It seems that restaurants in the Monroe and Ruston areas need a little work in telling diners about the source of their shrimp. SeaD Consulting went to 24 restaurants, and Founder David Williams said none of them said anything about the possibility of their shrimp being imported, as required by law.
“At the very minimum, you should have a sign saying, ‘We may or may not serve imported shrimp. Please ask your servant.’ And there was no actual signage like that in any of the restaurants we went to,” Williams said.
SeaD Consulting did genetic testing on the shrimp from all 24 restaurants and found that every single one of them was serving imported shrimp – including seven where the server told them that their shrimp was caught in the Gulf of Mexico. Williams says especially with the increase in radioactive material being found in imported shrimp, that’s a huge issue.
“If you go into a restaurant and you’ll be, ‘Hey, I don’t want to eat imported shrimp,’ and they say that they’re serving you Gulf shrimp and they’re still serving you imported shrimp, then that is a really big issue to me,” Williams said.
Williams says the fact that many restaurants in Monroe, Ruston – and Shreveport, as previously tested – serve imported shrimp is par for the course, based on his company’s findings.
“As you go north, the further away from the coast you get, the authenticity rate tends to drop down significantly,” Williams noted.
By contrast, the authenticity rate along the I-10 corridor tends to be very high, with the New Orleans area being the highest.
