When your recipe calls for seafood, call Anna

Anna Svedise of Anna’s Seafood has all of your seafood needs covered.|

Anna’s Seafood stall at the Eastside Farmers Market is a wonderful Petaluma gem that is hiding in plain sight, selling the freshest, highest quality seafood you will ever buy.

Anna Svedise is a human dynamo. The 27-year-old, set up shop about 18 months ago after working for her parents, who own Santa Rosa Seafood. Her enthusiasm for what she does is incredible, and her passion for fresh seafood is the crux of an exemplary business that few people in Petaluma know about.

Anna is quick to attribute her skills in this specialized business to her parents. She seems poised to expand her mostly family business. She is more than seven months pregnant, and she is hopeful her daughter will eventually follow in her footsteps.

A visit to her retail store at 1370 Redwood Way reveals how special her seafood really is. Anna talks with detailed knowledge and enthusiasm about the more than 100 varieties of seafood that her small company handles every week. Her seafood is not cheap, but given the extraordinarily high quality, it is a fabulous value.

Her fish are line-caught, and not netted, for the health of the fishery. The fish she brings in are so fresh that they are still bright-eyed, and in rigor mortis. She brings in fresh Alaska King Salmon, and fresh organic farmed Scottish salmon that is farmed in a sustainable way so that the whole fish is in perfect condition.

When she goes to the local docks, she pays for the seafood on the spot, because she knows that these hard-working people cannot wait the 30 days that most of the seafood buyers demand before payment is made.

Walking through her shop, she pulled out fish from cases that had just arrived, with fish from all over the world, sourced from sellers she trusts. She showed me tray after tray of fresh fish ready to be packaged for the farmers markets, or for restaurants in the area. About 50 percent of the fish she sells is from the West Coast, sourced from San Diego, Santa Barbara and the Sonoma Coast up to Humboldt. The rest of her fish comes from Europe, Hawaii and several other places, flown in fresh each week.

Anna’s sells fish that you can’t find anywhere else in the area, most of it “sushi-grade,” and she knows exactly when it was caught, and how to properly prepare it for sale. Her staff of 11 full-time and four part-time employees is primarily female, and they do a terrific job. It is clear that her honesty and enthusiasm spills over into how she treats her team members, and that she has trained them in how to prepare all the fish for sale.

Her seafood is seasonal, and varies from week to week. When I visited the shop she had true red snapper, scorpion fish, John Dory, three kinds of salmon, arctic char, fresh orange roughy, fresh sea urchin roe, three kinds of wild caught giant prawns, fresh ahi tuna, fresh swordfish, branzino, live crayfish, live Maine lobster, several kinds of smoked salmon and other smoked fish, and some crazy-good tuna salad made with fresh ahi tuna. She sells a number of prepared seafood items, such poke, gravlax, cioppino, chowder and several variations of the best tuna salad you will every have, all made right there.

Everything in her shop is clean, including the smokers, which are completely cleaned before each day’s smoking. If you try nothing else from Anna’s, you have to try the hardwood-smoked salmon.

Much of the fish that Anna brings in is still alive, such as crayfish, sea urchins, Maine lobsters and a wide variety of oysters. Her live local crab is dependent on the weather and she hopes to have some this week. The fishermen just don’t go out when the seas are dangerous.

The hours at her shop are a bit unorthodox, but generally you can make purchases on Thursday and Friday from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m., and on Saturday from 2 to 6 p.m. When she gets her display cases in February, her goal is to be open Tuesday through Sunday.

The best way to see all of Anna’s great seafood is at the farmers market:

Marin County Mart Farmers Market in Larkspur, Saturdays from 9 a.m.-2 p.m.

Petaluma East Side Market, Tuesdays from 10 a.m.-1 p.m.

Santa Rosa Luther Burbank Center, Wednesdays and Saturdays, 8 a.m.-1 p.m.

Kensington Market in the East Bay, Sundays 10 a.m.-2 p.m.

Jack London Square, Sundays, 10 a.m.-3 p.m.

Old Oakland, Downtown, Fridays 8 a.m.-2 p.m.

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