Should You Really Avoid Ordering Fish At A Restaurant On Certain Days?

Part of the appeal of legendary chef Anthony Bourdain was his no-nonsense honesty about the restaurant industry. In this vein, one of Bourdain's most famous pieces of advice was to avoid ordering fish at a restaurant on Mondays. Basing his words on the delivery schedules of New York City fishmongers at the time, Bourdain's advice became so well-traveled that he once joked to Insider Tech that "don't eat fish on Monday is going to be on my headstone."

In a 1999 issue of The New Yorker, the soon-to-be-famous chef quipped that "the Monday-night tuna you want has been kicking around in the kitchen since Friday morning, under God knows what conditions." The same warning appeared in Bourdain's smash hit memoir "Kitchen Confidential" one year later. Perhaps this was apt advice in 20th century New York, but according to Jason Pfeifer, culinary director for "City Harvest Presents BID 2024: CHTV!", this rule of thumb is no longer particularly handy.

Pfeifer, who is also Executive Director of Food & Beverage at Mattos Hospitality, a restaurant group that includes the Michelin-starred Estela, contends that in modern times, it is okay to order fish on Mondays, or any day. "We source for each day of the week," he told The Takeout in an interview. "We try our best to maintain daily PARs as to keep things as fresh as possible. Occasionally this may change if we are looking to age or cure a fish."

"PAR" is a restaurant industry acronym standing for "periodic automatic replacement," which means the amount of inventory of an item — in this case, fish — that a restaurant has available at any given time.

When asked about Bourdain's old adage specifically, Chef Pfeifer offered a more current take. "Some purveyors do not deliver on Sundays but all reputable restaurants have strict standards for the storage of fish and shellfish," he said. "Proper icing and temperature control will preserve the quality." Failing this, it's worth knowing the signs your fish has gone off. 

Not ordering fish on certain days for fear of poorer quality is antiquated advice. Modern chefs like Pfeifer have modern standards for fresher fish, which is delivered more frequently and stored more safely — though this might indicate little about the industry at large. But if Pfeifer's expertise is not enough in one's mind to counteract a legend like Anthony Bourdain, consider Bourdain himself.

Before his untimely passing in 2018 at the age of 61, Bourdain walked back his famous fish advice. In a 2016 interview, he explained that "it was a very different world" in 1999 New York, but in modern times "we have higher standards, we know more about food. We expect more of our food," particularly fish.

"Everybody eats sushi now. That was a really important point in the development of American gastronomy," Bourdain explained, because consumers learned to identify and appreciate high-quality fish. "The market can't get away with serving us the crap that they used to."

"Things have changed," Bourdain said. "Eat the damn fish."