The 33 Best Fish And Shellfish, Local And Exotic
Every year on the thirty-three weekdays of Lent, we present a ranking of the best seafood around town. Some years we rank seafood restaurants. On others, we rank specific dishes. Three years ago, it was the thirty-three best local seafood species for the table. This year, the subject is all the seafood that we find in our restaurants, seafood markets, and our dinner tables at home. The list is dominated by local seafood--we live in one of the great fisheries of the world, after all. But it also includes favorites from other places. Salmon and scallops. Lobster. Mussels. Halibut. Our chefs prepare spectacular dishes with those fine guests from other waters.
The list is not a countdown, beginning with the thirty-third best and working up to Number One. Rather, it starts at the top. It's a measure of how superb our seafood selection is that even #33 is involved in many excellent local dishes.
#13: Yellowfin Tuna
In New Orleans, fresh tuna went from unavailable to favorite in about three years. That was in the early 1980s. Before then, if you asked for or were offered tuna, you meant tuna from a can. The fresh was just not available. (We had no sushi bars then, either.) Tuna is obviously different from most other fish we eat. It's never seen in fillet form--always in steaks. Its color spectrum is shades of deep red. It has the texture of meat, with flakes so big that sometimes a large piece of the fish shows no flake structure at all. Most of the fresh tuna we eat is yellowfin tuna from the Gulf of Mexico. It's also known by its Japanese name ah. In stores, it's often marked "sushi grade." There is no official sushi-grade, so you can ignore that. The best cuts of tuna come from well forward on the fish, and far away from the dark bloodline areas. The rules of tuna cookery differ as much from those for other fish as its appearance. Tuna is the most popular species of fish eaten raw, or nearly raw. It's easier to accept than other raw fish, for some reason. Even outside of the sushi world, rare seared tuna is the standard style. During a legislative hearing on the disappearance of redfish in the early 1980s, Chef Paul Prudhomme, whose sensational blackened redfish caused the craze, said that tuna was a much better fish to blacken than redfish. He's right. Nothing's better blackened than tuna, and no way of cooking tuna is better than blackening it. What comes out is something that looks likes, feels like, and almost tastes like a beefsteak. Which is the key to tuna: cook it like you'd cook meat. Methods of preparation, sauces, and garnishes that work well with a steak probably will be equally rewarding for tuna. I'd like to make another suggestion to cookers of tuna, both at home and in restaurants. Instead of cutting it into the standard three-quarter-inch-thick steaks, how about reducing the width and increasing the thickness? The best tuna dishes I ever had involved what amounted to blocks, rather than slices, of tuna.
Fast forward to now, and you’re most likely to see Tuna Crudo on menus around town.
