Something's Good and Fishy

I have driven by this place more times than I could possibly count, but it’s off my radar screen. There are an amazing number of these sorts of places, spots that are part of my universe, in that they are right in front of me, but not, because I don’t really see them, my eyes slide right by. This one is a “Spanish” market. I don’t know how this happened, but “Spanish” somehow now means any culture that speaks Spanish – in the case of our Takoma-Langley area, that would mean Central American, mostly. And I’m pretty much Anglo-Saxon, even though I speak (barely) passable Spanish. And, I do buy Goya black beans from the Shopper’s Food Warehouse Latino aisle, and I know what queso blanco is. But I’m most accustomed to pretty conventional American groceries.

The Atlantic Market just isn’t in my regular route of Places To Go.

I thought it would be a colorfully crowded, jostling-and-full-of-people type of place brimming with papayas and mangos and dried fish and cans of fruit juices that looked vaguely familiar from trips to the Caribbean. That’s what the market at the corner of University and Piney Branch is. But this is a spacious, tidy grocery store with plenty of room to move about. I couldn’t even find mangos (though I did see papayas and those canned fruit juices, plus Clara’s favorite Salvadoran cookies).

And they have fresh fish. Lots of it. Cheap.

You can choose your fish already filleted, or choose the whole fish, and have the attendant clean it for you. I chose the latter, thinking how clever I was to choose my own fish – someone, somewhere taught me to look for clear eyes on a fish, to be sure it’s fresh, so armed with this fact I feel all seasoned and like the daughter of a fisherman (which I am). Some of the fish eyes, at this market, were clear, some not so much. I chose rockfish, partly because their eyes looked good and partly because I couldn’t believe it was only $3.99 a pound. Wow! I used the tongs lying on top of the ice in which the fish was packed, nice and neat along a tray that separated me from where the fish cleaning guys stood (are they called butchers if they’re dealing with fish, not meat?). I picked up a couple of rockfish and put them in one of the big white plastic bowls, then asked the fish man to please clean it. And he totally understood English, which was a relief because my brain couldn’t race fast enough to put “clean” and “fish” together in Spanish (though now that I’m sitting at my computer at home, of course, it comes to me, maybe not conjugated properly but I could have gotten the idea across)

So I watch as the fish is scaled and gutted, and remember doing this with my dad, the scraping of the knife against the scales, the squish of the innards as they leave that nice, neat belly cavity, and how macho I felt, at age 8, being able to handle all this without getting squeamish. I realize the fish man intends to leave the head on, but I’m not making fish stew (and have never used a fish head before) so I ask him to take the head off, and then I ask that he fillet it.

The filleting process is nothing like what I remember Dad doing – Dad was a finesse man, and painstakingly worked a very sharp knife along the bone to get a perfect fillet, losing very little meat along the way and rarely leaving a bone. I know he was rolling over in his grave as the fish man butchered this fillet, but I didn’t mind – there was still plenty of meat and I wouldn’t mind picking the bones out. Especially at 3.99 a pound. Except that he weighed it before he filleted it so I paid for the head and guts – maybe that’s why most people keep the head?

Anyway, I’ve found a cheap place to get good fish. They had enormous blue fish for $1.99 (same deal, pick the big fish, they clean it for you), and Spanish mackerel, and tilapia (pre-filleted or whole) and shrimp and crabs – and it all smelled clean, another sign of a good fish shop.

I pan-fried the fish and it was sweet and delicious, with just a bit of butter I’d combined with lemon and lemon rind. And there were fewer bones than I’d expected.

The Atlantic Market is in the shopping center at New Hampshire Avenue and University Boulevard, in what’s known as Takoma-Langley Crossroads – in the part where Toys R Us used to be. Bonus: their avocados were 69 cents a piece, and perfectly ripe.