Most of the province’s fishing fleet is focused on perch, pickerel and lake trout, and the bulk of even that catch is exported to the U.S. rather than shipped to city fishmongers. Terry Squires, a small-scale, restaurants-only seafood distributor from Port Dover, is trying to change that. Squires supplies the kitchens at Niagara Street Café, Cowbell and JK Wine Bar, among others, and has been working to create a market for less common varieties, such as tiny, oily smelt and the dead-ugly (but delicious) eelpout. Stephen Treadwell, of Treadwell in St. Catharines, uses Squires’ smelt. As for the eelpout—a long, slimy-skinned, white-fleshed fish with a beard-like appendage on its lower lip—he plans to start offering it to chefs this year, in the hope of building a market. “It’s a wonderful eating fish, with really nice, dense belly meat,” he says, “but the big operators pay next to nothing for it right now. A lot of it just gets thrown away.” The city’s freshest whitefish comes from Georgian Bay fisherman Andrew Akiwenzie. At the Dufferin Grove and Brick Works markets, his customers happily pay $9 a pound for carefully handled, expertly deboned fillets (Akiwenzie’s wife, Natasha, does it all by hand) that are rarely more than 24 hours out of the bay. And after a lifetime of seeing other fishermen from his reserve struggle to make a living, Akiwenzie is doing well enough to begin shopping for a commercial- sized smoker and the equipment to start his own small processing plant.