Yep, I didn't want to get into that.

You have to be careful when you're buying seafood that you're actually buying what's fished near that locale. If you're in Seattle buying scallops or shrimp, well, you're eating frozen ones, cause those species literally don't grow in the Pacific Northwest. But you can absolutely find market-fresh salmon in a variety of restaurants. In Maine, lobster is cheap as fuck, sweet, and delicious... but your clams are likely frozen, and your salmon is likely Canadian at best.

And this doesn't even get into the fact that most of the local coastal fisheries in the US are totally fucked and depleted, so whereas you might get local clams in Massachusetts back in the day, or local crabs in Maryland, most of that has to be caught way off coast now. Which means commercial ships, storage, and wholesale. So even if the crab was caught roughly off Maryland, it still might be stored for a month before it actually gets to Baltimore.

> Springfield's only difference is there is less selection because there is less money.

This is the crux of what I'm talking about with sushi elsewhere in the thread. There are not enough people every night willing to go out and spend $100+ on seafood here, which means restaurants don't order a lot of high-price stock, and don't go through what they do order very fast.

But yeah, it's not "all marketing", and you're tripping hard if you think that the best sushi here is on the same level as the best sushi in Denver or Chicago.