Virtual Gourmet

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THIS WEEK

Why Do U.S. Restaurants Serve
So Few Species of Seafood?
By John Mariani

NEW YORK CORNER
SAITONG
By John Mariani

THE MAGDALENE LAUNDRIES
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
By John Mariani

NOTES FROM THE SPIRITS LOCKER

Asian Spirits and Brews Have Become a
Major Innovator in the Global Market

By John Mariani

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ANNOUNCEMENT! There will be no Sunday issues of Mariani's Virtual Gourmet Newsletter for Sept. 15 and 22 because
Mariani will be in Italy during that time, eating around Lazio,
Puglia and Abruzzo.

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Why Do U.S. Restaurants Serve
So Few Species of Seafood?

By John Mariani

Tsukiji Seafood Market, Tokyo

According to Oceana, an advocacy group dedicated to ocean conservation, the U.S. imports more than 2,000 species of seafood from all over the world, to the tune of $25 billion last year. That’s out of a total of about 30,000 species of fish and shellfish in the world’s waters. Some, like bay scallops and shad, are seasonal, others, like sea cucumbers and barracuda, are regional.

Yet with so much to choose from, the offerings on U.S. restaurant menus—even those that call themselves seafood focused—the pickings are frustratingly few. There’s always salmon, almost always branzino, maybe halibut, and then mussels, shrimp, perhaps lobster.

Typical is the very popular Goode Company Seafood in Houston, whose menu list a dozen shrimp dishes, several crab, redfish, tuna, oysters, catfish, yellowfin and salmon. And that’s it. The historic Tadich Grill in San Francisco lists oysters, fried calamari, Dungeness crab, petrale sole, sand dabs, halibut, swordfish, Chilean sea bass and, of course, salmon. Even in New Orleans, an acclaimed place like Pêche offers five main courses, only three of them fish: drum, tuna and jumbo shrimp, along with fish sticks and seafood salad for starters.

If you’re willing to pay $750 per person (before drinks, tax and tip) at a sushi restaurant like Masa (right) in New York, you will certainly be served an array that may include stone crab, uni sea urchins, akamutsu seabass, bonito, Japanese sea perch, fatty tuna belly, amaebi sweet shrimp, golden eye snapper, striped jack, needle fish, sea water eel, smoked mackerel, abalone and more within the tasting menu, most imported. But such a selection is unimaginable elsewhere in American restaurants.

One exception is the venerable Grand Central Oyster Bar & Restaurant (below) in New York, here since 1913, specializing in seasonal and day-to-day species that at the moment features Ipswich clams, Spanish octopus, bigeye tuna from Montauk, 20 different oysters, Chatham monkfish, Icelandic Arctic char, rainbow trout, grouper, catfish, bream, scrod, New Zealand King salmon and much more on a menu the size of the New York Times front page.

The U.S. has plenty of seafood markets, though their selection wouldn’t make a dent in those 2,000 species. At Pike’s Market in Seattle (below), you’ll find Pacific Northwest species, and in Hawaii you’ll find wonderful Pacific seafood from ahi tuna and ōpakapaka, honu turtle, ula crayfish, ono, moana red mullet and mūhe’e squid.

So who’s buying those 2,000 species of seafood beyond the usual dozen? Some will be frozen or canned to serve specialty ethnic markets like Chinatown; some, like pollock, will be processed into surimi; others will be used as food for other species to eat.

The question is, why are restaurants not buying more than a handful of seafood species? The simple answer, culled from my asking several American chefs around the U.S., is that Americans are still squeamish about seafood and only order what they know, with shrimp and salmon the best sellers. That means mild flavored fish like sole, branzino and halibut. No chef in Phoenix, Arizona, Ames, Iowa, is going to take a chance air-freighting in stronger flavor fish like mackerel, mullet, bluefish, sardines, anchovies, herring, carp and bonito. Even swordfish is a rarity. If, out of those 2,000 species, an exotic fish with an odd name lands on a menu, what are the chances enough people will order it?

Also, for so long Americans preference for frozen fish that has been breaded and fried is still widespread; even people who don’t like fish will eat a fish stick. And still in the South, pompano (which Mark Twain described as being “as delicious as the less criminal forms of sin”) and catfish are almost always fried. No one in the South used to eat drum—long considered a trash fish—until the late Cajun chef Paul Prudhomme doused it with an snowfall of seasonings and sauteed it in an ocean of butter and called it “blackened redfish,” which became so popular at his New Orleans restaurant K-Paul’s Louisiana Kitchen that the wild species was banned by the federal fisheries.

One also has to remember that before the 1950s most of the world’s population lived on a meager diet of whatever was at hand, which encouraged coastline dwellers in China, Japan, Italy, Greece and Spain to eat just about everything and anything they could pull from the sea—the kind of thing TV celeb Andrew Zimmern would consume on his show “Bizarre Foods” and wrote about in Andrew Zimmern's Field Guide to Exceptionally Weird, Wild, and Wonderful Foods, gulping down grouper throats, mullet tail, grubs, live ants and the live beating heart of a frog—none likely to show up on menus here.

Americans wouldn’t touch such foods, not when chickens, pigs and beef were so readily available. In fact, when indentured slaves came to New England, their contracts demanded they did not have to eat lobster more than three times a week. Also, many Americans shy away from cooking seafood because it’s thought to be difficult to cook right.

We’ve been spoiled and for a very long time. Go to any supermarket—especially an Asian H Mart—and you may be overwhelmed by every imaginable kind of food, from ten kinds of Mexican tacos and twenty kinds of Chinese dumplings to fifty types of Korean kimchee. H Mart does have a seafood section, but the more unfamiliar species are not what most white Americans have much interest in, not when they can buy a nice piece of lemon sole and a slab of salmon every day of the year.

I know I’m spoiled: My fishmonger is Randazzo’s Seafood (right) in the Little Italy section of the Bronx, run by two brothers, one of whom shops the early morning fish market six days a week while his brother mans the shop. And when I go, seeing twenty or more kinds of fish arrayed on ice, the live crabs in their stalls, and the eels and lobster in their tanks, it’s always difficult to choose among the myriad choices, from porgy to orata, from tuna belly to pink salmon whose flesh tastes like butter, the dried baccalà cod and the Montauk bluefish, the tins of preserved anchovies and the cartons of fresh jumbo blue crabmeat.

It’s what I buy and bring home and cook, and I buy by the seasons. Sadly, I don’t expect to find much of that in American restaurants.

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NEW YORK CORNER

SAITONG

244 West 48^th Street

646-998-4089

By John Mariani

Even if the Michelin Guide to Bangkok gives stars to eight French restaurants out of 34 rated, I can’t imagine ever seeking out an ultra-expensive French hotel dining room in a city whose food culture is one of the richest and diverse in Asia. In meal after meal in Bangkok, guided by a local food writer, I never had the same dish twice. Indeed, no dish ever tasted like any other dish.

That has not, until recently, been the case in New York, where, as in Chinese and Indian restaurants, so many dishes are similar to one another, too often made with frozen vegetables. This has, however, changed a good deal in the last few years, so that, were I given to predictions, I’d say that Thai cuisine will achieve in popularity and media attention currently enjoyed by Korean cuisine.

A fine example is SaiTong in midtown, a dramatic looking, well-lighted spot with a menu that goes well beyond the usual dishes. “Sai” denotes both the banyan tree, beloved in Thailand for its Buddhist associations of enlightenment, as well as the word for a tool in rural areas used to trap animals.

It is owned by the Lam family who also run Spicy Shallot in Queens. The new place is under the care of son Brian Lam, with

Executive Chef Kittibhumi Kanarat, who hails from of Nakorn Sri Thammartat, whose cooking emphasizes that of Southern Thailand, not least seafood dishes. All are in big portions meant to be shared at the table, so ordering a few appetizers is requisite to appreciate SaiTong’s range. I left the ordering up to Lam and Kanarat, and we took a lot of food home.

The space itself is wondrously decorated in various woods with a vortex hung from the ceiling in the dining room. The tables are rustic wood or polished stone, the food comes on various ceramic plates, and banquettes line a highlighted wall of what appears to be striated rock.

As in any country’s cuisine, many ingredients are used repeatedly in many dishes, but the trick is to have them interact in different ways as to enhance the main ingredient, and Thai cooks do this with grace and deft. Heat and salt, sweetness and sour must be in balance, and, contrary to many people’s belief, heat is a function, not a dominant, of flavor. The single pepper symbol here indicates a dish that is supposed to be quite fiery, though the kitchen can temper it. Nakorn fish curry salad is one of those where heat matters, coated with a curry paste with tuna fish and tossed with fragrant herbs then decorated with slices of boiled eggs and the texture of crispy fried fish ($28).

Another seafood dish, quickly fried snapper, is treated to a simpler black pepper and basil sauce ($45). An item from the southern province of Chumphon, pineapple curry ($48) adds mussels to the mix topped with grilled sea bass fillets.

Chaiya pad Thai ($38) is a milder dish by design, a mountain of rice noodles, shallots, chili paste, shrimp paste, coconut milk and salted egg yolk, stir-fried with tamarind sauce then sumptuously topped with grilled lobster tail and cheese and served with chives, bean sprouts, shredded mango and long beans (right)—as Lucullan a dish as you’ll find in Thai cookery.

Turmeric tom kha soup ($16) is a delicious mélange of strong chicken broth mellowed with coconut milk and spiced with fragrant galangal, turmeric, red onions, gourd and sprinkling of coriander.

If you prefer meat, the Yala grilled wagyu strip loin with Gulabuza Malaysian-style paste ($38) is very spicy, assuaged by potato mash, a rolled crêpe and a counterpoint of onion rings. My favorite meat dish was grilled pork jowl ($25) marinated with chili lime sauce to cut the fat-rich meal and roasted rice powder coating.

Thais love duck, and the duck fruit curry ($35) here comes crisp and sizzling to the table, slathered with red curry and hot chilies, tomato, pineapple, black grapes, pumpkin, lychee and basil, which may one the most complex rendering of ingredients on the menu.

If you like English toffee pudding, you’ll love the mango sticky rice, either as a side dish or as a dessert ($15).

This food is always tantalizing but the key at SaiTong is that nothing tastes like anything else on the menu, despite the replication of ingredients, which, happily, makes return visits here requisite. There’s a lot more on the menu I didn’t eat or mention, so it’s an adventure I’d like to pursue again and again.

Open daily for lunch and dinner.

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THE MAGDALENE LAUNDRIES
By John Mariani

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

As Katie well knew, Dobell tore up his timetable and told her to stay in Ireland until these crimes against nuns and priests finally came to an end.

“Those women from the Laundries are really taking their toll, aren’t they?” he said on the phone. “Cutting them down like wheat.”

Katie thought that was crude and told her editor so. They then discussed aspects of the continuing story, and Dobell seemed to suggest Katie’s going deeper into the Laundries’ history was important to it.

That evening she and David spoke about everything they’d learned that day.

“Any update from Max?” she asked.

“As of late today, not much. He just hopes the hell it ends with this one event. He’s not sure if it was attempted murder or not. The perpetrator might’ve been scared away by someone in the rectory before she had a chance to finish Liddy off. I can’t imagine she’d let him live to tell what Liddy knows.”

“Unless she thought Liddy would bleed to death before someone found him,” said Katie. “Or maybe she wants Liddy to talk about the reason he was mutilated. It would come out that Liddy was a sexual predator, one way or the other, and he’d have to live with that, maybe go to prison. That could blow the lid off the whole slimy bunch of them.”

“Oh, that would be a pretty sight,” said David, “him walking around prison without his genitals, make new friends, meet some old enemies.”

“Sick as that sounds, David, maybe that’s also what the perpetrator had in mind by letting Liddy live.”

After a bite at a nearby pub, Katie and David spent the rest of the evening going off everything that had occurred since they set foot in Ireland, trying to make links between the murders and this new crime.

Would the current perpetrator be someone who’d known Maureen Maloney? Had they been together in the Laundries and known Liddy? Was it possible that both women had hatched a plot together, parceling out the nuns to one and the priests to the other? Could there possibly be other women out there who were also intent on further violence against their abusers? David again brought up the possibility that one of the women’s fathers or husbands might have been driven to assault Denis Liddy to avenge what their daughter or wife had been through.

“In each case the perp had to know exactly where the victim would be at a specific hour and figure out how to get to them,” said David.

“Would that be so difficult?” said Katie. “The nuns were always in the same place at the same time according to their schedules. One was at her convent, another in her schoolroom and another in her apartment. And Mother Augusta was in the hospital room. And now Liddy was in his rectory, as would be expected after dinner.”

“In the case of Mother Augusta,” said David, “it was easy for Maureen to do the job because she was already working at the hospital. Now that I think of it, she must have saved Augusta for last, after finishing off the others. Must’ve made Mother Augusta terrified. Maureen would never have gotten to her, with all the police security, except that she could come and go, right past them.”

“Right, and until the police had the third murder on their hands, they didn’t see the requirement to throw security around the other living nuns.”

“Exactly,” said David, “and Maureen knew that would happen that way. That’s why she committed the first two murders in such quick succession, then the third, which set off the alarms that all the Sisters of Charity were under threat.”

“So we’re left with Mons. Liddy,” said Katie. “Does this mean Max is going to send Gardato every parish in Dublin? I read that there are at least a hundred churches in the city, and God knows how many schools priests might teach in.”

“Yeah, that would be impossible. I’m thinking that Max will try to find if Liddy had any connection to the Laundries, and if he did, there might well be other priests still in Dublin who were molesting the women along with Liddy. That would narrow the security measures Max would order into play. He told me he was trying to cull a list from the little he had in his files. Well, I’ll see him first thing tomorrow and get an update. Who you seeing?”

“I’ve got calls in to some of the women I’ve already interviewed who might know something about Liddy or have names of other predator priests.”

Katie particularly wanted to speak to Sharon Burns, who had seemed to be the most forthright among several with good reasons to want the nuns dead as well as the priests. She was also one of the youngest, a few years younger than Maureen Maloney. Katie also found Sharon’s being a call girl intriguing, having never met one before.

David had said, “Be careful. All hookers lie like hell. It’s crucial to their profession.”

“She’s a call girl, not a hooker,” said Katie.

David smiled, “If that’s what you want to call her, go right ahead.”

When Katie telephoned, Sharon sounded like she would look forward to seeing Katie and talk about the murders and the mutilation of Father Liddy. Sharon had known Maureen Maloney briefly in the Laundries and wasn’t really surprised she turned out to be the perpetrator.

When Katie arrived at her flat, Sharon had just changed from lingerie to a silk robe and slippers, apparently being between clients.

“Maureen finally got her revenge,” said Sharon, lighting a cigarette. “But it doesn’t sound like she found any peace in it. Maybe none of us who came out of the Laundries ever will.”

It was a great quote and Katie made sure Sharon would allow her to use it in the story. Katie then asked Sharon to tell her more about the priests, even the police officers, who came to the Laundries and molested the women. Before getting to Father Liddy, Katie asked Sharon if she’d go through some names of priests that Sarah Garrison had provided in order to find out if any rang a bell and to find out if any were still alive.

There were about a dozen on Garrison’s list. Sharon didn’t recognize most of the names and of the four she did know, she believed two were dead, including Father O’Rourke who she’d said had molested her and others for years. Another, named Duffy, was “ancient by now.”

“What about Father Denis Liddy?”

Sharon laughed and said, “Ah, Father Denis Penis we called him”— pronouncing Denis as “Deenis.” “He got what was comin’ to him, didn’t he? Nice touch about cuttin’ off his genitals.”

“So what about him? Did he molest you or the other women?”

“Liddy?” laughed Sharon. “Liddy never touched any of us. He liked boys, not girls. We used to say to each other, ‘Father Denis Penis is comin’ today, ladies, so we have nothin’ to worry about.’ It was like a reprieve. He’d just say Mass and give us Communion and leave.”

“So how did you know he was gay?”

“Because while they were fuckin’ us some of the priests like to gossip about the other priests, and they said Liddy was as queer as they come.”

“Wait a minute,” said Katie, her mind now racing. “Then why would one of the Laundries women want to mutilate Liddy if he’d never touched them?”

Sharon looked at Katie and shook her head.

“Well, it certainly isn’t Maureen Maloney, now is it?” She tapped her forehead. “Think, Katie: It was probably one of the boys Liddy had been fuckin’.”

The realization that Liddy’s mutilation had been a copycat murder after Maureen Maloney’s suicide struck Katie as both abominable and terrifying. And then she remembered how Archbishop McInerney had sworn to her that Mons. Liddy had never taken advantage of the women at the Laundries, which Sharon now confirmed.

“And where did the pedophile priests find their male victims?” asked Katie.

Sharon thought Katie was being oddly naïve.

MARIANI'S VIRTUAL GOURMET NEWSLETTER is published weekly. Publisher: John Mariani. Editor: Walter Bagley. Contributing Writers: Christopher Mariani, Misha Mariani, John A. Curtas, Gerry Dawes, Geoff Kalish. Contributing Photographer: Galina Dargery. Technical Advisor: Gerry McLoughlin.

"What’s the best way to tell the bartender what you like?" By Eliza Dumas, Eater.com (8/28/24).