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.
#9: Brown Shrimp
The shrimp we gather from local waters are of such fantastic quality that we're safe in calling them the best in the world. For years, they were the standard of all America. In most of the country, when people ate shrimp they were probably eating our shrimp. I guess it's a measure of how little importance quality holds when it competes against price that imported shrimp of substantially lower goodness have made their mark. For a while there, even in supermarkets in the New Orleans area, you really had to work to find local shrimp. And that's really crazy. We ought to raise hell about that. (I know I do.) Not all is a disaster, though. During shrimp season, restaurants have a hard time getting fish, because all the boats are out catching shrimp. Shrimp remain the most valuable single seafood commodity in the country, with Louisiana leading the league.
The main shrimp species that we boil, fry, and barbecue is brown shrimp. There are two seasons for brown shrimp, in the spring and the fall. During the season, trucks can be seen on roadsides all over the area selling shrimp out of ice chests. The Shrimp Lot in Westwego is the best place of all to find them, because these are the shrimpers themselves, selling the decapods they just caught. The rest of the year is not bereft of shrimp, of course. Fortunately, of all seafood shrimp are most amenable to freezing. Even refreezing them doesn't seem to destroy them--although, of course, there's nothing like getting them when they're still moving.
Few food items inspire more culinary creativity than shrimp. You can cook shrimp just about any way you can think of, and thousands of ways haven't been invented yet. But for my money, the two greatest shrimp dishes are New Orleans-style barbecue shrimp (which, of course, have no barbecue aspect) and shrimp remoulade. I can't get enough of either of these two dishes. I think a greatly underrated and little-served dish is broiled shrimp--butterflied or not, with perhaps some garlic butter but certainly a nice hit of salt and pepper. Shrimp scampi is a great pan-sauteed version of that.
On the other hand, I think fried shrimp are boring (I accept that I am in a minority in holding that view and that it represents a major taste eccentricity). And to my palate shrimp Creole is the worst dish in the entire Creole cuisine. Again, there are many disagreements, but I don't think tomatoes and shrimp go together. The biggest drawback to shrimp is peeling them. For most dishes, this is essential. But in some, the shell is not a problem--especially at certain times of the year, when the shells are very soft. For example, I almost always eat barbecue shrimp unpeeled, which is much less messy. You can go to most Japanese restaurants and order fried shrimp heads--which are exactly that--and find that they're wonderful. As are shrimp "spiders"--the complex of legs, with the meat attached at the top. We could go on endlessly on the ways in which Louisiana brown shrimp are delectable.
