Tampa: Grouper... or is it?

You order grouper; what do you get? @ the St. Petersburg Times

A St. Petersburg Times survey of 11 restaurants featuring grouper showed that six served a cheaper fish instead.

One Palm Harbor restaurant charged $23 for "champagne braised black grouper" that actually was tilapia.

Interesting article. According to the Fish Base, there are 449 species of Grouper/Sea Bass. Some of what the surveyed restaurants were serving, didn't even come close. Asian Catfish and Tilapia for $23? I suspect that a survey of restaurants serving so-called Sea Bass would yield similar results. I love the sample that was too thin and overcooked to positively identify (although DNA proved it was definitely not grouper). Guess I won't be stopping at that establishment the next time I am in St. Pete. One surprising thing about the study, was that Red Lobster was one of the restaurants actually serving fresh local Grouper.

Thanks for the link. I've mentioned many times, the St. Pete Times is a great little independent paper and it has food feature writing that we wish we had here. I'm relieved to see that the places on the beach actually serve fresh local grouper. I'm not surprised that an all-night Cuban diner with $4.00 "grouper" was not really serving grouper. I'm kind of impressed it was hake. As for the fancy place palming off tilapia for grouper at $23, Ha! Believe me, that place is just what you would imagine a place in Tampa selling "champagne grouper" would be. Your worst "fine dining" nightmare. Otherwise, dig those crazy low prices for the locally caught grouper, ten bucks and under. Nuts.

Tampa Bay, known largely for vice, Bern's, Scientology and football, if anything, is also home to two of America's great sandwiches, the Cuban and the Grouper.

Today's St. Pete times has a fine photojournal tracking local grouper from ocean to bun. When you see it, you might wonder how so much work can go into an 8 buck meal with a sunset view of one of America's finest beaches.

http://www.tampabay.com/

This issue has come up a couple of times before on the board... in connexion with the fish one gets billed as 'Dover sole'... also, more recently, in connexion with the discussion of fish and chips and a place that says its serving fresh cod... I don't want to accuse anyone of anything but fresh cod -- again, in my opinion, the real deal is a wonderful fish -- just isn't very plentiful anymore and certainly not cheap and I'm sure that some places that serve 'cod' are in reality serving something more plentiful, cheaper and less tasty.

Of course, one must make mention of the item in the news today about the projected collapse of all of the world's fisheries by mid century... Inevitably, there are those folks who like to say 'Oh, that's just alarmist horseshit from environmentalist nuts' but the fate of the North Atlantic cod, once just about the most plentiful fish going, should be evidence enough to show that the threat of disaster of immense proportions is hardly unimaginable.

Too many people, too few oceans...

Antonius

This is probably a little off-topic, but this thread reminded me of a peculiar phenomenon that I experienced when I lived in St. Croix, USVI. Most of the "fresh" fish served down there was grouper (or people said it was, anyway) and many of the locals refused to eat it for fear they would get "fish poisoning." Fish poisoning was this horrible sickness that people got after eating fish that fed on the coral reef that surrounded the island. People's hair fell out and some became partially paralyzed. Although I never met anybody who was actually in the throes of this disease, I fully believe that it exists because my friend's boss (the federal district judge for the island) had suffered from it. He got it from eating the fish and chips special at a restaurant by the courthouse. So here's my question: What the heck is fish poisoning? Maybe some kind of mercury poisoning? In addition to contracting it from grouper, people also got it from eating barracuda.

Ciguatera Fish Poisoning

Thanks for the info. The Virgin Islands is such a crazy place and when I lived down there people were always telling me things that I wasn't sure whether I should believe. And although I was fairly sure that (for example) the problems with my telephone service were due to incompetence on the part of the telephone company and NOT to the "jumbies" living in my phone, the fish poisoning story always sounded like it might be true. When I first moved down there, I could not figure out why so much of the local cuisine was based on canned fish when we were on an ISLAND for God's sake. But, there turned out to be a perfectly rational explanation for this (as there usually is).

maureencd, gleam,

Thanks. I believe I had heard of that poisoning long ago but had forgotten about it. The link is fascinating.

This passage strikes me as worthy of emphasis:
Obviously persons who live in or travel to endemic areas should never eat barracuda or morey eel, and should be cautious with grouper and red snapper, as well as enquiring about local fish associated with Ciguatera. Since there is no reliable way to "decontaminate" or even to distinguish contaminated fish by smell or appearance, at a minimum, people should be advised to avoid the viscera of any reef fish as well as avoiding consuming unusually large predacious reef fish especially during the reproductive season.

Antonius