Sustainable fish is catching on in Hong Kong restaurants

Adrian Kavanagh, senior head chef at Jamie's Italian, has only been in the city a few months, and is impressed by how much seafood Hong Kong people eat. "It's blown me away how much we're selling," he says. "I was previously at Jamie's Italian in Scotland, and we serve more steaks there. It's interesting, because there's more you can do with fish than with steak," he says.

Oliver insists on serving sustainable seafood at all his restaurants, and ensures everyone who is part of the supply chain acts ethically in a system the company has called the "Jamie Oliver Supplier Information Exchange".

"Suppliers love it and hate it, but we need to prove we are what we say we are," says Ivan Fernie, operations and development director. While the Jamie's Italian brand has been using sustainable seafood since it started in Britian in 2008, the World Wildlife Fund in Hong Kong has been trying to get local restaurants and hotels to use more sustainable seafood since 2007.

Heavy demand for seafood has led to overfishing of some species and environmental damage caused by trawlers and dynamite fishing.

"When we launched the Seafood Choice initiative, not a lot of people knew what it was," says Stephanie Cheung, programme officer of sustainable seafood at WWF-Hong Kong. "The shark fin campaign has really grown, and young people prefer not to have shark's fin soup at weddings. But we need to make choices to try to reduce eating non-sustainable seafood," she says.

As a result, WWF Hong Kong has come up with a seafood guide, in which species are listed as green for "Recommended", yellow for "Think Twice", or red for "Avoid". Cheung says the guide is flexible, as stocks increase and decrease; for example the orange spotted grouper, which was flagged yellow in 2007, is now red, while Portuguese sardines were previously deemed yellow, but are now green, thanks to a resurgence inthe population.