New Wave Seafood of Wantagh ready for Christmas rush

"Christmas Eve, it’s our Super Bowl," said Anthony Monteforte, a manager at New Wave Seafood in Wantagh.

For the fish store’s Italian American customers, there is nowhere else that they would consider buying provisions for La Vigilia, the Feast of the Seven Fishes, that is as much of a Yuletide tradition as trimming the tree or exchanging gifts. And satisfying those customers means the shop’s preparations for "game day" test its butchering skills, its inventory, its organization, its kitchen capacity and the stamina of its staff.

But owners Frank and Patricia Marinello, who opened the store in 1996, look forward to it every year.

"This will be our 30th year," said Frank, who is descended from fishmongers on both his mother’s and father’s side, "and we wouldn’t have it any other way."

A week before Christmas, fresh eels, octopus, blue crabs, smelts and scungilli start to take their place next to the shop’s usual lineup of salmon, swordfish, shrimp and more. Bacala, salt-cured cod, is introduced to a dayslong bath so that customers who don’t want to deal with it in its plywood-hard form have a pre-soaked option. Seafood salad, always a big seller, threatens to overwhelm the kitchen: hopefully 400 pounds will be enough.

But the season’s unchallenged seafood category killer is shrimp: New Wave is on track to sell about 5,000 pounds of it in the three days leading up to Christmas Eve.

Over the years, the Marinellos have developed a strategy for dealing with the onslaught. This week, a line forms outside the store before it opens at 9 a.m. when customers are ushered into the dining room of New Wave’s adjacent restaurant. "We close the restaurant for the days before Christmas," Patricia explained. "We can’t cook all the catering orders and still run the restaurant."

Dining tables are rearranged so customers can form a "zigzag" line and, while they wait, they are treated to hot chocolate or wine or sangria; Christmas movies play on the monitors. "We try to make it fun," Patricia said. "And we try to get them out within 30 minutes," Frank added.

While fresh fish orders are filled on the spot, the deadline for catering orders was last week and the number topped 500. That’s far too many for New Wave’s regular storage, and so the store borrows a refrigerated trailer from Sysco, its principle wholesale supplier, and parks it in the lot in front of the store. Catering customers receive coat-check tickets, color-coded for the day of pickup. Once the ticket is presented to the counter, the number is relayed, via walkie-talkie, to a runner in the parking lot and the order meets the customer at the cashier.

Staffing the Christmas rush requires not only all regular hands on deck but also any available summer help as well as the Marinello’s three adult children. Luckily, the two married ones chose mates who also worked in the store when they were teenagers.

The Marinellos meet Seven Fish celebrants at every skill level: They’ll sell you live Maine lobsters, steamed and split lobsters, lobster salad, frozen Brazilian lobster tails (all the way up to 20-ounce monsters) as well as tails that have been butterflied and given the oreganata treatment that only need to be slipped into the oven.

And what of the Marinello’s own Christmas Eve? They are hardly slackers when it comes to home cooking: Patricia prepares Christmas dinner for 14 (beef tenderloin filled out with the shop’s clams oreganata, ahi tuna and seafood salad) and Frank presides over an annual New Year’s Eve lobsterfest. But once the shop closes its doors at 3 p.m. on Dec. 24, Patricia said, "we’ll go home, have a shower, make a nice cocktail and say, ‘we survived another year.’ "