The TunaVille Market and Grocery delivering sustainable seafood directly from local commercial anglers is a hidden gem in Point Loma.
“We don’t do a lot of advertising or have a big sign out front that says Tunaville,” said Tommy Gomes, who partnered with Mitch Conniff of Mitch’s Seafood to create the market at 4904 North Harbor Drive. “People who want local seafood – they’ll find us.”
Gomes and Conniff are part of a group of current and retired commercial anglers owning and operating the seafood market to bring the freshest local catch to customers including chefs in San Diego restaurants.
“We deal with a lot of chefs who truly want to come in and buy local seafood,” noted Gomes adding that TunaVille Market and Grocery is in the front of their dockside building, and Celebrity Seafoods, their wholesale division, is in the back.
Buying local seafood is important in a number of ways, pointed out Gomes. “When you’re buying from a local fisherman you’re creating jobs in your community and keeping money in the home front,” he said adding, “Our fish has a story to it, a face and a family that produced that fish for you.”
Gomes said Tunaville gets loads of fish from local commercial anglers coming in three or four times a week. “We buy the fish when it comes off the boat,” he said. “Then we bring the fish into our market and we ice a bunch of it down, hang some. Then we cut it and let the restaurants know what we have for the next couple of days. They call ahead and start ordering.”
Fish available in the market include halibut, sheepshead, bluefin, harpoon swordfish, thrasher shark, and other locally caught species on ice in display cases. Gomes noted they also carry some imported fish including Coho Salmon from Washington state. Tunaville also offers seafood delights like octopus salad and tentacles and rockfish, shrimp, and other varieties of ceviche.
Also carried at Tunaville are a wide variety of tin fish, like sardines and anchovies. “We carry all the different flavors of tin fish from all over the world,” noted Gomes adding, “We have squid, octopus, a beautiful selection of Patagonia shellfish. We have classic canned fish coming out of Alaska. We also carry a vast selection of oysters and mussels from Oregon and Washington.”
On one side of the fish market is a gift shop with Tunaville shirts and other branded merchandise. “Those are all pictures of the men and women that worked the fleet, from Point Loma families who owned the boats,” noted Gomes of the historic photos on display.
Looking ahead, Gomes said: “The future is good, and we want to be ahead of everybody else when it comes to hyper-local seafood.”
Gomes, Conniff, and the creation of Tunaville in June 2022 is part of an ongoing local effort by anglers to revive San Diego’s local commercial fishing industry. Four months later in October, Point Loma commercial fishing businesses and tenants at Driscoll’s Wharf including Tunaville launched a new Point Loma Commercial Fishing Alliance. The group was formed to draw attention to the significant role commercial fishing plays in the local economy. The alliance seeks to advocate and represent commercial fishing activities along the Point Loma working waterfront, known as America’s Cup Harbor and Shelter Island.
Tunaville is named for the Point Loma neighborhood in which it resides, the boundaries of which are Lowell to Talbot streets, and as high up the peninsula as Willow Street. The immigrant Portuguese populace had settled there as far back as 1885. By the 1930s, the neighborhood had become a bustling tuna fishing haven. Early Portuguese fishing settlements subsequently grew along the base of Kellogg and McCall streets in La Playa and Roseville.
A “kill quota” implemented in 1975 substantially harmed San Diego’s fishing fleet. Boats were required to limit their bycatch, ultimately causing Bumble Bee Seafoods and Van Camp Seafood Cannery to close its doors in the early 1980s.
TUNAVILLE MARKET AND GROCERY
Where: 4904 North Harbor Drive.
Hours: Wednesdays through Sundays 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Info: tunavillemarketandgrocery.com.
