Preston Battistella, Long-Time
Fish Wholesaler, Departs The Scene
Preston Battistella died a few days ago. It's been long enough since he left the fresh seafood distributing trade in which he spent most of his life that, even in the food business, many people might not recognize his name. But for decades he and his family were the premier sellers of fresh fish to the restaurants and markets of New Orleans. Battistella's Seafood has roots as far back as the days when numerous merchants sold fish in the French Market, where Battistella's had not only a stand but a restaurant.
Preston was one of the first people I met when I became acquainted with the New Orleans confraternity of gourmets. In the 1970s, there were no wine dinners of the kind you can find almost every day of the week now. If you attended something like that, it was because you were a member of a private gourmet club. The members of those clubs dined grandly, although I wouldn't say especially better than wine-dinner attendees do now. The menus were sometimes very exotic, though, and the fact that everybody dressed to the nines made the dinners special.
Preston was a member of every such club, and at those dinners (I was often invited as a guest) he and I used to have long conversations about seafood and food in general. He was a convivial, classy man, full of interesting stories. He was a great source of information for me during the mid-1980s, when quotas and bans were placed on local fish that had always been available in nearly unlimited supplies before. Preston told me that it was because fishermen had become too efficient, targeting schools of fish by airplane and then scooping up the whole load, leaving none to reproduce. "The way it's going," he told me after speckled trout had been all but removed from the market, "we'll soon be eating cod meuniere. No local fish at all!"
Battistella's Seafood came to an end in the 1990s, when a weird catastrophe occurred in their main operation in the Marigny. An unknown block of ice above one of their refrigerators had been growing for years, and finally became so heavy that it caused a structural failure in the building. Rebuilding was too much for Preston, who was well into his seventies. He hung it up and let other fill his niche. I haven't heard much from him since then, but his demise strikes me as a significant milestone in the annals of New Orleans food.