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Just beyond the balcony on the 22nd-floor penthouse, New York City’s skyscrapers flickered, and the Yale Club’s tablecloths flapped as white as the waiters’ jackets in the night breeze. Yet the fresh air was not the star of this 2013 spring night, but rather, fresh water. Specifically, the kind used to produce the night’s supper – Atlantic salmon.

Served three ways – raw as tartare, roasted with skin on or cured as gravlax – this salmon had been farmed using a new technique, in fresh water on an inland salmon farm. The guests, members of the Atlantic Salmon Federation, hoped that more salmon farmed this way could help save endangered wild salmon.

“The flavor was great,” said the chef, Tom Valenti, noting that in terms of taste the pink fillets were to other farmed salmon what heirloom tomatoes are to winter beefsteaks. “But my angle, forgive the pun, has more to do with conservation.”

With an inland farm in British Columbia poised for the first time to start selling commercial quantities of freshwater-reared salmon this month, conservationists in North America are counting on chefs and shoppers to show the aquaculture industry that inland farming is a viable alternative. The standard practice of farming salmon in huge sea cages is toxic to the oceans, they say, and deadly to wild salmon.

So how is the new technology working?

“All of the fish has been pre-sold for the next year and people are very excited,” said Guy Dean, vice president of Canada’s Albion Fisheries, a distributor of inland-raised salmon.

Albion sells this special salmon for around 20 percent more than salmon farmed offshore. The price point fills an important niche for a growing number of concerned consumers who are willing to pay more for safe salmon, Dean said, but who can’t afford to pay triple for sustainably caught wild Pacific salmon. People who tasted the inland-farmed salmon for market research reported that it was leaner, less fishy and more buttery than standard farmed salmon – similar to wild salmon, he said.

“This salmon has the ability to tell a story on multiple levels: its sustainable impact, the non-use of pesticides or chemicals,” he said. “So for the average [consumer] it really resonates.”