Lake fish in Annecy: four species, many misunderstandings

“Lake fish” appears on a great many menus in Annecy. On Lake Annecy it is caught by two people. That isn’t an accusation, it’s a physical constraint, and it explains almost everything that follows. Here are the species, the reality of professional fishing on the lake, and the words that give a menu away.

What the lake actually holds

Four species turn up on menus, plus two the fishermen know better than the visitors do.

Féra comes first by a distance. The word is a local usage: people around Lake Annecy and Lake Geneva use it for the whitefish Coregonus lavaretus, “especially when it appears on a restaurant menu”, as the French research institute INRAE puts it. On Lac du Bourget and the smaller subalpine lakes the same fish is called lavaret. Note the consequence: féra names a species, never an origin.

Omble chevalier, Arctic char, is the most sought-after salmonid here and the scarcest of the four by volume.

Perch and pike complete the short list. Burbot and lake trout exist too, in small quantities, mostly in winter.

Lake Annecy escaped the eutrophication that collapsed whitefish populations in most lakes of the region from the 1980s onwards. It had a decline of its own all the same: catches fell among amateur anglers from 2004, then among the professionals. Things have improved since, helped by a tightening of the rules in 2011 and by favourable spawning conditions. The lake has been scientifically monitored since 1992.

Two professional fishermen, and what follows from that

Lake Annecy has two professional fishermen. Each lands an average of 5 to 6 tonnes of féra a year. One of them adds roughly 2 tonnes of perch, 1 to 2 tonnes of crayfish, small volumes of Arctic char, and 100 to 500 kg of burbot and pike in winter. Nets go down in the late afternoon and are lifted before dawn, six days a week. Sonar is banned for professional fishing. Restaurants make up a little more than half of their customers; the rest goes to direct sales and small retailers.

Let’s do the arithmetic out loud, because it says more than any verdict. Around a dozen tonnes of féra a year for the whole lake, at 150 grams of fillet per plate, gives something like 80,000 portions a year. Spread across the calendar, that is roughly two hundred portions a day — for every restaurant in the agglomeration, every fishmonger and every household put together.

Two hundred portions. You can see immediately why a whole street cannot serve lake fish every evening in July.

Fishing has seasons, and they are written down

The dates are set each year by prefectural order, which means they move: check the current order rather than take our word for it. The shape of the year, though, is stable.

Salmonids — trout, Arctic char, whitefish — are open from late January to mid-October. They are therefore closed through autumn and early winter, which is the spawning period. Pike is protected in spring, with a break of about two months. On top of that come minimum sizes (37 cm for whitefish under the current order), daily bags, annual caps and a catch log to return to the administration. Those rules govern recreational fishing; professional fishing sits under a separate licensing regime.

The consequence for your plate is direct. In autumn, fresh lake féra becomes scarce. A kitchen may perfectly well serve frozen fish — but then it says so, and the word “fresh” comes off the menu.

How to spot a menu that promises without serving

Six checks, in the order you can make them.

1. The exact wording. “Perch fillets” is not “perch from Lake Annecy”. “Lake fish” with no species named means nothing, which is precisely why it gets written.
2. Féra is not an origin. Whitefish is caught and farmed elsewhere. The name alone tells you nothing about which body of water it came from.
3. Perch is the breaking point. Around Lake Geneva, an investigation by RTS and the consumer magazine Bon à savoir established that the overwhelming majority of perch fillets eaten in the region come from abroad — Estonia, Russia and Poland foremost — and that about a third of the establishments tested were serving imported fish without saying so. That investigation covers Switzerland and Lake Geneva, not Annecy: we have no equivalent study here. But the supply logic is identical, and Lake Annecy lands roughly two tonnes of perch a year.
4. Permanent availability. A lake species offered all year round without interruption, in a high-turnover room, is an arithmetical improbability before it is a lie.
5. The three-part question. Which species, which lake, landed when? How fast the answer arrives matters more than its content — the same test as in the six tells for reading a terrace.
6. Absence, which is a good sign. A menu that doesn’t promise lake fish is often more reliable than one that always does.

What we could not verify

Two claims circulate that we are setting aside for want of a primary source. First, the history of whitefish introductions and restocking between the Alpine lakes in the nineteenth century, often told across the table, which we could only trace through secondary sources. Second, the real proportion of imported fish served in Annecy’s restaurants, which as far as we know has never been publicly measured. We would rather say so than fill the gap.

What we wouldn’t do

• Order perch on a quayside on an August Saturday and expect it to have come out of the lake.
• Be surprised that there is no fresh féra in November. That is the regulation working, not the kitchen failing.
• Confuse the lake with its river: the Thiou, which drains it at the northern end, turned tanneries for six centuries before it became a postcard — a different story altogether, and nothing to do with fishing.

Lake Annecy supports two fishermen. A menu that acknowledges that tells you more about the house than ten lines of description.