By Isabella Ferrante
Every day, thousands of people walk the planks of Monterey’s Municipal Wharf II — joggers, fishermen, visitors trailing the scent of the working harbor. Almost none of them know what hangs beneath their feet. In the green water under the wharf’s pilings, suspended in the cold surge of Monterey Bay, hang some 250 cages holding more than a quarter-million red abalone. It is a farm without fields, a harvest without seasons, and very possibly the most literal expression of “local seafood” anywhere on the California coast.
This is the Monterey Abalone Company, and it has been quietly at work here since 1992, when Art Seavey and Trevor Fay began raising California red abalone in the one place perfectly suited to them: their own native water. The company occupies a weathered warehouse at the end of the wharf — the commercial wharf, built in 1926, the one where fishing boats still unload beside wholesale fish houses and the yacht club. From the warehouse, a hatch in the floor leads down into the understory of the pier, a dim, dripping cathedral of pilings where the farm does its patient work.
Patient is the word. An abalone is not in a hurry, and neither is anyone who farms one. Under good conditions a red abalone — the largest abalone species in the world, and the one Californians have prized for more than a century — grows roughly an inch a year. From the time a young abalone enters a cage beneath the wharf, about four years pass before it reaches market size, around three and a half inches across the shell and a quarter pound in weight. Four years of tides, four years of tending, for a single serving of one of the coast’s great delicacies.
What the abalone eat is its own remarkable story. Each week, the company’s crew takes a skiff out to the kelp beds of Monterey Bay and hand-harvests fresh giant kelp — Macrocystis, the towering brown alga that forms the offshore forests this coastline is famous for. The fronds come back to the wharf by boat and go directly into the cages, an entirely natural diet delivered with the regularity of a farmer haying his barn. The harvest is coordinated through a local kelp cooperative so the beds are never overdrawn; the forest that feeds the farm is also the nursery of the bay itself, and everyone involved treats it accordingly. The abalone, for their part, live essentially as wild animals — same water, same food, same cold currents — with the single luxury of protection from the sea otters that would otherwise make quick work of them.
There is a deep historical resonance in all of this. Abalone built one of Monterey’s first great fisheries; for generations, divers worked these waters, and abalone steak was a signature of the Peninsula table long before anyone spoke of “California cuisine.” By the late twentieth century, after decades of pressure on wild populations, that era closed — commercial harvest of wild abalone in California ended in 1997. The farm beneath the wharf is how the tradition survived: one of only a small handful of commercial abalone farms remaining in the state, keeping a legacy food alive not by taking from the wild but by raising it, shell by shell, in the wild’s own front yard.
The destination for nearly all of this patience is the dinner table — and a nearby one. Roughly ninety percent of the farm’s abalone goes straight onto the menus of restaurants on the Monterey Peninsula and around the San Francisco Bay Area. When abalone appears on a tasting menu in Carmel-by-the-Sea — and it appears on the most celebrated of them — there is a fair chance it spent its entire life two ridgelines away, swaying in a cage beneath the wharf, eating kelp cut by hand that same week. Chefs prize it for exactly that: a delicacy of extraordinary freshness whose provenance is not a marketing phrase but a street address. The remainder goes to home cooks and the curious, who can buy abalone directly at the warehouse door and receive, along with their purchase, cleaning advice and the gentle counsel every first-timer needs: tenderize, cook fast, do not overthink it.
Properly handled, farmed red abalone is a quiet revelation — sweet, faintly briny, with a dense, silky texture somewhere between scallop and squid at its most tender. It wants little: butter, lemon, perhaps a whisper of seaweed to remind it where it came from. The great abalone dishes of the Peninsula’s past were simple ones, and the great abalone dishes of its present mostly still are.
What lingers, after a visit to the end of the wharf, is the elegance of the whole arrangement. A working pier from 1926, still working. A native species, raised in native water, on a native diet. A food with a century of local history, saved not by nostalgia but by two men’s decades of unglamorous, tide-soaked labor. Monterey has spent a hundred years telling stories about its relationship with the bay — some proud, some cautionary. Beneath Wharf II, largely out of sight, one of the best of those stories is still being written: a farm that took the most storied ingredient on this coast and found a way to keep it here, hanging in the cold green water, an inch a year, for as long as anyone cares to keep tending it.
Monterey Abalone Company is located at 160 Municipal Wharf II, Monterey. montereyabalone.com
