The Plain Dealer's Steve Litt reported Tuesday that Cleveland Heights entrepreneur J. Duncan Shorey intends to redevelop a vacant metal casting plant at E. 71st and Platt as a hip multi-use project that capitalizes on Cleveland's "hot themes."
First and foremost (if not the hottest) among these many uses at the "Foundry Project"?
A $4.5 million, 40,000-square-foot "high-tech" fish farm in which Shorey would produce thousands of pounds of Mediterranean Sea Bass every week.
BRANZINO, BABY.
Like all the development projects around here, Shorey wants the fish farm up and running, with high-tech Branzino on the tables of Cleveland's finest restaurants (certainly Doug Katz's!) by the Republican National Convention.
Shorey's got commitments from a fish brokerage in Toronto and a fish farm in Indiana to buy huge quantities of of the Branzino, but with endorsements from Katz and the Flying Fig's Karen Small, we might be seeing more Sea Bass on the menu in local haunts.
(Martha Stewart's got this shit on lock).
Shorey's Foundry project also intends to use a small percentage of the fish farm's profits to fund a non-profit studio art center on the building's top three floors. (This may include a glass-blowing furnace. Can you say #HotThemes?)
Shorey hopes to get a computer server farm online within the next six months or so as well, but his primary focus will be on improving the food desert in the surrounding area. His plans include a culinary school and a farmers' market.
And due to all the toxic dredging in Lake Erie which may mean we can only safely eat mutant Walleye once per month — ONCE PER MONTH?!?! — fish-lovers may have no choice but to find a new favorite locally sourced seafood dish.
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