Another Failed Fish Friday - The Grape Report
Weekly Food Reviews
Food Review by Gary Gardiner
This year’s Lenten fish reviews included a salmon bowl, honey walnut shrimp, and a church’s Friday night fried fish meal. The meal did not impress with its fried cod and fries, yet was praised for intent and the sacramental quality of its fish and handmade desserts.
This Friday, I visited Smash Park, one of the city’s newer dining spots. Its online menu listed shrimp dishes, Bang Bang and Caribbean, that sounded promising.
The menu offered both shrimp dishes. My waiter also mentioned a Lent special: fried cod with fries, coleslaw, and tartar sauce, served off-menu. I ordered the Caribbean shrimp and fried cod.
Jerk shrimp, pineapple pico de gallo, crema, and cilantro are served over quinoa. The quinoa was so sweet that it overpowered everything else. The pineapple tasted pre-diced and wasn’t freshly cut.
The shrimp were hard, overcooked, ruining taste and texture. The flavors of the serrano-avocado crema were masked by the sweet quinoa, rendering them undetectable.
Ate all the shrimp and cilantro, some of the pineapple, but left most of the quinoa.
The fried cod portions were smaller than last week’s church dinner. The two planks combined were the same size as one from last week. They were super crispy, bordering on overdone, with mushy, not flaky, fish. The tartar sauce was great. The dill was subtle but noticeable, the best part of the meal.
The cole slaw, jammed into a single-serve container, wasn’t cold, lacked distinct flavor, and disappointed on a second try. The fries were good, passing the “no-catsup test” with a well-seasoned coating.
The Caribbean shrimp cost $13.99. The fried cod was $15.99. The $9.99 Guinness came in a plastic glass, poured from a can.
The Green Grape Report
Food Review by Gary Gardiner
Market District
Price – $6.98 for a two-pound clamshell with a buy-one-get-one offer putting the price a $1.74 a pound.
PLU Code – NA
The Review
All there is to say about this week’s grapes is that they are large, sweet, inexpensive, and of the Autumn Crisp variety. That places them at the top of the grape-eating food chain, far exceeding last week’s numbers, with an exception that deserves study.
The sclerometer, a new tool in The Grape Report’s testing arsenal, measures the pressure required to break a grape’s skin. But it is still an acquired skill in the lab, and with only three weeks of data, its figures have not yet begun to echo the tactile knowledge that comes from eating grapes. Perhaps measured testing, for all its rigor, leaves something behind: the pleasure of personal comparison, of returning each week to the fruit with memory in tow, and of finding in each fresh taste an answering trace of the one before.
A grape announces itself in ways that resist easy capture. There is the skin’s brief tension, the small, decisive rupture, the sudden bloom of juice and flavor, and the almost invisible comparison the mind begins making at once between what is tasted now and what was tasted then. These sensations pass quickly, yet they leave a distinct impression, gathering over time into a private archive of texture, sweetness, and change.
The sclerometer may one day lend that archive a measurable form. Until then, the truest record remains partly in the body itself: in the mouth’s memory, in the hand’s expectation, and in the quiet recognition that pleasure, too, can be a way of knowing.
This Week’s Grape Data
● Weight - 16 grams, from an average of 10.
● Size - 35x29mm, again from the average of 10 grapes
● Sugar - 23.1%
● Crispness - 20 on the sclerometer
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