Supplying nine restaurants with ingredients involves a lot of logistics, especially for establishments that stake themselves on the freshness of their seafood.
Ben Groshell, owner of Marker 32, Valley Smoke and four fish camps among other restaurants, met the challenge by building his own seafood processing and distributing operation.
At Southern Provisions, in Jacksonville Beach, staff dress and portion whole fish for distribution to the restaurants in Groshell’s group, Southern Table Hospitality.
Southern Provisions started 10 years ago with a small processing building where fish was stored in portable cooling units.
After an expansion in 2023, the two-story, 3,200-square-foot facility includes a walk-in cooler and a freezer, a fish cutting room, dry goods storage space and a test kitchen.
The group purchases seafood from wholesalers and local anglers while also employing a licensed commercial fisherman, Dustin McIntire, who supplements the needed catch through excursions on the company’s sport fishing boat.
Southern Provisions offers enough cold-storage space to allow Groshell to buy and keep seafood in bulk, such as an annual purchase of frozen octopus from Spain when prices are most favorable.
Other cold-stored menu items include squid and as much as two months’ worth of shrimp for his restaurants, which can use 60 to 70 pounds of it per day.
“We mostly buy domestic calamari. Those are items that we keep in the freezer,” he said.
To increase efficiency, Groshell leases a machine that processes shrimp at the facility and saves the labor of removing shells in individual kitchens.
Each whole shrimp must be de-headed by hand, but the machine can remove the shells and either butterfly or make a narrow cut for various recipes as needed.
The central processing plant allows for better quality control, Groshell said.
Most restaurants rely on a chef or sous chef to inspect every food item delivered to the restaurant. At Southern Provisions, items pass through one set of inspectors, facilitating a consistent standard of quality across all of Southern Table’s restaurants.
“At most restaurants, the local fishmonger sends something, the chef is busy, he puts it in the cooler, gets back to what he’s doing. The next morning, (he) looks at it and it’s not the quality he wants but he’s a day behind. That is really why we decided to do this fish house,” Groshell said.
Southern Provisions delivers supplies daily. Cooking crews need only to properly store the seafood items, knowing they have already met the company’s standard.
Groshell said he and his buyer, Clint Perkins, work to maintain good relationships with suppliers by making consistent orders and providing prompt payment.
“We pride ourselves in having a small fish house. We pay on time. Some of these big fish houses demand 30, 60, 90 days to pay. Our little niche is seven to 14 days,” Groshell said.
“That helps us get the guy on the other end of the line sit up in his chair a little bit, even though we’re small.”
Running the operation requires working hours outside of 9 to 5. Perkins may call foreign purveyors in different time zones several times per day to find the freshest products are available.
“One purchase could take weeks of negotiating, talking to them, sending product, getting back with them,” Groshell said.
“And then there’s some items where you can’t wait. There’s no time to wait at all. If it’s black grouper from Mexico sitting on the dock in Miami, you can’t say, ‘I’ll call you back.’ It’s just gone. There’s such a demand for a lot of this stuff.”
Besides buying product, Southern Provisions also sells to other restaurants and groups. If McIntire has a particularly good day on the boat, excess fish are offered for sale.
Trucks bringing crab from North Carolina or fish from New England return with Mayport shrimp and other local seafood purchased from Southern Provisions.
“In North Carolina, the crab people want the shrimp heads that we have to use as bait in their crab traps,” Groshell said.