for all the time.” “I think people were having such awesome experiences coming into the shop and getting these live urchins that they were posting on Yelp. “It just kind of caught on,” Colgate says. About eight years ago, urchin became more popular domestically, and the shop began selling live specimens to local restaurants and, eventually, direct to customers. Santa Barbara fishers started recognizing this unique resource in the 1970s, and soon urchins were shipped to destinations overseas. The kelp has a lot of opportunities for nutrients and for growth.” “The Santa Barbara Channel Islands are really unique because we’re getting currents coming down from the north, then we’ve got southern currents coming up, and they’re merging right at San Miguel and Santa Rosa. “With urchins, the flavor profile is totally dependent on what they’re feeding on,” he explained. Purple hachi urchins saw a population boom a few years ago after their natural predators began dying off. Instead, the flavor reminded me more of papaya - tender and faintly sweet, with just a touch of salinity.Īccording to Brian Colgate, the market’s owner and founder, this flavor is a result of a combination of factors, including the freshness of the urchins, the care the divers take when harvesting them and Santa Barbara’s unique geography. I was expecting something akin to the uni I’d had at outstanding sushi restaurants, with a hint of sweetness and a bit of funk. Like the other customers, I took my snack outside, gave one of the golden slivers a squeeze of lemon and popped it in my mouth. He used a metal pick to clean out the animal’s innards, leaving just the golden tongues. Courtesy of Georgia FreedmanĪt the end of the lunch rush, I was invited behind the counter, and a staff member cracked a large red urchin open for me. “There’s none of that aftertaste.”īehind the counter at the Santa Barbara Fish Market, a staff member cracked a large red urchin open using a metal pick. “We also heard from friends who said, ‘If you go to Santa Barbara, you have to have uni,’” In said.Īfter trying a bite, they both told me that it was the best urchin they’d ever eaten. Jay Park and Taejin In were visiting from outside Philadelphia and said that if you look up “Santa Barbara things to do,” every video is people eating uni. “So I was Yelping places around here, and it would keep coming up.” “I’m a big sushi fan, and I’m a big Yelper,” said Kelly Swindler. A group of young women from Chicago told me it’s one of the first things that comes up if you search for Santa Barbara food spots. I asked a few customers how they had heard about the urchins. When I arrived at the Santa Barbara Fish Market for my investigation, I noticed that the line for urchin started to build up at the door around noon. I decided to return the following weekend to try these briny treats and to see if I could learn how this relatively out-of-the-way fish market and the raw urchin have both ended up on so many visitors’ radars. “I told you it was too much,” the daughter said, but her father finished the last of the urchin anyway, unwilling to let any of it go to waste.Ī merchant offers purple hachi urchins. They dug the golden gonads or “tongues” (the parts you get when you order uni at Japanese restaurants) out of the shells with a plastic spoon and gave them a quick squirt of fresh lemon before eating them. They were down from San Jose, and their friends had insisted that they try the urchin. One family carrying a tray of urchin asked to share the table I was sitting at. Instead, they were laden with large aluminum containers full of raw sea urchins that had been cracked open and nestled into a bed of ice, their golden meat still attached to the sides of the shell and their purple spines waving in the air.
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