Lessons on ahi tartare and doughnuts, Cooking For Solutions-style.

An iceberg-shaped chunk of ahi looms on the stage-lit demo table next to a sharp knife and a tantalizingly blank cutting board. The audience sips sparkling wine and noshes on croquettes and bruschetta, waiting to see what Chef Matt Bolton (of event host InterContinential The Clement Monterey) is going to do with this gorgeous, grade-1 tuna.

The cooking demo opens last Saturday evening's "Bubbles and Bites on the Bay," one of a series of events in Monterey Bay Aquarium's restructured Cooking for Solutions festival for sustainable seafoodies. (Is "seafoodie" a word? Let's make it a word.)

Bolton says his fisherman pal caught the ahi near Hawaii using mousetrap gear, which he says is a sustainable technique involving a squid-baited hook and bobber, "a giant version of trout fishing on a lake."

(Geoff Shester, California director of marine conservation nonprofit Oceana, responds to my Tweet on that point: "mousetrap gear is illegal now off Calif, but we'd like to change that…It's a clean alternative to drift gillnets.")

Tonight's demo: tuna tartare. Bolton gives cred to Beverly Hills chef Shigefumi Tachibe for inventing the dish in the 1980s, when his customers asked for steak tartare but he was out—leading him to improv with the meaty fish, an umami-packed member of the mackerel family.

Bolton's version adds ginger-jalapeño aioli to diced ahi (which he shows us how to cut, first removing the sinewy part and the bloodline) and garnish.

While Bolton works, David Rosenberg of the Monterey Bay Aquarium takes a few moments to impress us with tuna facts. There are eight species of tuna, he says, and they can swim to depths of up to 800 feet. The largest ever caught was 21 feet long and some 1,600 pounds, he says, selling for "more than a luxury car" on the Japanese market.

Sous Chef Michelle Lee steps ups next to demo fresh doughnuts. She rolls out the dough with a French rolling pin ("with love," she says, "expel the gas") and reveals the secret to good yeast doughnuts: timing. The dough, after rising, should spring back when lightly poked.

"I like my doughnuts cute and chubby, kinda like my men," she says.

Lee keeps the comedy rolling. She explains that a properly proofed doughnut sports a "sexy white line" around the middle. And she pooh-poohs the notion that some cooks might skip the salt: "Why would you not use salt? It makes everything better."

Her diet trick: "I like smaller doughnuts, 'cause you don't feel guilty if you have two."

Out on The Clement's deck overhanging Monterey Bay, we mingle and munch. The bubbly and wine flow as one solitary otter does languid rolls on the surface of the kelp forest below.

Bolton's tuna tartare, atop brioche toast and wonton crisps, pairs beautifully with raw cheeses from Big Sur's Schock Dairy. As a jazz singer croons, two guys from Morro Bay Oyster Company, one of whom rocks an artfully curled mustache, shuck nonstop.

Lee's petite doughnut holes, filled with jam she made from local P&J organic strawberries, are gone pretty quickly.

Some of us (ahem) may have had more than two.