An amazing fish story

Imagine, if you will, sitting at a posh seafood restaurant as you look over the menu.  You've already ordered a cocktail (say maybe, an Old fashioned), and the server comes to your table to take your order.  The server asks whether you would be interested in tonight's special, grilled Patagonian toothfish.  You respond, "That sounds a little too exotic for me, but how about the Chilean Sea bass instead?"  The jokes on you though, there's actually no such thing as a Chilean sea bass - it's actually a Patagonian toothfish!

As a matter of record, Lee Lantz, an American fish wholesaler was on a trip to Chile in 1977 looking for a new kind of fish to bring back to American restaurants.  He came across the Patagonian toothfish, a fish so ugly that the local fishermen called it the "trash fish" (whenever they caught one, they would just throw it back out into the water).  The name certainly fits, because the Patagonian toothfish is one of the ugliest things your eyes will ever look upon!  It has huge googly bugged-out eyes and a protruding lower jaw full of teeth, and it grows almost to the size of a small adult human (check out the photograph below):

But as Lantz found out, the fish tasted amazing!  He knew that the fish would sell well in the U.S., and better yet, nobody but the kitchen staff would ever actually see the fish whole.  However, he knew that the name just wasn't going to work.  So he changed the name to Chilean sea bass.  The funny thing is that the Patagonian toothfish is not exclusive to Chile, and it isn't even a member of the bass family!  As Dave Trott explains in his article, "Drinking the label", "It's not a secret formula, you must have supply and demand.  So the job is twofold: discover (or make) a good product, discover (or create) a demand."  

Pretty soon, Chilean sea bass was all the rage!  The fish was so popular on restaurant menus that there are now regulations about how much fish can be caught.  Lantz had discovered the product and created the demand.  Trott further writes, "What Lantz had understood was what all chefs understand, presentation: before you eat a dish with your mouth, you eat it with your eyes. Although in this case it was: you eat it with your ears. The name creates the image, the image creates the taste. There’s a saying in beer advertising: you drink the label."

It's an amazing story (dare I say, "fish story"), particularly if you like to eat fish!  Apparently it's a common one too.  Have you ever heard of the slimehead fish?  While it sounds pretty gross, it's actually sold as orange roughy.  As one marketing firm suggests (and they are absolutely right), "Perception is reality.  The way something's described makes a tangible difference in how people judge its quality.  Toothfish had to at least taste decent.  But an appealing description is what truly hooks people's interest."