Find The Fish

"It Was A Most Elusive Little Fish..."

Don't ask these guys to help you find a fish...

I had an odd urge to consume something with fins & scales yesterday.

Houston's a pretty good town for getting some seafood.  With the Gulf nearby, there's no lack of shrimp, oysters, redfish and other tasty local goodies.

There's a local chain called Mambo's that does a pretty fair job of serving up the pescado. 

Since it's also less than a mile from the house, I dropped by after work.

They don't have a huge breadth to their menu.  Appetizers are few, mostly ceviche and fried things.

For the fish, you can choose from red snapper, catfish, tilapia and basa. Oh, and gar, which I wouldn't eat on a bet.  There's also lobster, oysters, and shrimp.

Damn! There's octopus!  Can't forget the octopus!

I got a shrimp cocktail to start.  I much prefer a Gringo shrimp cocktail.  The typical SC in a Mexican-style place is a mug full of salad shrimp, chopped onions, peppers and avocado doused with ketchup and hot sauce.   It's OK, but I prefer jumbo shrimp & horseradish spiked cocktail sauce...

The dinner special was a whole red snapper for 16 bucks, so instead of my usual combo platter (which is all fried, and not that good for me), I splurged and got the snapper split down the center and grilled.

Damn, that was one tasty fish.  A lot of bones, though.  Sections around the head and fins were slow going to keep from inhaling the pinbones.  I gave up with the fork and just used my fingers.  To hell with being polite, there was fish to consume!

While the fish was grilling, I used my phone to figure out just WTF "Basa" and "tilapia" were.  Basa is just a fat Vietnamese farm-raised catfish.  It's called Basa so the U.S. catfish growers keep a monopoly on the catfish name.

I always thought tilapia was some kind of South American fish.  I had it confused with the Arowana.  Turns out, though it's called perch or bream sometimes, it's really an African Cichlid.  So, when you're dining on tilapia, you're pretty much eating a fish identical to the Oscars or Jack Dempseys your tropical fish-loving friends have raised.

Looks like it's basa from here on out...