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Publisher/editor

Jay Harlow

For most of his adult life, Jay Harlow has been professionally involved with seafood -- cooking it, writing about it, and teaching others to cook it.

A former restaurant cook and chef, a newspaper seafood columnist for more than a decade, a popular cooking teacher, and author or co-author of a dozen cookbooks, Jay moved into online publishing with the 2004 launch of The Seafood Monitor.

The online publication is "simply an extension of what I have been doing all these years, with a focus on a specific audience," says Jay. "Whether it's writing for the general public, teaching home cooks, speaking to a professional conference, or consulting with a single client, it's all about learning all I can about seafood, distilling what I have learned, and passing it on in a form that the recipient can use."

Four years out of college (with a B.A. in human biology from Stanford), having worked mainly in the wine business, Jay returned to school in 1978 to study hotel and restaurant operation at City College of San Francisco. After finishing the kitchen portion of the program, he went to work in San Francisco restaurants, soon landing a job at the Hayes Street Grill. "This was the beginning of my real immersion in seafood," he recalls. "I had always liked to cook fish and shellfish, but now I was working with a different selection every day. The menu was literally whatever fish had come in the back door that morning."

Based on Jay's cooking at Hayes Street and other Bay Area restaurants, including Mark Miller's Fourth Street Grill, Berkeley publisher John Harris approached him in 1981 to join in a new seafood cookbook project. The book, published in 1983 as The California Seafood Cookbook, earned Jay and co-authors Isaac Cronin and Paul Johnson a nomination for the Tastemaker Award (predecessor to today's IACP and James Beard awards), and became the standard reference book for West Coast seafood cooks for many years.

The California Seafood Cookbook launched Jay onto a new career path as a food writer. He has since authored or co-authored eleven more cookbooks on topics ranging from shrimp and grilling to beer and wine. (publication list)

In the mid-1980s, Jay branched out into newspaper and magazine writing. After a month-long stint as guest food editor of the San Francisco Examiner, he began as a freelance contributor to the San Francisco Chronicle food section. He soon got his own column, "The Fishmonger," which ran for more than ten years as a weekly feature of this multiple award-winning food section. He has subsequently written freelance columns and articles on seafood for the Examiner and the Los Angeles Times, as well as for magazines including Food Arts, Fine Cooking, and Simply Seafood.

The years of research and recipe development that went into the newspaper columns is reflected in Jay's 1999 cookbook West Coast Seafood: The Complete Cookbook. Russ Parsons of the Los Angeles Times, recalling the success of Jay's first book, wrote "This one is almost guaranteed to wind up as well-thumbed and sauce-flecked as the last." Amazon.com reviewer Schulyer Ingle says "Complete Cookbook falls short of the mark; Final Word comes closer."
More reviews of West Coast Seafood

Promoting his first cookbook also led Jay to another favorite avenue for sharing his passion for seafood -- teaching cooking classes. He is a regular and popular teacher at several Bay Area cooking schools, and travels several times a year to teach in cooking schools and cookware shops from coast to coast. He has also made numerous television and radio appearances.

In 1990 Jay and his wife, writer and editor Elaine Ratner, founded the cookbook publishing firm of Harlow & Ratner, whose catalog includes bestselling works by Martin Yan and Elaine Corn's Now You're Cooking, winner of both the IACP and James Beard awards.

In 2004, Harlow & Ratner expanded into the online publishing world with the launch of The Seafood Monitor, an online newsletter for food professionals.

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