Nopa chef-owner Laurence Jossel is teaming up with fishmonger Joe Conte to open a new seafood restaurant and fish market at the Ferry Building, and it's called Nopa Fish.

The good news abounds for the Ferry Building food scene, where a buzzworthy Cambodian spot, Lunette, just debuted in June, and where the Michelin-starred Sorrel team is planning a big new restaurant and bakery in the former Slanted Door space. Today the Chronicle brings the first word on Nopa Fish, the new project of Nopa's Laurence Jossel and Water2Table, the local fishmonger operation owned by Joe Conte — who in 2022 briefly ran Ancora, a high-end seafood restaurant, on Valencia Street.

Nopa Fish will be a counter-service affair in Suite 31 of the Ferry Building, the space previously occupied by, appropriately, San Francisco Fish Market. There will be a retail component with fresh fish and shellfish on offer, as well as grab-and-go meals. And the menu, per the Chronicle, will consist of "classic seafood dishes, chowders and salads," including at least one fried fish dish.

"The Ferry Building is a great place to introduce tourists to our food scene and celebrate what us locals do. It’s a great launching pad for a new restaurant," Jossel says in a statement to the Chronicle.

And the Ferry Building issued a statement saying "Nopa Fish will not only enhance the variety of offerings in our marketplace but also support our mission of promoting local, sustainable food."

The opening timeframe is early 2025, which means Nopa Fish should be opening around the same time as the as-yet-unnamed Sorrel offshoot.

This is the first expansion project for Jossel since the debut of Nopalito over a decade ago, which is now run by former Nopa partners Allyson Jossel (Jossel's ex-wife) and Jeff Hanak, and former Nopa cook Gonzalo Guzman. Jossel bought out his partners at Nopa during the pandemic, becoming sole owner of the 17-year-old restaurant — which itself was a kind of bellwether for the Divisadero corridor's gentrification when it opened in 2006. And he now runs it with wife Holly Rhodes, who will also be running Nopa Fish.

Jossel's partner Joe Conte, meanwhile, has a long history in the Bay Area's restaurant world, having been operations manager for Spectrum Foods in decades' past — the restaurant group that included trenty spots like MacArthur Park in Palo Alto and Guaymas in Tiburon — and vice president of oeprations for Wolfgang Puck's restaurant group. He launched Water2Table a decade ago, and the company has become the go-to fishmonger for Michelin-starred restaurants Atelier Crenn and Lazy Bear, among others.

San Francisco could certainly use a high-end fish market, and judging from Water2Table's offerings, we can expect Nopa Fish's retail counter to offer things like fresh local anchovies, Monterey vermillions, local black cod, local halibut, Southern California bluefin tuna, and more.

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