A new campaign launched by the New York State Department of Agriculture and Markets and Cornell Cooperative Extension, Suffolk County, will highlight restaurants and fish stores that offer sustainably caught and farm-raised fish and shellfish from Long Island.

The Long Island Seafood Cuisine Trail is starting with 20 locations on Suffolk County’s South Shore, extending from Bay Shore to Montauk.

They include Shands General in Patchogue, Varney’s Restaurant in Brookhaven, Mastic Seafood, The Fish Store in Bayport, The Cull House in Sayville, Blue Island Oysters in West Sayville and The Snapper Inn in Oakdale, where the officials held a press conference on Wednesday to announce the launch of the trail.
The program is part of Gov. Kathy Hochul’s 2024 Blue Food Transformation initiative to strengthen local food systems and boost New York’s seafood and aquaculture industries.

Long Island is already “in the forefront of the eat-local movement,” State Agriculture and Markets commissioner Richard A. Ball said on Wednesday.

Ball said highlighting the region’s seafood industry has a lot of benefits.

“I think it’s going to be good for our farmers,” Ball said. “It’s going to be good for our seafood producers. It’s going to be great for the tourism business and jobs and the economy on Long Island. It’s a win, win, win.”

Having an app consumers can download “makes it easy for consumers to do the right thing, which is to support the local economy,” he said.

The plan is to add five more South Shore locations and 25 on the North Shore, said Kristin Gerbino, fisheries specialist with Cornell Cooperative Extension, Suffolk County. The North Shore locations will extend from Oyster Bay to Greenport.

Locations had to apply to be part of the program.

“We knew we wanted to be part of the trail, since we’ve been serving local seafood since 1929,” Snapper Inn general manager Kerry Blanchard said.

Jay Varney, owner of Varney’s Restaurant in Brookhaven, said locals already know about the restaurant, which opened in 1981. He’s hoping that being part of the trail will spread the word among tourists looking for fresh Long Island seafood.

“It makes it so easy,” he said of the app.

Long Island attracted 42 million visitors in 2023, and the most popular activity is dining in local restaurants, said Kristen Reynolds, president and chief executive officer of Discover Long Island, which promotes Long Island tourism.

Visitors want to try Long Island’s famed local seafood, but they don’t always know where to find it, Reynolds said.

The trail will help visitors locate restaurants specializing in local fish and boost Long Island’s $7.5 billion tourism and hospitality industry.

Reynolds said Discover Long Island will promote the seafood cuisine trail through Discover Long Island’s 11 social media channels, which reach 10 million people, including the 250,000 visitors expected in September for the Ryder Cup international golf matches at Bethpage State Park in Farmingdale.

The free seafood trail app is expected to be available in the coming weeks. Travelers on the Long Island Expressway will also be able to find it at the Taste of New York display at the Long Island Welcome Center in Dix Hills, said Amy Lesh, program manager for Taste of New York, Long Island region.