MORGANTOWN — Dock to Table Provision Co. will soon set up shop once a week in Morgantown, bringing fresh seafood to the area.
“We just wanted to do something completely different,” owner Tommy Scott said.
Scott and his wife, Stephanie, are both West Virginia natives, but spent time living in Charleston, S.C., and Wilmington, N.C.
When the two moved back to Bridgeport about five years ago, they couldn’t find fresh seafood in the area, Tommy Scott said.
He said he spent a year traveling along the Gulf and East and West coasts building relationships with fisheries and suppliers before opening a place in Bridgeport in September.
Dock to Table is a mobile market, and starting Thursday, it will set up from 3-8 p.m. every Thursday in the Econo Lodge parking lot, 3506 Monongahela Blvd., near the WVU Coliseum.
Scott said each week, drivers go get seafood from suppliers and bring the vacuum-sealed products back. Initially, the drivers would travel all the way to the Gulf in Louisiana to get fish, but now, distributors meet them halfway, he said.
“Everything we do is fresh,” he said. “We wanted to build a company where we were transparent in the source and harvest date.”
He said the fishing industry has horror stories similar to other animal food industries, such as the chicken industry, where there is a lot of mislabeling and misrepresentation of the product.
Scott said the vacuum-sealed packaging gives seafood a naturally longer shelf life, and he’s familiar with the length of time he can keep a product before it goes bad. Fish shouldn’t smell fishy, he said.
The market has a wide variety of fish and product changes weekly, Scott said.
Its inaugural Morgantown market will have sea bream and mahi mahi, both from the Gulf; lobster meat and scallops from Massachusetts; and cold-water fish such as arctic char and salmon, Scott said.
“Sometimes, if the ocean isn’t giving us it, we don’t have it,” he said.
Dock to Table has a fish processing license from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and Department of Agriculture, Scott said.
In addition to selling seafood, Dock to Table provides recipes. Scott said a lot of people in the area haven’t tried what he sells, but he can recommend a new type of fish based on what people like.
People who like catfish will probably like sea bream, Scott said. It’s also a firm and flakey white fish with a mild flavor.
“In my opinion, they could charge more,” Matt Straley. “The product speaks for itself.”
Straley said seafood from a chain grocery store is about the same price, but is lower quality than Dock to Table’s offerings.
His family eats seafood about twice a week, and Straley said he’s tried every type of fish the market sells.
“It’s like having seafood you would get beachfront.”
Customers receive one email a week telling them what fish are in stock, Scott said. The stock is also posted on www.docktotableprovisionco.com and on the businesses Facebook page.
