The Price Drops While You Decide

How dynamic pricing works at Pesca, and why your fish might get cheaper the longer you look at it.

Here is something that almost never happens in a restaurant. The price of your dinner can go down while you are still making up your mind.

At Pesca there is no fixed menu and no fixed price list. When you walk in, you head straight to the fish market, where the day’s catch is laid out on ice. What is there depends entirely on what came in that morning and what the season and the weather allowed. Some evenings that means a counter full of oysters and Dover sole. Other evenings it is monkfish, langoustine, or something you have never tried before.

Every fish has a price, and that price moves. The more we have of something, the sooner it starts to drop. By the end of service the goal is simple. Everything on that ice should have found a plate.

We do this for one reason above all others. Fresh fish does not wait. We buy for the day and not for the freezer, so whatever sits on the market needs to be eaten that same evening. 

Lowering the price as we go is how we make sure it is, rather than throwing good fish away at midnight. Less waste for the ocean, and often a gentler bill for anyone willing to be a little adventurous.

For you, that turns dinner into something closer to a market than a menu. Come a little later and you might find a gorgeous piece of fish for less than it cost an hour before. Ask one of our fishmongers what is plentiful tonight and you are usually pointed at both the freshest choice and the friendliest price. 

There is no wrong pick on the fish market, but there is a clever one! So when someone asks what dinner costs at Pesca, the honest answer is that it depends: on what came in, and on how much is left by the time you choose. That is not a quirk we are working around, it is our whole philosophy. The catch sets the stage, and the price follows the fish.

Come see what is on the ice tonight!