Just what we needed! Another seafood label! The latest is Smart Catch, and it will certify restaurants that commit to serving seafood that meets the label’s sustainability standards.

In particular, Smart Catch is emphasizing “storied fish,” which is to say, fish whose provenance will make for interesting presentation to diners. From this, one infers that fish caught locally, or perhaps fresh overnighted from some interesting place, are likely candidates for celebration, as opposed to those that are, say, flash frozen, shipped to China, processed, refrozen, and shipped back to a container port for distribution and re-thawing prior to deep frying.

In its essence, I like the idea. Ideally, dining should be an experience, and having a knowledgeable server or even chef relate the stories (or as Smart Catch likes to say, tales) lurking beneath the surface of the menu certainly qualifies as experience.

Trouble is, we already have a zillion seafood labels. (Don’t believe me? Check out https://goo.gl/S2bPyJ.)

Smart Catch is the brainchild, we are told, of Paul Allen, a guy whose prolificity of brainchildren includes computer operating systems, a rock and roll museum, professional sports teams and numerous scientific and philanthropic endeavors.

This invests in it a certain cache and, assuming Allen’s ongoing commitment, staying power.

I wasn’t much on seafood labels in the beginning and nothing in the intervening years has changed my mind. But I do see in Smart Catch a potential mechanism for advancing diners’ interest in seafood as well as the cause of locally caught fish.

It depends, of course, on whether the tale actually tells us something about the fish, who caught it and where, or is a bromide such as “We don’t serve trawl-caught fish.”

This one could go either way.

You know which way I’m leaning.