We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Zachary Redin a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Zachary thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Let’s start with education – we’d love to hear your thoughts about how we can better prepare students for a more fulfilling life and career

I believe we need more emphasis on learning trades and less on high achieving academics. I’m someone who spent my time in school studying and learning dates/facts and it really hasn’t been all that useful for my career.

I knew I wanted to be a chef since I was 5. I went to the Institute of Culinary Education and graduated with degrees in Culinary Arts, Culinary Management, and Baking and Pastry Arts. Those courses were 6 months long with an internship at the end and they were entirely focused on teaching you the basics you needed to know. There were days when we would just work on one technique the entire class. All of that was in an effort to get you prepared to work in a kitchen right away.

ICE is a school where a lot of people come to change their careers. The students are from all over the world and a wide variety of ages. I believe that if there were more options to learn and explore different trades before leaving high school then a lot of these people wouldn’t be changing careers. They can find a career they love and be able to spend more time working in it and growing rather than playing catch up at a later stage. I’m glad that at 33 I’ve spent the last 15 years in the food industry, having the time to try different jobs within it, and opening my own business earlier in life.

My path to fish mongering from being a chef was kind of a roundabout path. I think ICE also did me a disservice by really only pushing restaurants as the internship path. They talked a lot about restaurants and famous chefs but never really about other career paths in the food industry. Falling into fish mongering was one of the best things to happen to my career.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I went to the Institute of Culinary Education right out of high school. I earned degrees in Culinary Arts and Culinary Management. At the end of those courses I had to do an internship. I chose to work with seafood at The Restaurant at Rowayton Seafood in Rowayton, CT. The restaurant has a fish market in the parking lot that orders all the seafood and fillets the fish for the menu. I worked in the restaurant for a few years and for the last year that I worked there I also spent one day a week in the fish market. It wasn’t a great experience and I was getting bored so I left.

After leaving Rowayton I had a few jobs and found myself going back to ICE for Baking and Pastry Arts. This time I chose to do my internship with Lafayette in Manhattan. That job lasted for a short while before the commute from Connecticut got to be too much. I was burning out really quickly. So I left Lafayette and heard that there was a new manager running Rowayton Seafood’s fish market. I got hired and this is when my mongering career started.

Scott Bennett taught me everything about selling the fish. It pushed me out of my comfort zone in a good way. I spent a few years working as an assistant manager to Scott and soaking up everything I could about the business of fish. I decided to leave and spend time working on my managerial career for another year or two before I ended up being drawn back to seafood.

In 2018 I started working at Fjord Fish Market in Cos Cob, CT. I quickly proved to them that I knew my stuff when it came to fish and moved up to being one of the managers for their main store in Cos Cob. After my first year I was given the opportunity to take over and become the new fish buyer for the company. I would drive down to the New Fulton Fish Market in the Bronx every week and purchase all the fish for their locations. Covid eventually put an end to working at Fjord and pushed me into opening my own business.

In 2021 I started To The Gills as a mobile fish market. Farmers markets and raw bars to start. By November of 2022 we opened a retail shop with my girlfriend Kate Truini (owner of New Curds On The Block). To The Gills specializes in fresh hand cut fish and shellfish from all over. I still drive to the Bronx every week to pick up all the seafood. Whatever anyone is looking for I do my best to source. If I can’t find it then my mongering skills really come into play as I will try and find a good substitute or different recipe for the customer so they still feel like they are getting what they were looking for.

We’d love to hear about you met your business partner.

I am the sole owner of To The Gills and my girlfriend Kate Truini is the sole owner of her cheese mongering business New Curds On The Block. However we knew it would be smart to open a joint shop together as we both have the same customer base and treat our products in the same way. We are united by the mongering.

Kate and I met when we were both working in Cos Cob, CT. I was managing and buying the fish for Fjord Fish Market. Kate was working as a cheese monger right next door at Greenwich Cheese Company. I had a friend that worked at the cheese shop right before Kate joined them so I would occasionally go over to hang out and learn about cheese. After my friend left the shop I would still go over and that’s when I met Kate. I like to tell people that I bought a lot of cheese I didn’t want in the beginning.

We became friends after a while and eventually came to our senses and started dating. Almost 4 years later now we are extremely excited to both be running our businesses and to be able to work together every day to create our joint shop.

Can you tell us about what’s worked well for you in terms of growing your clientele?

Consistency. My first farmers markets and raw bars started as every other week. And while I did well at those it became evident very quickly that I was missing out on sales just because I wasn’t there every week. Customers would disappear for a few weeks and when I finally saw them again they would say things like “where were you last week?” or “I thought you weren’t here today.” It was easy for me to look at my calendar and know when I was going to be working or not. Customers weren’t keeping track and I shouldn’t have expected them to know my schedule. I had customers miss almost every raw bar because they would miss one and then be on the opposite schedule all summer.
My second year at the farmers market was every week and you could see the difference. I had a line of customers every week which would draw more customers. They knew that they could count on my being there to supply them with seafood every week and business boomed because of it.
This coming farmers market season I will be back every week even though the shop is open. Plenty of customers haven’t made it to the shop yet or don’t live in the area during the winter months. I need to be consistent for them by going to the farmers market again this year but also starting to push them more towards the shop.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.tothegillsseafood.com
• Instagram: @to.the.gills
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100063905598135

Image Credits
Lisa Nichols – Bread and Beast food photographer @bread_and_beast