“Sometimes there’s a lot of superior merchandise, and everyone can get it. But sometimes there’s a limited amount, and I have to protect my chefs,” Samuels says. “I’ll say to everyone else, ‘Hey, there’s no jumbo sea bass for you’—because I know my chefs are going to need it.” In the hypercompetitive world of New York food, fish is the trickiest catch of all.

For an example of just how volatile the fish business can be, consider piballes, a delicacy favored by Cornelius Gallagher, the chef at Oceana. Piballes, otherwise known as baby glass eels, are available only three weeks of the year, which means they normally cost a hefty $80 a pound—more than ten times the price of, say, high-quality halibut, cod, or flounder. Gallagher has a $75 prix fixe menu, and he tries to keep the price of a fish no more than 35 percent of the overall cost of his dish, so piballes just barely squeaks into the realm of the affordable. But it’s worth it, he figures, merely for the cachet: “My customers are pretty educated, so when they see it, they go, Okay, he’s got piballes on the menu—we’ll try it.”

This year, though, Gallagher got shut out. The Japanese market—awash in money from a hot economy—went completely berserk for piballes and bid the price up to a punishing $350 a pound. “That’s insane,” Gallagher says. “That’s more than caviar! More than foie gras.”

Piballes is an extreme case, with extreme prices. Yet it’s a useful snapshot of the fish business, where the price and availability of a fish can zip up and down from day to day, wreaking havoc with chefs’ plans.

The problem isn’t merely demand. It’s that the supply chain for fish is affected by such a bewildering array of forces. Consider the case of Chilean sea bass, which rose to popularity about ten years ago. It was originally known as “Patagonian toothfish,” a name so unsavory that chefs had trouble persuading anyone to try it. But in the mid-nineties, a major stock of the fish was discovered off the coast of Chile, and some enterprising businessmen rebranded it as “Chilean sea bass” and sold it for about $2 a pound to chefs, a price so low it instantly showed up on every menu. Its high fat content meant it survived shipping well and was difficult to overcook. Soon, the enormous demand eroded fish stocks, and environmentalists lobbied Chile and adjacent nations to impose quotas to save the fish. With the quotas in place, the supply of Chilean sea bass shrank drastically, and the price soared to $9 or $10 a pound, where it resides today. Now days can go by without a supplier’s seeing Chilean sea bass at all, and many chefs never feature it because of its endangered status.

Many other previously dirt-cheap fish have been rising in price, as more and more quotas are imposed. Most quotas began fifteen years ago, when North Atlantic stocks suddenly dried up and the U.S. government began carefully regulating how much fish could be caught—and when. The result is a tangled forest of rules determining who can catch fish when and where.

“Cod used to be the lowest common denominator in the fish industry. It was less than $1 a pound. It was what you put in fish and chips,” Samuels recalls. Now scarcity has turned it into more of a luxury fish, particularly when it’s caught not in a net—which causes damage to the fish—but on a hook and line, which ensures that every fish is individually handled. “Now it’s $4 and $5 a pound, and Le Bernardin wants it.”

“The cooking part is easy,” says one chef. “What sets us apart is getting the absolute freshest fish.” And the competition for that has gotten very stiff indeed.

Snapper is another New York fish-of-the-moment, and its availability varies on a week-by-week basis—it’s only legal to catch it in Florida ten days out of every month, when easy availability can drop the price to about $4 a pound. When Florida boats are dry-docked, chefs are forced to get their snapper from New Zealand or other countries, and boom, the cost of travel boosts the price to $5.25 a pound. For many fish, the threat of overfishing continually looms: When Samuels was a kid, his family could barely give monkfish away for 50 cents a pound. Now it’s up to $3 or $4 a pound, and some fish experts worry it will soon be as endangered as Chilean sea bass.

“I think you should eat all the good fish you can right now, because the demand for fish is so high, it doesn’t seem good for the future,” says Mitchell Davis, publications director of the James Beard Foundation.

Mind you, not everyone agrees that we’re on the verge of a piscine apocalypse. Quotas, some argue, do work: They brought striped bass back from the brink. And when competing for scarce resources, New York is blessed by geography; Montauk is a world-class fishery that is a mere ten-minute boating trip from a deep coastal shelf that plunges into the Gulf Stream. Better yet, New York has excellent and cheap air shipping, offering increasingly easy access to international markets. Many foreign fishermen have become expert at key packing techniques—surrounding the fish with ice, carefully bleeding them, and sometimes even managing to leave them coated in their protective slime from the ocean. “Sometimes I get better fish from South America than I get from Montauk,” Samuels says during my visit with him, using his hook to open up a box of yellowtail snapper that glisten so brightly it’s as if they’d just been plucked from the Hudson River. “See? It’s packaged beautifully.”