[title type="h5"]
Thirty Best Exotic And Rare Seafood Species You Might Eat In New Orleans, Plus Three[/title]
Ten years ago, the New Orleans Menu published a survey of the 33 best seafood dishes found in Southeast Louisiana restaurants. The number was not accidental: there are thirty-three weekdays in Lent. It was a countdown, from the least interesting of the group to the best. Readers said so many nice things about that series that we've published another one ever year since.
The themes of past lists rotate among seafood restaurants, seafood dishes, and seafood species. This is a species year, using a new criterion. All thirty-three installments for 2014 are either exotic (not caught in local waters) or native seafoods we don't encounter very often.
As an extra, we'll dig up the last few countdowns of seafood restaurants and dishes and post them now and then throughout the Seafood Season. Whose strictures, it must be said, are not exactly penitential. [divider type=""]
[title type="h5"]#33: Tilapia[/title]
Tilapia is among the most widely-served finfish in America. Two aspects of tilapia have respectively great appeal to customers and restaurateurs. Its flesh is soft and white, and its flavor is negligible. Surveys of restaurant customers over the decades have show that most people like the idea of fish more than its flavor. For that reason, they gravitate to very mild species. I find a seafood flavor hard to detect in tilapia.
Restaurateurs like that popularity, but they're even happier about how easy it is to keep a supply of tilapia in the house. Because it's exclusively a farm-raised fish (its origin is the Nile River, where it has been fished for millennia) , it's almost always available from seafood wholesalers, a fact that takes a load off restaurant food buyers. For that reason, I have seen a correlation between the presence of tilapia on a menu with a lack of interesting fresh food throughout the restaurant's offerings. But not always: I have found tilapia proudly offered in more than a few otherwise excellent restaurants.
The only time I ever eat it is when the restaurant tricks me into ordering it, usually by calling it something else. (St. Peter's fish is a common one.) I like my fish to taste like fish. Tilapia tastes like nothing to me.
Written by Tom Fitzmorris March 05, 2014 08:50 in
