My Italian-American family gathers every Christmas Eve to cook a Feast of the Seven Fishes. And every year, it’s always just a little disappointing. Sorry, Mom.
While the Feast must include seven distinct seafood dishes, there’s no correct way to prepare it. It’s entirely open to personal preference or family tradition and typically relies on whatever fish is readily available in the American northeast. Still, a touch of gourmet precision can help refine some of Nonna’s age-old recipes. The Feast is a quintessentially Italian-American tradition – one rooted ostensibly in Old World Catholicism and the abstention from meat until Christmas Day. Yet there’s very little record of it ever taking place in Italy. Instead, it evolved from the Italian diaspora in New York City in the 1800s, and includes many dishes that could fit anywhere in the melting pot of American cuisine.
Disappointment – or at least diner’s regret – can set in because the Feast is typically a heavy, carb-loaded meal. The lightest fare starts at the top, a cold seafood salad, shrimp cocktail or clams casino. Then, at least a few fried dishes: calamari, shrimp, eel or smelt. Linguine with clams or anchovies comes out later in the evening. And the meal isn’t complete without a final entrée of cioppino (a San Francisco fish stew) or baccalà (salt-cured cod in tomato sauce). While it’s meant to be paced over several hours before midnight mass, the food coma can set in early, and last well into Christmas Day.
Preparation can be daunting for the home cook. Preventing rubbery calamari is tricky for even seasoned chefs, to say nothing of the difficulty of multiple rounds of stove-top frying. Diversity in flavor and texture can easily be lost with an overreliance on tomato–based acidity. Thick, center-cut cod loins are hard to snag at a supermarket, and the baccalà is often unbearably salty.
Yet suggesting any tweaks to the traditional menu is dangerous. Fusion flavors, all the rage today, can modernize the Feast, but often at the expense of leaving it unrecognizable. Although there’s endless opportunity to elevate delicate seafood, the Feast must remain accessible. It still needs a cohesive seven courses – and to feel festive.
Seeking advice on what best to do, I asked some of New York’s top seafood chefs to weigh in on what they would do to improve the Seven Fishes.
P.J. Calapa has fond memories of preparing the classic Feast with the Italian side of his family. He keeps the tradition alive today with an elevated twist at Marea, his high-end Italian seafood restaurant on the corner of Central Park. “I want it to feel somewhat authentic,” Calapa explained, “but I also want it to feel Marea. You start with a little crudo, then we go into pasta and then maybe a main course. We don’t do it as a tasting.”
Calapa avoids frying altogether, instead leaning on raw fish in the early courses and pasta as the primary carbohydrate. Caviar bruschetta, lobster burrata and Branzino tartare with chives and pistachio make up the first three courses. “Pistachio always kind of makes me feel a little bit holiday-ish,” he says, and of course it’s very Italian.
He then resets the palate with a “deconstructed Caesar salad” packed with anchovies, before two pasta dishes: a “hearty and robust” braised octopus fusilli paired with a “very delicate” lemony crab pappardelle. He’s torn on whether to serve the pasta family style. For the final course, he goes back to his roots, reconstructing the baccalà he used to make with his aunt. The most important thing is getting “beautiful loins of Atlantic cod and lightly curing it.”
Eric Ripert, whose three-Michelin-starred Le Bernardin serves as a global authority on seafood, leans more traditional in some ways, but less so in others. “I have been invited to a Seven Fishes once or twice,” the chef says, “and I have to say, it was pretty good when it was very traditional. The family came together, and the grandma was in charge of the kitchen.”
Unlike Calapa, Ripert is on board with keeping the fried staples, suggesting a lighter tempura rather than breadcrumbs or a more unconventional fried octopus. “Carpaccio makes sense,” he says, while admitting his preference for scallop ceviche might fall too far outside Italian tradition. “I love the idea of doing a whole fish, roasted,” he says. “Either in a salt crust or covered with tomatoes and onions and white wine. You can bring it as a centerpiece for the table, and then it’s very convivial because you cut it and share with everyone… If I was doing this, I would go after the model of Le Bernardin, which is a tasting menu with seven different preparations of fish going from very light to slightly richer and with recipes that go with red wine at the end.”
You don’t have to be a Michelin-starred chef to fold in some of these lessons for an elevated yet festive Feast. Keep the fried fish but lighten up the pasta. Serve portioned courses but do something immersive, like carving a whole fish at the end. Rely on lighter Italian flavors, such as pistachio and lemon, instead of a tomato-garlic overload. Less can be more: lean on raw fish, or use flavorful fishes as an auxiliary ingredient to lighter finger food or salads. That doesn’t have to be inaccessible: opt for flying-fish roe instead of caviar, and instead shell out on the best cod loins you can find.
Then again, if chefs like Calapa and Ripert are on board with tradition, maybe the Seven Fishes Feast doesn’t need changing after all.
This article was originally published in The Spectator’s December 22, 2025 World edition.
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