Rare Eels Get Celebrity Chefs In Hot Water

(NewsCore) - British TV chefs Gordon Ramsay and Jamie Oliver both served endangered European eel at their restaurants while fronting high-profile campaigns to highlight declining fish stocks, according to British newspaper The Sunday Times.

Ramsay, who slams the shark fin trade in an investigative TV documentary broadcast Sunday in the UK, had eel on the menu at his London restaurant Maze as well as at France's La Veranda, in Versailles, where he is a consultant.

Oliver, whose show on so-called sustainable seafood aired last week as part of UK network Channel 4’s “Big Fish Fight” series, sold endangered European eel at his London restaurant Fifteen.

European eel was listed as an endangered species in 2008 by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature after a 90 percent drop in its population over the previous 30 years.

Both chefs removed the eel from their restaurant menus after being contacted by the paper.

A spokesman for Oliver said that “eel has occasionally been on the menu at Fifteen London but will now come off the menu until we have done further research into the state of eel stocks.”

Ramsay’s spokeswoman said, “We will be reviewing our position and removing it from the menu for now.”

Corine Rozendaal, who runs the Dutch Eel Company -- which is based in Lincolnshire, central England, and supplies both chefs -- denied the eel was an endangered species and said the population decline had settled.

When told that the European eel was officially designated as critically endangered, she said, “But that’s Greenpeace for you.”

Greenpeace’s head ocean campaigner, Femke Nagel, said there was no such thing as “sustainable eel” because eel farming relied on sourcing the species from the wild.