Where to find the finest fish dishes
I doubt there's a country in the world with so much access to so much fresh seafood as the United States—two long, wriggling ocean coastlines, large rough gulfs, big and small rivers, and hundreds of thousands of lakes, from Maine to Minnesota.
Yet for most of the post-1950s era, when the technology of freezing took hold on American food, frozen fish became the norm rather than the exception; most restaurants bought poor quality, cheap seafood. Then they overcooked it—usually fried or broiled.
See our slideshow of Best U.S. Seafood Restaurants.
Seafood restaurants tended to be cavernous tourist haunts like Anthony’s Pier 4 in Boston, the Sardine Factory in Monterey, and Bookbinder’s in Philadelphia, all driven by high volume to turn out thousands of seafood platters with cole slaw, French fries and ketchup on the side.
But when America underwent a gourmet revolution in the '80s, seafood restaurants began demanding better and fresher product, so that the famous Grand Central Oyster Bar in New York, which, since opening in 1913, had foundered for decades, re-emerged as a bellwether of great seafood, simply prepared—not least in its creamy oyster pan roasts and seasonal runs of shad and softshell crabs. Under its vast arched ceiling, tiled by the artist who also did the Great Hall of Ellis Island, with its curving counter and take-out bar, the GCOB seems like the very belly of the city.
A sea change occurred in 1986 when the great Parisian seafood restaurant Le Bernardin opened a branch in New York and immediately garnered four stars from the New York Times. Chef Gilbert LeCoze and his sister Maguy ferreted out the freshest, highest quality fish at the often squalid Fulton Fish Market (since relocated to the Bronx). At a time when most French and continental restaurants featured species like Dover sole, turbot and Norwegian salmon, LeCoze favored American black sea bass, Columbia River sturgeon and Nantucket bay scallops. Other restaurateurs and chefs took their cue from Le Bernardin, and soon Northwest Dungeness crab, rainbow trout, Pacific oysters, blue crabs and Gulf redfish were joined by Mediterranean species like branzino and orata. As at Le Bernardin, they were served with finesse—lightly cooked, sometimes in a bath of vinegar and Asian spices.
At Ray’s Boathouse, once a simple fish-and-chips place in Seattle, overlooking Shilshole Bay, local ingredients rule: You may start off with Neah Bay cold-smoked salmon with espresso mustard, or Skookum Inlet mussels steamed in butter and a dill broth, then move on to Columbia River Chinook salmon with an apricot compote, or Chatham Strait sablefish with corn custard, all accompanied by a great Pacific Northwest wine list. The James Beard Foundation calls Ray’s one of “America’s Classics.”
See our slideshow of Best U.S. Seafood Restaurants.
You can find great Gulf seafood all over New Orleans, of course. Paul Prudhomme’s famous “blackened redfish” at K-Paul’s Louisiana Kitchen was so popular the species was almost fished out. But there are others—at GW Fins, chef Tenny Flynn keeps to tradition with dishes like his seafood gumbo of oysters and crab, and his wood-grilled lemon fish with crabmeat. But he has global reach, evident in creations like his wasabi-crusted maxi with Asian vegetables, sticky rice and sweet soy butter, and macadamia-and-pepper crusted swordfish with a veal jus and crispy onions.
At Kyma in Atlanta, the Karatassos family has created a Greek seafood restaurant that not only rivals but actually inspires similar restaurants in Greece itself. The Karatassoses visited Greece extensively, ate everywhere, learned everything. They then adapted the idea of simply grilled whole fish, and started with a seafood mezze that included wonderfully smoky grilled octopus. Not only was Kyma called the best seafood restaurant in the city by Atlanta magazine, but it received Georgia Trend’s Silver Spoon Award as best restaurant overall.
If there is one truly great new entry in the field this year it is L20, wordplay for French chef Laurent Gras’ watery domain of a restaurant in Chicago that is clearly an evolution of what Le Bernardin began 22 years ago. Gras’ grasp of so many species and so many food cultures shows in his superb Asian sushi as much as it does in dishes like Japanese snapper whose scales and skin he crisps so that it adds textural counterpoint to the sweet flesh of the fish itself.
It is, of course, still wonderful to see that a very, very old-fashioned seafood restaurant has maintained its standards—and a near monopoly—on its namesake item. Joe’s Stone Crab Restaurant opened on Miami Beach the same year that Grand Central Oyster Bar debuted. But Joe’s is a much simpler operation, where a critter once thrown away by fishermen came to assume star status on the menu—and at star prices. The stone crab, whose shell Damon Runyan said was as “hard as a landlord’s heart,” is a delicacy of luscious white meat that gets dipped into melted butter or a mustard-mayonnaise of Joe’s devising. It is marvelous and the very epitome of the simple goodness of American seafood in its purest form.