September 19, 2022 — Togue Brawn sits on cobblestones between two piers, preparing a makeshift picnic on top of a block of granite as dozens of seagulls watch unblinkingly from surrounding rooftops. She unpacks jars of salt and achar and olive oil and, finally, the meal’s centerpiece: a plastic to-go container full of raw scallops, hauled out of the ocean only yesterday.
Brawn slices each plump, ivory-colored cylinder into thinner disks she lays on a platter. “The texture is what you should really notice, and the flavor is good and not fishy,” she says, then a confession: “I am obsessed with scallops.” She wants everyone else to be obsessed with scallops, too. And since the pandemic caused a swell of enthusiasm for mail-ordered foodstuffs — including Brawn’s scallops — that time may well be nigh.
Twelve years ago, Brawn started her company, Downeast Dayboat, to introduce dayboat-harvested Maine scallops to the masses. Brawn buys from small boats that often drag the bottoms of inshore crags along the Gulf of Maine and land their bounty a few hours later — as opposed to the bulk of sea scallops eaten in the U.S., which are often sourced from large trip boats that work federally managed offshore waters three or more miles off the Atlantic coast from Massachusetts to Virginia, staying at sea for a week or more (overall, Maine lands less than 2 percent of U.S. sea scallops). Because of the challenges and expense of quickly shipping out her fresh dayboat scallops, comparatively few people outside of Maine have gotten to sample Brawn’s.