May 30, 2025 — Newport’s Local Ocean restaurant is the kind of place where you might have lunch next to the fisherman who caught it.
That’s according to Laura Anderson, co-founder of the more than 20-year-old restaurant.
“Creating market opportunity for fishers and showcasing local species were really what drove the founding of the restaurant,” Anderson said over a tuna wrap with fries on a recent Friday afternoon.
The tuna in her wrap comes directly from Oregon fishers, Anderson said. Local Ocean has built its business around buying as much fish as it can directly from Newport’s fleet of commercial fishing boats.
That makes Local Ocean an anomaly. The majority of seafood sold at restaurants on the Oregon coast doesn’t come from Oregon, according to a 2023 report commissioned by the Oregon Coast Visitors Association. Meanwhile, most fish from Oregon’s commercial fleet are exported to foreign markets.
Although restaurants like Local Ocean are working to convince diners that locally-sourced fish is delicious and easy to incorporate into most meals, on the whole, Americans don’t choose fish as their daily protein source. By contrast, fish is the number one protein source in most Asian countries, where it is regularly included in daily meals. The lack of fish consumption here makes access to foreign markets especially important for fishers.
That was the challenging market environment facing Oregon’s fishing industry before President Donald Trump made two major moves during the first few months of his second term: cuts to the federal workforce and tariffs that are causing foreign buyers to retaliate against U.S. sellers.
On Wednesday, the International Trade Court ruled the bulk of Trump’s tariffs illegal after Oregon and 11 other states sued the administration over the import taxes. On Thursday, the U.S. Court of Appeals froze that decision as it considers the administration’s appeal. Many economists say the back and forth on tariffs have already done lasting damage to U.S. industries.
“Fishing and having a life in the fishing industry is chaotic,” Heather Mann, executive director of Newport-based Midwater Trawlers Cooperative, said. “There’s ups and downs for all variety of reasons from season to season, year to year. So a lot of people will say, ‘Oh my gosh, the tariffs. The tariffs, how is that impacting you?’ And my response right now is, in terms of seafood and exporting seafood, we’re uncertain. We don’t know.”