I'd be inclined to use grep or perhaps List::Util first.

my $party = (grep $_->[0] eq 'fish', @$pairs)[0]->[1];
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use List::Util 'first';
my $party = (first {$_->[0] eq 'fish'} @$pairs)->[1];
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though it's more a case of just being different ways to do it, rather than better ways.

What probably would be better is to make a function "as_hash" that would do the conversion to a hashref (the map), so that your code would be more self-documenting.

sub as_hash {
  my $aref = shift;
  return { map @$_, @$aref };
}
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