Captain John Mallette is charting a future where Carolina commercial fishermen thrive, coastal heritage is protected, and clean, local seafood is what’s on the table.
Photography by Unique Media & Design
From a small boy growing up around fishermen to a young man traveling the world as a charter boat captain to a commercial fisherman recently appointed by the North Carolina governor to the Marine Fisheries Commission, Captain John Mallette has lived a life full of fishing and seafood, and he is not done yet.
The list of Mallette’s accomplishments and business ventures is extensive, but he is focused on supporting local commercial fishermen, educating others and providing “good, clean, fresh, chemical-free seafood.”
“Take the time to learn your local fishmonger,” Mallette says to those who want to know more about seafood as he emphasizes the importance of supporting local commercial fishermen.
Mallette is one of those local fishermen, of course, but he is also a seafood business owner, an educator, an advocate, a storyteller and soon to be a restaurant owner. Oh, and then there is the rice farm.
Beyond all he does with seafood, Mallette has partnered with friends who own the “only rice farm in the state.” He adds that the family-owned farm, Tidewater Grain, produces gluten-free Carolina Gold Rice that is more flavorful than “commodity rice” and has some medicinal properties.
Concerned with sustainability in everything he does, Mallette says, “We don’t waste anything.”
He uses the broken grains of rice to make rice flour, which is the basis for a breader he makes for his seafood; he says it’s healthier than flour-based breaders.
“With how I grew up in the country, I take that rice flour and I make my own chicken breaders, seafood breader, anything fried that we would do here in the country,” he says, adding that this rice flour “comes out smooth like wheat flour.”
Among Mallette’s other accomplishments is a significant grant-funded project for NC Catch. He describes NC Catch as “a nonprofit organization that promotes local seafood, supports commercial fishing and just tries to get the word out about eating local seafood.”
“It’s about educating the public about North Carolina seafood, the history behind it, what all it entails, and also disproving a lot of misinformation about commercial fishing and some of the misinformation on an environmental standpoint,” he says of NC Catch.
Through an NC Sea Grant Community Collaborative grant, Mallette helped secure funding for a program called Recognizing African American Participation in the North Carolina Seafood Industry.
According to NC Catch, the project was a partnership “with our African American Chef Ambassadors and Board members, the Core Sound Museum and Heritage Center, and Black-owned Mastermind Photography.”
Mallette served on the NC Catch board until the governor appointed him to the state’s Marine Fisheries Commission. That commission is “composed of commercial and recreational fishermen, commercial and sport fishing industry representatives, at-large members and a scientist. They adopt rules and policies and implement management measures for fisheries.”
Each year Mallette also appears on stage doing cooking demonstrations with a number of high-end chefs at the N.C. State Fair and is the chef ambassador and seafood ambassador for the Got to Be NC initiative. He was also instrumental in revitalizing the Sneads Ferry Shrimp Festival.
An emphasis on clean and local permeates Mallette’s work. He is focused on educating others and, to that end, says he “does a lot with the colleges.”
In fact, he says he is planning to open a restaurant on the UNCW campus soon, with other schools across North Carolina and Virginia in contract talks. He says he is “doing demos at the campuses right now and everybody loves it.”
Capt John’s Chicken and Seafood will soon be part of the UNCW food stations. The breading will be made from his gluten-free rice flour, and the seafood will be locally sourced. Mallette describes the restaurant’s offerings as “an entire menu that’s soul food, country cooking.”
Beyond all these ventures, Mallette also co-owns a seafood store with Randy Millis. They launched Southern Breeze Seafood in Jacksonville in December 2020.
Although Mallette says everyone thought they were crazy opening a business in the middle of COVID, it turned out to be a good thing.
“When things started to open, it made people paranoid about their food,” he says. The store benefited because “people started looking for more local, more fresh, more chemical-free,” and that’s exactly what Mallette and Millis provide.
Fresh, local and clean are integral to everything Mallette does. He says that “full traceability” is important. Even though Southern Breeze Seafood does sell a few seafood products that are not local, such as crab legs and salmon, he says, “There’s nothing we sell that we can’t trace right back to the original source.”
Mallette says his biggest goal is “educating people on how things really work.”
For example, he says that “commercial fishing needs to be looked at as a viable career choice.” As for himself, even with everything else on his list, he is still on the water every day he can be Above all, he says, it’s critical to “support local, to support commercial fishermen.”
