The Best Luxury Mail Order Meat And Seafood

Holidays are a time for celebrations, and celebratory meals mean extra special splurges. But you don’t have to go to a restaurant to give the gift of the best main courses, as recent years have seen an explosion in the quality and diversity of specialty meats and impeccably sourced seafood available online. Things that you literally could not buy just a few years ago, from imported Japanese beef to rare cuts of Spanish iberico pork to “high-Prime” dry aged steaks can now be in the home kitchen in a day or two, even though you still can’t buy these in any store in most cities.

So, if you have someone on your gift list who loves food, these are top tier choices for their specialties, and each one has been personally vetted for excellence.

Florida Stone Crab: Stone Crab is Florida’s most famous food and one of the most unique and delicious regional specialties in the nation. But stone crabs are best fresh and never frozen, so should be eaten only in season (October 15- May 15) making them an extra-special choice for this time of year. They are also sustainable, as crabs are not killed when one of their claws (usually the larger) is harvested, and they grow back. Founded in 2008, Miami-based George Stone Crab supplies some very high-profile restaurants and is one of the largest home delivery specialists, with fishermen in the Keys bringing in 3,000-5,000 pounds of claws daily throughout the season. Owner Roger Duarte was dubbed the ‘Stone Crab King” by Bloomberg’s Businessweek. To offer the freshest claws in the country, the company delivers by Mini Cooper in South Florida and for everybody else, ships nation-wide overnight from distribution centers in the Keys and Miami. Each order of claws is caught and delivered from boat to your table fresh within 24-36 hours. Yet prices are 40% to 60% less than you’d expect to pay in a restaurant. In addition to how delicious they are, what I love is the streamlined ordering process. Claws come in four different sizes, medium, large, jumbo, and colossal, so you just pick your claw size, select how many people (portions) you’re ordering for, add any extras (homemade sauces, Fireman Derek’s Key Lime Pie or top shelf organic Russian Osetra Caviar), and choose your delivery date. Claws come cooked, you just crack and eat – they even throw in a wooden mallet.

Holiday Roasts, Prime Steaks and Much More: For one-stop shopping no one beats Allen Brothers when it comes to deluxe meat and seafood. I’ve repeatedly tried shipments from this venerable – since 1893 – Chicago butcher and have always been wowed. They are most famous for beef but as a top supplier for some of the country’s most famous restaurants, they do it all and also carry heirloom pork, bison, elk, veal, lamb, coveted poulet rouge chickens, heritage turkeys, duck, quail, wild caught sea bass, black cod and halibut and much more. You can even find rare half-pound plus Australian jumbo lobster tails and wild bay scallops from Patagonia. But at this time of year what stands out to me most are the celebratory cuts and family holiday roasts, like extra thick all-natural USDA Prime porterhouse steaks you won’t even find in top steakhouses, pork and lamb rib roasts, and most of all, a stunning selection of holiday worthy centerpiece beef roasts. We are talking bone-in rib roasts (prime rib) that include different sizes and choices of USDA Prime, dry-aged USDA Prime, or roasts from heirloom Aberdeen Angus and true wagyu. If you want easy slicing, they have all sorts of rib eye roasts and de-boned tied full rib roasts. Wagyu Chateaubriand? Artisanal ready to cook Beef Wellington, complete with duck and goose pates? Basically, if you want to shake up the table for a family of red meat lovers, you can’t do any better – the hardest part is choosing!

Sushi, Sashimi, Fresh Fish: Got a sushi or sashimi lover on your list? You’d have to go to the top one percent of America’s sushi eateries to get fish as good as that from Honolulu Fish Company, the only mail order specialist with more than a dozen species (because it’s all fresh, the less common daily catch offerings change) of exclusively hook caught fish (for sustainability, HFC does not allow its buyers to purchase fish that have not reached reproductive maturity). This is top quality (remember the terms sushi grade and sashimi grade don’t have any actual meaning) fish you can happily eat raw, but you can also cook them. HFC has 20 years’ experience providing many top chefs around the country, with every fish hand inspected and selected at the docks daily by sashimi experts, tehn immediately prepared, packaged and shipped fresh in custom insulated packaging that reaches you unfrozen within 48 hours of selection.

You can buy mouthwatering ready to slice blocks and filets of ahi tuna, salmon, hamachi, kanpachi and much more, but for gifts I’d consider either a sampler (like Ultra Ahi/King Salmon/Deep Sea Sweet Crab or a pound each of Kanpachi/Ultra Ahi/King Salmon) or a complete sushi making kit ($169) for either maki (rolls) or nigiri. These include one pound each of Hawaiian wild caught “ultra” ahi tuna and King salmon, along with all the best imported from Japan accessories: super premium sushi rice from Hokkaido, excellent sashimi shoyu (say sauce) made specifically for raw fish, wasabi paste made from actual Japanese horseradish (a lot of wasabi paste/powder is bogus) and vinegar. The nigiri kit has a 5-piece plastic mold for forming the rectangular nigiri rice slabs, the maki kit fresh roasted Japanese seaweed wraps and a bamboo rolling mat. An even better gift is the complete Ichiban Home Sushi Kit that has both the nigiri and maki supplies and adds a third fish, Hawaiian-caught wild kanpachi. The fish and the ingredients were both out of this world, and the portions are so generous that when we made the nigiri kit, it was enough for two nights of epic blowout sushi dinners for two that left us stuffed, with still enough fish leftover that I then made poke. Could it get any better? How about free shipping on everything, rare in the world of express shipped cooler-packed food.

Statement Steaks: Let’s be honest – sometimes gift giving is about impressing, and when you need to make a big impact, there’s no better way than Japanese beef. The “Rolls-Royce of Red Meat,” Kobe beef is the best-known luxury steak on earth, but it is just one of (and not necessarily the best) many coveted regional Japanese offerings. Japanese beef comes from pure blood Japanese cattle breeds (wagyu) and the main difference is where they live and what they eat, so think of Kobe like Napa, while other top areas like Omi, Matsuzaka, Sendai, Satsuma, Sanuki, Takamori, Hokkaido and so on are Sonomas, and all fabulous. The big thing is that Japanese beef from any of these places is similar to its peers but markedly different from any other beef anywhere else, even pure blood imported wagyu raised here. While it has become much more available, most Americans have still never tasted Japanese wagyu, and all of it is fattier, richer and more tender – like butter – both a unique experience and real indulgence for even the most jaded steak lover.

No other vendor comes remotely close to Holy Grail Steak Company for selection, and they were the nation’s very first licensed mail order retailer of authentic Kobe beef when the USDA ban on Japanese meat was lifted several years ago (Buyer Beware – there’s lots of fake Kobe online). Holy Grail has an unrivalled selection of regional Japanese beef and lots of cuts from each, plus all kinds of tasting and comparison sampler packages. But while they are most famous for this, their overall focus is on the most desirable “Holy Grails” of beef from everywhere, so they also stock oddities like rare “carrot finished” Santa Carota beef from California, uncommon 100% grass fed Prime beef, American and Australian wagyu, lots of dry aged selections, and the elusive domestic “High Prime” or “Upper Prime” Black Angus steaks (Prime is the USDA’s highest grade, but it has several sub tiers, so most Prime is not the best Prime).

The Most Delicious Secret in Meat: I’ve had secreto twice in my life, both times in Europe, and both were among the most delicious things I’ve ever tasted and the most memorable meals I’ve eaten, and I’ve been writing on food for 25 years. It’s just stunning. Secreto is a “butcher’s cut,” a less well known (it literally means secret) but delicious choice the butcher used to keep for himself, such as hanger, picanha or teres major in beef. But secreto is not beef, it’s pork, and it’s the best cut from the world’s best pigs, Spain’s Pata Negra (black paw), a 100% Iberian breed – the Kobe beef of pork. The scereto is a strip adjacent to the belly, and the result is the fatty rich deliciousness of pork belly with less straight fat and a meatier, more steak-like texture. On a full-grown pig, the cut totals just around one and a quarter pounds. The world’s leading authority on cooked meat cuisine around the globe, James Beard Award-winning author and educator Steven Raichlen, called secreto the “Best Kept Secret in Barbecue.” It is one of several good reasons to give upstart Spanish meat importer Campo Grande a try.

The small New York-based food company debuts this month – just in time for holiday orders -offering mail-order boxes of Spanish and Spain-inspired meats and seafood. As founder Kurt Oriole explained, “After years of squabbling with the USDA, we’ve finally succeeded in importing free-range Ibérico pork – the finest stuff from Spain – that’s unlike anything else on the market. Like the acorn-fed jamón you’re likely familiar with, fresh Ibérico pork stands out for its off-the-charts marbling and nutty, bold flavor that needs little more than a flash in the pan and a flick of crunchy salt to shine. We are the first direct-to-consumer brand selling it Stateside. Starting November 15, Americans will be able to order a box of fresh heirloom Spanish Ibérico shipped to their doorsteps.” The Ibérico Box rounds up Spain’s beloved “noble cuts,” including secreto, but also presa, abanico, pluma, and a rib rack. They also offer two other boxes reverential to Spanish cuisine: a seafood box, filled with European hake, monkfish, baby clams hand-harvested on the Mediterranean coast, Spanish sea bass, and desalted bacala (all sustainable and line-caught), and in a nod to old-school Basque steakhouses, extremely limited-release grass-fed vaca vieja (“old cow”) steaks, from humanely raised steers that live up to 12 years. The result is funky, like the ultra-aged 60+ day dry-aged beef that has been a hot trend among top chefs. It’s too long an explanation for this piece, so read my story about Casa Julian in San Sebastian, one of the world’s greatest steakhouses to learn more, but suffice to say until now you could not get this kind of vaca vieja in this country. 

Maryland Crab Cakes, Blue Crabs & Succulent Seafood: For anyone visiting Maryland – or choosing starters at an old school steakhouse anywhere else – the classic Maryland lump crab cake is a must-have delicacy. The very best ones only use real Maryland blue crab, the ones Chesapeake Bay is world famous for, with as much crabmeat and as little binder as possible without it falling apart. For mail order you cannot do better than the ones from Cameron’s Maryland Seafood, an excellent family-owned business that has been the largest local retailer of Maryland’s world-famous blue crabs and crab cakes since 1985. They sell over 150,000 crab cakes each year, and not only are they delicious, they ship very well and cook up great and easily at home. They come fresh but can be frozen with no loss of greatness. This is the signature but everything I’ve had from Cameron’s has been excellent: they sell Maryland’s famous whole blue crabs, certified “True Blue” by the state authority (meaning they are real blue crabs from Chesapeake Bay unlike many imported imposters), and they are pre-cooked with classic seasonings. The choices are vast, male or female, each in various sizes up to “colossal,” plus blue crab claws and Maryland soft shell crabs. The pre-cooked and seasoned spiced shrimp are wildly addictive, but my favorite is the stunning soups, especially the thick, rich, meat-packed crab bisque, better than at the finest restaurants. The lobster bisque is also great, and they offer lots of combos and samplers and holiday gifts. You really cannot go wrong with anything Cameron’s sells, unless you don’t like delicious food (and great customer service, from shipping to detailed reheating/cooking/storage instructions).

Awesome Wild-Caught Salmon: The vast majority of salmon consumed in this country is farm raised, and while aquaculture is not inherently bad, in practice much of it leaves a lot to be desired. Large carnivorous fish like salmon are especially difficult to raise right, and much of the time they are given unnatural diet, colorants and drugs. I wrote extensively about this is my national bestseller Real Food, Fake Food: Why You Don’t Know What You’re Eating & What You Can Do About It, a few years back, and ever since I have consumed only wild caught, drug-free salmon. In reality that pretty much means Alaskan salmon, because its by far the most available option, aquaculture across the board is illegal in the state, and the salmon waters are some of the cleanest anywhere.

Unlike some of the rare products above, Alaskan salmon is pretty easy to buy, but I like Alaskan Salmon Company for several reasons. First, it is a fishermen-owned brand focused on sustainably sourced wild Alaskan seafood, spearheaded by 29-year-old Kyle Lyle, a native Alaskan and fisherman himself who removes all middlemen to connect consumers directly to local fishermen. Secondly, they sell only prized Copper River salmon, both sockeye and coho, from one of the most acclaimed terroirs in the seafood industry. But most importantly, it is delicious, and that’s why some of the nation’s most famous chefs and restaurants buy here, from Del Frisco’s steakhouses to Nobu Matsuhisa, who said, “Before working with Alaskan Salmon, I have never preferred using wild salmon. By the time it reached my kitchen the meat is in bad shape and smells soiled. Now I can smell the fresh Alaskan ocean every week when we open the box.” They sell it at an accessible price ($189 for 12 fillets), precut into perfect portions, 6-8 ounce skin-on filets, easy to cook in a pan on the stove to get that ideal combo of crispy skin and moist tender meat. There’s no cutting or fuss and muss, just unwrap as many filets as you have diners and go from there. They sell in 12 and 24 packs, shipped frozen, or as a recurring subscription, and they also offer a “Chef’s Selection” option that adds other top Alaskan wild caught specialties, a mix of salmon, halibut, black cod and rockfish, a really ideal gift for any seafood lover.

Turkey, Ham & Much More: There are few better value, more reliable online meat vendors than Porter Road, a Nashville-based artisanal whole animal butcher shop. With a focus on sustainability, Porter Road uses only pasture raised animals from small family farms in Kentucky and Tennessee that are hormone and antibiotic free, raised outside, and fed vegetarian, non-GMO feed. Yet compared to most mail order fine meats, the prices are extremely reasonable – the same or less as you’d pay at local butcher – plus free shipping over $100, a low threshold in this niche. They have a lot of specials for the holidays, such as whole 10-15.5 pound turkeys from the family-owned Jolly Barnyard farm, pasture raised without hormones (all U.S. poultry is antibiotic free by law). Another good bet is the hams, from naturally raised hormone and antibiotic free pigs, sold fully smoked and cured and shipped so you just coat with glaze and heat. These are sold by the half ham, 4.5-6.5 pounds ($84), or whole (9.5-12, $132) a nice centerpiece. The holiday specials also include beef rib roasts, whole tenderloins, pork loin roasts, and more. Outside of the holiday specials, the normal year-round standouts at Porter Road include gourmet versions of backyard grilling standards, rarities such as hot dogs made from dry-aged, drug-free beef, dry-aged burger patties, house made bratwurst and Italian sausage. These kinds of sausages are hardly ever made with such high-quality meats. Another great gift choice is the store’s 10^th Anniversary Box, with two each of pork chops, strip or ribeye steaks, Denver steaks, plus a pound of ground beef, package of dry-aged hot dogs, breakfast sausage, and house seasoning ($120).

Domestic Wagyu: Due to lax USDA labelling laws, what you can legally sell in this country as wagyu can be pretty suspect and pretty low quality, but there are a growing number of artisan wagyu ranchers doing it right, with 100% genetically pure bloodlines traced to imported Japanese wagyu breed cattle or their eggs. One of the best is just down the road from me so I have been able to visit the farm, see how well it is run firsthand, and taste a variety of the products. Vermont Wagyu was also featured on The Today Show during the Summer Olympics from Tokyo, and has suddenly become even more desirable. The owner, Dr. Sheila Patinkin, is a retired pediatrician who has become one of the foremost wagyu breeders outside Japan, and she is also a vice president and board member of the American Wagyu Association.  VT Wagyu offers a wide range of individual cuts, from the common (ribeye, NY strip, filet) to butcher’s choices (Bavette/flap, coulotte, hanger, flat iron, flank, baseball) and even half briskets for backyard smoking and both English and Korean cut short ribs. They also offer wagyu chorizo, kielbasa and burgers, plus a variety of assorted gift boxes. The most special ones are the selections that combine wagyu with other coveted made-in Vermont products, such as maple syrup, decadent Ploughgate Creamery cultured butter, pancake mixes, award-winning Jasper Hill Farm cheeses and other of the most acclaimed gourmet products from the Green Mountain State.

Italy’s Decadence – and A Taste of Venezuela: If you’ve been to Italy and you love food, you are probably familiar with porchetta, one of the greatest meat dishes from one of the world’s greatest cuisines. Porchetta is a slab of skin on pork belly wrapped around a pork loin and layered with seasonings, then tied and roasted, so each circular slice has the tender meaty pork meat inside, fatty belly around it, crunchy exterior, and tons of flavor, a perfect combination. But unless you’ve got mad butchering skills, good porchetta is nearly impossible for the home chef to make, and not something you’ll find in your average butcher shop or pretty much any supermarket. But you can find it at mail order specialist Meat n’ Bone, and they go one better, using farm raised heritage breed pigs for even more wonderful flavor. To me this is a standout product worth ordering for a special occasion, but Meat n’ Bone has a lot of other hard to find and very specialized offerings spanning a wide range of beef, pork, lamb, poultry, game and seafood, with a special focus on Spanish and South American specialties (like Brazil’s beloved picanha cut in a variety of beef styles including domestic and Japanese wagyu, unheard of elsewhere). I most recently wrote about their 60-day dry-aged USDA Prime bone-in rib steak that is infused daily during ageing with Venezuela’s most prized spirit, Diplomatico Reserva Exclusiva rum. That is one steak I guarantee you will never see anyplace else, and another great gift idea for the red meat lover on your list who thinks they have seen it all.