Fish in a dish

Today's post is only tangentially related to the Washington trip (you'll be relieved to hear if all the marble has been getting to you).
Instead it is concerned with something I had taken for granted in New Zealand but sadly cannot here - access to good fish.  Now the fish in America is very good, as long as you are in the right place.  Central Pennsylvania is not really the right place.  When I first arrived here, aware that the trip from New York takes about four hours on a good day, I realised that fish this far inland might be a bit sketchy.  And I was right, though perhaps not for the right reason.

You can get excellent fish here, you just have to know where to go.  After a few forays that ended badly (taste wise...I haven't eaten any properly bad fish here) I've come to realise that it's only worth ordering fish in restaurants if someone I trust has recommended it.  The other night Mrs Walles and I went out to a place where we had been advised the all-you-can-eat haddock and chips was good and it was excellent.  So good that I had two platefuls.  I've also had very good seafood at a Japanese hibachi place.  But then if you were looking for somewhere that was pretty much guaranteed to have fresh fish, a Japanese restaurant would surely be a good bet.

Though fish here is generally lacklustre I don't think this is because of our distance from the coast right now.  It seems more likely that in the time before fast transportation when the coast was even more remote people here just didn't have a lot of experience with cooking and eating fresh seafood.  I think you can see this in the way that a lot of restaurants serve fish - baked and smothered in cheese sauce, the kind of dish that's designed to stifle any flavour of the fish itself.  It's a conservative region and I can easily see this indifference to fish passing from one generation to the next even as access to good seafood improved.

I'm not sure if that's the explanation, but it's still a fact that it's hard to find good seafood around here, so I'm very grateful to the friend who gave us the tip the other night.  I don't have to wait until we visit a coastal area to get my seafood fix anymore (as I did in Washington).  The new place has me hook, line and sinker.