October 1, 2014 — It’s about a three-hour drive to the nearest coastline from Chapel Hill — 162 miles to Wilmington , 178 miles to Atlantic Beach and longer to get to other seafood hotspots on the Outer Banks.
Yet many Chapel Hill restaurants claim to serve fresh, local seafood — shellfish, shrimp and even mahi mahi.
Squid’s Restaurant and and Oyster Bar’s executive chef Andy Wilson, whose restaurant doesn’t promise that its seafood is local, said it is difficult to only serve seafood from North Carolina.
“We have things like snow crab and calamari and lobsters (and) oysters — a lot of things on the menu that we can’t get locally,” Wilson said. “We have a pretty big menu here at Squid’s. It’s a bigger restaurant and all of the things that are local that we can get aren’t available year round.”
Wilson said he uses local shrimp when he can, but since it’s not available year – round, he sometimes uses “Latin farm-raised shrimp.”
“We try to offer a little bit of everything, so if this was a small restaurant that just specialized in local seafood, we would do that. But some of our stuff does come from other parts of the world,” Wilson said. “We try to keep everything domestic.”
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