The Work We Do: Nate Phillips, Alice’s Fish Market

[I’m] Nate Phillips, Alice’s Fish Market. It’s a family-owned business for 26 years. I grew up in the fishing industry. I was actually brought home from the hospital straight to the boat. Before they even brought me home, it all kind of started there. 

You get to see stuff that a lot of people don’t. We do a lot of farmer’s markets. The people that come to those farmer’s markets, they want fresh seafood. The look on their faces when they see stuff laid out, they know they’re getting something fresh. People always come back and tell me how fresh my stuff is.

It’s great and you just get the satisfaction of being outside. You get to work with a bunch of different guys. We’ll get on a boat, we’ll go out, lift however many cages we need to.

Today we’re doing a couple thousand pieces, so we had to lift four or five cages, six cages. You have to pick through all of them. You have to get the right size. Some places are picky, they want a specific size. Other places, they don’t really care. They’re more about the taste. Everybody that works for me says that these are the best tasting oysters they’ve ever had.

“The Work We Do” is a Suffolk Times multimedia project profiling workers on the North Fork. It is made possible by Peconic Landing. See more photos on Instagram @thesuffolktimes.