From the boat to your plate: How fresh fish gets to Indy

As the winter sun crawls over rooftops in downtown Indianapolis just before 8 a.m., trucks rumble forth from Bardales Seafood’s processing center at 1407 N. Harding St.

While commuters race-walk against the cold or putter through traffic on their way to work, the five-man crew at Bardales has been wrist-deep in grouper and halibut for the past five hours.

The work may not be glamorous, but it’s how high-end restaurants like Tinker Street, Northside Social and Sangiovese Ristorante get fresh seafood every day.

“If we screw up, they don’t have the product to open the restaurant with,” Bardales chief operations officer Todd Reisenbigler said.

Reisenbigler, 54, has worked in business for decades, including 20 years as the president of Irvington, Calif. mortgage company Jumbo Lending. He owns properties throughout Indianapolis, including a squat olive-green garage on 882 E. Coil St. just off the Monon Trail in Broad Ripple.

Late in 2022, the man leasing the property came to Reisenbigler seeking capital. That man was Phil Bardales, a commercial fisher who spent years wrestling all things scaly from the Atlantic Ocean until a boating accident sidelined him a few years ago.

In early 2020, Bardales moved to Indiana with his girlfiend, an Indiana native. With his injuries prohibiting the intense physical strain of commercial fishing, Bardales was landlocked for the first time in his life.

But even 600 miles from the nearest ocean, he wasn’t done reeling in the big ones. In March 2022, the doors of the squat garage on Coil Street opened as Bardales Seafood.

Bardales’ years on the water left him with connections to fishermen all over the country's coastlines. With one phone call, he can get fireback grouper, deep water cobia or Atlantic tripletail from the ocean to the processing center in as little as three days.

Bardales initially planned to open a retail store but determined wholesale was more immediately feasible. Tinker Street Restaurant, Noah Grant’s and Traders Point Creamery were among his earliest clients.

Soon he realized he would need to expand to keep up with demand. Not only was the wholesale operation pushing capacity at the 800-square-foot Broad Ripple location, but Bardales was concerned that nearby businesses might not appreciate their new neighbor, especially during the summer.

“When you’re around thousands of pounds of fish getting processed every week, there’s gonna be a smell from that,” Reisenbigler said.

So Bardales turned to Reisenbigler seeking advice and capital. He got both, plus a business associate.

“I got in because I know Phil is doing something that’s never been done before,” Reisenbigler said.

In July, Bardales’ processing center moved into the 6,500-square-foot building on Harding Street.

The original Broad Ripple location now serves as a retail market. The olive green has been painted over with illustrations of colorful sea life.

Every day, Bardales’ suppliers set sail around the globe. Halibut from northern Europe, Patagonian salmon from South America, black cod from Alaska, scallops from Massachusetts, shrimp from Mexico and the Keys. The catch varies by season and by region, but one factor is immutable for Bardales: it has to be day boat fish.

Day boat refers to fish that returns to shore the same day it was caught. While many seafood wholesalers boast fish that returned to shore a day or two before delivery, that fish can spend days or even weeks on the boat that harvested it.

After one of Bardales’ suppliers reels in a catch via line or spear — never nets for fin fish, Reisenbigler said — they plunge the fish into a well of ice-cold saltwater, hindering the growth of bacteria that break down proteins and rob otherwise fresh fish of its firmness.

While some varieties of seafood must be frozen for transport, most of Bardales’ fish is packed on ice to maintain an internal temperature just above freezing. The fish then travels by truck or plane to Indianapolis, where Bardales employees gut it and cut it to their customers’ specifications.

“What Phil does, no one else can do here,” Reisenbigler said.

At least, not at the local level. As Bardales’ cut-to-order fish rolls off the lot on Harding Street around 8 a.m., a payload of seafood roughly 10 times as large descends on Indianapolis via Interstate 69 before fanning throughout the city.

Enter Fortune Fish and Gourmet. The Midwest seafood giant was formed in the Chicago area in 2001 and has served Indianapolis restaurants for more than 20 years. Fortune is Bardales’ biggest competition, Reisenbigler said. That's not the way Fortune sees it.

“I don’t want to sound over the top, but Fortune is the competition,” Fortune Indiana market manager Greg Skotnicki said. “We’ve just got the total program when it comes to being a distributor in the area.”

Where Bardales prioritizes specificity, Fortune excels in sheer volume. Reisenbigler estimates Bardales receives between 800 and 1,000 pounds of seafood weekly. Fortune's Indiana team receives up to 10,000.

Wild grouper from Alaska, tuna from Boston, mahi from South America, farmed salmon off the Norwegian coast. Literal tons of fish from around the globe.

Some, like Great Lakes walleye, are trucked whole to Fortune’s Bensenville, Illinois processing facility on slushy-like flake ice, processed and shipped down I-65 to Indianapolis in as little as three days. More ambitious catches, like Norwegian salmon, hitch commercial flights to O’Hare International Airport just outside Bensenville.

Illinois general manager Jon Novak said Fortune primarily receives the top of the catch, the most recently caught fish and therefore the freshest. In order to harvest so much fish, some large commercial vessels stay on the water as long as a week. Fishermen pack their catch in ice, brine it in near-freezing saltwater or in some cases flash freeze it to maintain freshness, but the margin for error is slim.

“Even a variance of just a handful of degrees between like 32 and 39 degrees can rapidly change the shelf life of a fish,” Novak said.

Fortune relies on state-of-the-art tracking, refrigeration and sanitization technology to keep its product fresh across multiple days and thousands of miles.

The fish Fortune sells carry quality certifications from the Marine Stewardship Council and Aquaculture Stewardship Council, independent agencies that seek to set standards for sustainable fishing practices. Fortune also boasts a reputation decades in the making — Skotnicki estimates the company has more than 100 accounts in the Indy area and beyond, including upscale eateries like Bluebeard, St. Elmo’s and Bonge’s Tavern.

"They provide the highest quality seafood in the Midwest," Bonge's owner and head chef Jake Burgess said. "We'll have fish delivered to us in 72 hours, boat to back door, and that's really hard to find within a landlocked state."

Bonge's is one of several Indianapolis-area restaurants that has trusted Fortune for years. Part of Reisenbigler and Bardales' challenge is persuading chefs and owners that they can do something bigger businesses like Fortune can't.

One of Bardales' earliest catches in the Indianapolis dining scene was Tyler Shortt, executive chef at Tinker Street. Since opening in 2015, Tinker has purchased from multiple seafood vendors including Fortune. Bardales approached Shortt last year with a sales pitch and some samples.

"The quality of the seafood was exponentially better," Shortt said of Bardales. "We would get whole fish and you could tell — the gills, the eyes, everything else — that the fish was higher quality."

While Fortune remains the dominant force in Indianapolis, company officials have noticed Bardales. Skotnicki said he met Bardales about a year ago and discussed his plans to wholesale seafood.

“He’s downtown, he’s got a nice little, small facility, he’s going around calling on all the customers trying to get a piece of the action, and he’ll do OK,” Skotnicki said. “He’ll get a little bit here and there, but he’s not gonna be able to get a footprint like we have. He’s just not big enough.”

Harsh words, perhaps, but Reisenbigler is aware that Bardales faces an uphill battle.

“We’re the little local guy that’s gotta work really hard on competing with those guys,” he said. “They have a lot of money and they have a big footprint in the city.”

Overtaking Fortune would likely be Bardales’ biggest catch yet, but Reisenbigler said he isn’t worried about growing a massive business. For as wide as Bardales casts its nets, its aspirations remain local.

Right now, that means going from restaurant to restaurant and welcoming customers into the Broad Ripple shop, showing them that even in the middle of America, they can get fresh seafood. One day, Reisenbigler hopes that fresh seafood will be synonymous with Bardales in the Circle City.

“We’re here to support Indianapolis,” Reisenbigler said. “We’re the local guy.”Contact dining reporter Bradley Hohulin at bhohulin@gannett.com. You can follow him on Twitter/X @bradleyhohulin.

This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Bardales Seafood brings fresh fish to landlocked Indianapolis