gone with the fish

I should take a time to pen an obituary for The Fish Market, a small restaurant chain whose last local outlet closed last week, cast out by the wave of expanding housing development.

The Fish Market had faded a bit in recent years, but it never lost its quality as some fading restaurants do, and in its heyday, 30-40 years ago, it was a very popular place, one of the few full-service restaurants around here which specialized in fish and had a wide variety. It had four or five outlets in the area in those days.

It was a favorite place of my mother's, and when I was working at Stanford, she'd pick me up for lunch once a week and we'd drive over to a nearby Fish Market. I'd usually have a lunch special they had in those days, two small fillets of cod (I think) and snapper, which I got with rice and green beans, and a cup of chowder. Otherwise the trout, which was butterflied and whose skin was an iffy proposition to eat.

I was in that same outlet of the Fish Market several years later, with my mother and brother, when Obama's image appeared on the little tv set over the lobby area and announced that Osama had been got.

Since my mother died, I hadn't been back all that often, but I went there with my brother, who liked it too, on his most recent visit, and a good thing too, as it was soon after that the closing was announced for a couple months hence. Of course I let him know right away.

I couldn't get there for some time, because this was when my car was in the shop for extensive repairs, but afterwards I did get back a couple times for my current favorite dish, extraordinarily lightly coated pan-fried petrale sole.

Well, there are still two Fish Markets in San Diego - one downtown on the waterfront and one north of town in Solana Beach - and if I ever get back to San Diego, it'll have to be on my list.

My mind keeps nagging me that there's somebody I need to tell about the closing. When I think it through, I realize that that somebody is my mother.