Tour of New Fulton Fish Market & Baldor

We trundled into a big bus at 4:30am this morning and shot up to the New Fulton Fish Market at Hunts Point in the Bronx -- it used to be on South Street by the water on the old southern tip of Manhattan for over 100 years, but according to the security guard/tour guide/all-around mook, fish hasn't been brought to market by boat for at least 40 years -- everything is by tractor trailer or airplane.

We arrived around 5am, and it was starting to wind down -- load in is around 8pm the previous day, and the main selling to the purveyors and restaurants happen between midnight and 6am. It was a huge cavernous hangar, with a grounds reminiscent of an airport -- how did this ever fit into downtown Manhattan? The room is climate controlled between 40 and 45 degrees, and the smell of fish is omnipresent. The air is very moist, the floor is wet, and trays of fish over ice are everywhere. The moist air guarantees you WILL smell like fish after you leave. After a minute, though, you barely notice.

Unlike the old market, this one is not subject to weather. Fish froze in the winter and spoiled fast in the heat of summer. Even though the fish are out on the selling floor, they are kept at a perfect temp to keep it fresh. According to the manager of Blue Ribbon, one of the most reputable fish companies in the market, after each stall does its own sanitation, a machine very similar to a Zamboni comes out and fully cleans the market floor. I would've loved to stay and see that!

Here are some random shots of what I saw....



Most of the workers carried these intimidating looking hooks in which they used on everything from dragging boxes to picking up huge fish by the gills.


Geoducks!!


These shrimp were genetically modified for their shells to look like printed cardboard boxes. This is one huge shrimp, huh....


Wanna know where gefilte fish comes from? Carp is not a very sexy fish...


After the fish market, we went next door to Baldor, a huge purveyor of produce and specialty foods. Unlike the fully unionized, once mobbed-up fish market, this place is privately owned by one person, has no union, is spotless, has a gym for it's employees, is 100% HAACP certified (that's the highest level of government-certified cleanliness), and they bent over backwards to give us a thrill with a good tour.

This place is huge. It's not a warehouse, but a series of linked warehouses. Here is a room just for a wide variety of potatoes...


In other areas, you could find more exotic hings, like edible flours...


Before they took us for muffins, coffee and free swag, we went into the room where veg is cut and processed -- it seems in hotels, where the union requires a potato peeling person to earn $25 an hour, Baldor has found a big business in cutting and prepping veg for unionized institutions. Being HAACP certified, no one can go in with exposed hair....