The Quality at Kuzma’s Fish Market Is Off the Hook

Ken Hewitt is an inveterate old-timer of the seafood industry, getting most animated when narrating the seasonal fluctuation of salmon prices and calling out the intriguing kinds of rockfish he’s looking for at the moment—redbanded or shortspine thornyhead.

“Each fish has its own personality,” he explains. But when Hewitt worked as a seafood director at Uwajimaya, he found he just couldn’t give each fish its own proper attention. “I’m gonna need to go back to my roots, go back to the small shop,” he realized. He set out on his own, opening Kuzma’s Fish Market in Edmonds in 2018.

The inspiration for the store and its name—a Croatian nickname for Ken—came from Hewitt’s grandmother. In 1972, when seafood was an almost entirely male industry, Margarita Aldrijic bought the West Hill Fish Market in West Seattle. “She got to rub elbows with all those men who told her that she wouldn’t make it,” he remembers.

Hewitt joined his grandmother as an early apprentice, starting out wrapping fish in newspapers at age 8. Within a few years, he was cutting fish, and, by the time he could drive, picking up product from the waterfront. He was 21 when the property was condemned and the business closed. “I thought I knew everything when I left my grandmother’s store and went to Mutual Fish,” he says. In 15 years at Harry Yoshimura’s iconic Rainier Valley fish shop, he learned all about sushi, sashimi, and poke—and even more about running a seafood market with personality and heart. “They knocked me down a couple notches and brought me back up.” 

Though Hewitt spent nearly two decades at Uwajimaya after leaving Mutual, Kuzma’s space inside a garage-style building echoes the latter’s friendly Rainier Valley shop more than the supermarket. Staff approach customers between the rows of live tanks that burble with oysters, clams, and crabs, helping them select from the open refrigerators of smoked and prepared seafood along one wall. 

Gleaming piles of ice chill big hunks of sashimi-quality tuna, piles of shiny black mussels, patterns of plump scallops, and long fillets of black cod, all marked with handwritten signs. In a case, the same black cod sits in kasuzuke-marinated chunks, waiting for customers to take home and cook. Hotel pans hold poke and fried fish cakes, ready to eat alone or over rice and garnished as part of a bowl, and shelves are stacked full of breadcrumbs and spice mixes—anything anyone might need to prepare a meal of seafood. 

Or not: Kuzma’s also cuts, shucks, steams, scales, and fries. “Everything comes in whole, and we break everything down here,” says Hewitt. They still fillet all the fish in-house, slice sashimi daily, and talk nervous customers through how to sauté shrimp or sear a scallop.

Two years ago, Kuzma’s expanded, nearly tripling the square footage of its Edmonds shop, allowing for a full kitchen and a seating area for customers looking to enjoy their poke bowl on-site. But it remains, in spirit and compared to supermarket operations, a small independent shop. That’s what Hewitt—and folks who shop there—love about it. “The customer starts with me and finishes with me,” he says. “I’m just the last of the old-school guys.”