“There was guy with a shack and a sign that said ‘Clambakes to go,’” Minardi recalled recently of a trip his family took to Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution on Cape Cod. “And what he had was a pretty neat little set up. He’d line the bottom of a tin bucket with clams and mussels, on top of that lobster, on top of that local corn, and on top of that potatoes all diced up. And basically…people would pick it up and put it on the stove and pull everything out.”

Before long, Claws on Wheels was selling 200 5-serving tins a year. In one year, they sold nearly 300. Minardi would soon contract with a company to manufacture smaller tins for more intimate 2- or 3-person meals. When customers started asking, “Can you come and cook it?” Minardi’s crews started showing up with the tins and the burners and the paper plates and the tables. Before long, the options included shrimp cocktail, filet mignon, seared tuna, wine and beer, as well as salads and veggies. “And then it got into a full-blown, massive catering business,” said Minardi.

Today, fresh seafood is just one of the many draws of Claws on Wheels on Race Lane in East Hampton. In addition to the catered options like clam bakes, the store offers to cook any raw fish it sells while you wait, and features oyster po’boys, seafood quesadillas, a dizzying assortment of comically illustrated seafood soups, and an array of thoughtful vegetable sides—from miso eggplant to braised parsnips to broccoli rabe—developed by chef Luc Turbior, who joined Minardi to meet the growing demand for more elaborate fare.

“It’s a way to compete against the Citarellas and supermarkets,” said Charlotte Sasso, owner of Stuart’s Seafood in Amagansett, who, with her husband, Bruce, recently purchased Claws on Wheels. The reality, Sasso said, is that busy people do one-stop shopping. “If you come in here with four people for lunch, they may not all want seafood,” Sasso reasoned. “If the kitchen is open, you might as well expand your menu.”

It’s a smart business decision, even if it isn’t exactly purist. Historically, seafood shops were an offshoot of fish-packing sheds, those garages, barns or garden sheds where baymen came together to clean, pack and ship their fish to distant markets. Some of the fish were always kept to sell locally. In Men’s Lives, Peter Matthiessen describes a shop in Amagansett that doubled as a restaurant serving a simple menu of fried bluefish, clam pie and bay scallops, depending on what was in season. “One of the advantages of our local seafood shops is that they get the fish before it goes into the city,” said Sasso, an advantage that many supermarkets without contacts or filleting facilities don’t have.

But today, that’s not enough. Seafood customers run the gamut from foragers, who like to gather their raw materials and combine them at home, to folks who might have state-of-the-art kitchens but don’t know how to turn on the stove. For this latter group, seafood shops, with their offerings of poached fish or sautéed scallops, or even nonindigenous specialties like roasted salmon or shrimp bisque that can be reheated at home, are a blessing. And so most seafood businesses are evolving.

At Inlet Seafood on Montauk’s East Lake Drive, the largest commercial dock in New York State, the fishermen-owners recently opened a restaurant to serve their impeccably fresh seafood. Fans of the Seafood Shop in Wainscott know that this important packinghouse also pushes its catered fare: fried oysters and clams, and an assortment of Latin-flair seafood. The homey Bob’s Fishmarket and Restaurant on Shelter Island, founded as a fish market three decades ago by bayman Bob Reiter and his wife, Kolina, later expanded to serve fish and chips and eventually evolved into a full-service restaurant—although Bob said it’s the fish market, rather than the restaurant, that still makes a profit, as economizing locals cook for themselves.

Gosman’s Dock in Montauk offers perhaps the ultimate example of building a business around seafood, but not depending exclusively upon it. Along with a well-stocked seafood store and a restaurant known for its steamers and lobsters, Gosman’s offers an abundance of knickknacks and other tourist-related fare, as well as a sort of working-waterfront amusement park for families who want to dwell among the fishing boats.

“You’ve got to think about what’s going to make you profitable and allow you to pay the rent,” said David Girard, owner and chef of Buoy One on West Main Street in Riverhead. When Girard purchased this shop four years ago, he got rid of the wholesale license, and revamped the dim, crowded, lattice-filled interior to turn 3 booths and a couple of tables into an airy space with eye-catching cobalt and yellow tiles that offers 30 seats inside and another 40 on the outdoor patio. Girard, who has cooked in France and at such New York restaurants as the Rainbow Room, Park Avalon and the Peninsula Hotel, tossed out the largely fried all-you-can-eat menu in favor of a raw bar, wine and beer, and a simple but creative cuisine that includes rare pepper-seared tuna served atop fried wonton skins crowned with seaweed salad and dolloped with wasabi mayo, wok-seared sea scallops with plum tomatoes, snow peas and tasso ham, and Thai codfish. Girard acknowledges that he may not have the atmosphere of a Starr Boggs or Jedediah Hawkins house, but customers craving seafood aren’t always craving fancy. “If diner wasn’t such a dirty word, it would be a fish diner,” Girard said.

Ever mindful of additional markets, Buoy One has a growing catering business with Martha Clara Vineyards, where Girard’s wife, Lorraine, does cooking demonstrations. Adjusting this balance between selling raw seafood and selling prepared fare—or teaching customers how to cook—defines the challenge of contemporary East End’s seafood markets. When Bruce and Charlotte Sasso of Stuart’s Seafood decided to purchase Claws on Wheels, they reasoned that their own existing business was primarily wholesale, while Claws on Wheels’s profits were driven by a robust retail and catering clientele.

At Braun Seafood in Cutchogue, evolution has been the status quo since James Homan took over the small oyster-shucking company from the Braun family. “My father peddled different things to make a living,” says Ken Homan, James’s son. We still do today. Diversification is the only reason we are here due to the ever-changing, wild nature of our industry.” Homan’s father started selling the legendary Peconic Bay scallops to restaurants up and down the East Coast, until that population collapsed in the 1980s and he moved into a wider array of seafood. Ken, whose business school thesis examined the possibilities of seafood retailing if the East End’s year-round population continued to grow, has now turned the company into the largest supplier of seafood on both Forks.

The company has 65,000 cubic feet of storage warehouses, a fleet of 20 refrigerated trucks, and moves everything from Indian shrimp to whole Scottish salmon to African yellowfin tuna. He’s got a holding tank that turns over 10,000 pounds of lobsters in a busy summer weekend. Nearby vineyards use his copious amounts of fish trimmings for fertilizer. Although Homan notes that there isn’t as much local fishing as there used to be, Braun is still the largest supplier of local seafood and has even trademarked the Peconic Bay and Robins Island labels for oysters, squid and flounder in an effort to develop national recognition for the region. Ninety percent of Braun’s business is still wholesale, with sales to most of the Island’s seafood shops, “but to secure our future in the world we’re going to have to develop more retail,” said Homan. The takeout extension they added to their fish market last year is bustling and Homan has added a commercial kitchen in anticipation of his next move into the realm of dining.

Others have been able to resist this shift towards prepared foods and retailing, partly by cultivating a loyal customer base focused on whole fish. “My biggest thing is my fish market,” said Charlie Manwaring, owner of the Southold Fish Market next door to Port of Egypt on Route 25. “That’s where my heart and soul is. I’m not trying to make the big dollar on the prepared foods.” And because Manwaring was a fisher (like his father and grandfather) and has contacts with local draggers, pinhookers, pound trappers, and anyone else pulling seafood from the sea, locals swear by his shop for the largest selection of whole fish on the North Fork.

“There are so many questions about seafood nowadays,” he continued. “You’ve got to trust your fish guy. We get to know the guys who are bringing you the fish. We know the fish are being iced. You come in here at 10 o’clock in the morning and they’re still alive in my case.” Manwaring isn’t as confident about supermarket fish. “I hate supermarket fish. The stuff is frozen, it’s pumped up with water and no one knows that.” Still, the high price of fish has encouraged Manwaring to do his own smoking, make soups, and prepare other quick, “grab-and-go-things” that have a higher mark-up.

All of this differentiation, however essential and profitable, still has its own cost. “It’s something else you have to be good at,” said Sasso. “When we bought the shop twelve years ago, they didn’t sell baguettes or brie or gourmet pasta. Now we have to know where to get good fish and good, other stuff. Seafood is still the big draw.” The next stage in her “evolution,” said Sasso, “is to do more family-style meals, so people can get a roasted chicken, meatloaf, or pot roast and take it home. People don’t know that you can come here and get a great burger.” Although most seafood shops suggest that they are moving in this same direction of ready-made meals, the list of items can seem conspicuously lacking in seafood.

Which isn’t too different from the long-term shift away from just selling seafood caught nearby, according to Minardi. He admits that he lost a lot of business in his early days because he only handled fish from fishermen he knew. That meant fluke in the summer, cod, flounder and sea scallops in the winter, bay scallops and striped bass in the fall, Napeague clams in the spring. Just as shopping habits demand that you can buy a burger and guacamole at your seafood shop, most shoppers want to see smoked salmon and whitefish alongside the smoked bluefish. “It’s a global thing now,” said Minardi. “You can get fish from anywhere in the world. Before I knew where it was coming from, I knew the quality. I knew it was fresh. You can do local with a few people but you can’t really satisfy everybody.”