Maine Avenue Fish Market

One day when three friends (B, C, and E) were in town, we followed a tip to explore the Maine Avenue Fish Market. It's a bit more than a mile walk from my apartment down to its location on the waterfront.

The fish market is outside. I took pictures. Di Yin did many more. The market is apparently one of the last remaining open-air seafood markets on the east coast, and one of the oldest such markets in the United States.

We ate lunch there. I tried the fried red snapper special, a huge chunk of fish (with bones) served on white bread. It was decent but plain. I was given every possible topping: tartar sauce, tabasco sauce, cocktail sauce, and ketchup. It came with a sub-par coleslaw of finely diced cabbage in mayo.

The highlight of my meal was hush puppies, deep-fried balls of corn meal. Those brought me back to my childhood.

I also tried some items my friends bought including large raw oysters (good) and ceviche (bleh, not really ceviche or sashimi for that matter).

For cooking later, we bought flounder (which Di Yin steamed Chinese style) which we discovered wasn't as good as sole cooked in a similar fashion, mackerel (broiled Japanese style) which we declared good and put on our regular rotation*, and sardines (broiled, already on our regular rotation). In later visits, we bought more seafood including squid and more mackerel.

I find it interesting that the prices for all the fish are the same between different sections/wings of the market. It's not clear to me whether all these sections are the same vendor. I'd be surprised if they are because then the displays would be rather redundant.

The fish market provides inexpensive cleaning/gutting. Given the ambiance, it's exactly what you'd expect: men in a small room with big knifes, big counters, big sinks, nozzles for spraying down all surfaces, and buckets for unusable parts. No pictures allowed.

Over the next year, we revisited the fish market multiple times, Di Yin many more than I. We often got shrimp or squid. Sometimes we bought fish. Two of those times we decided to clean and gut the fish ourselves. We learned it's pretty easy and fast if you're willing to make a mess and have scales fly everywhere. Once we bought live Maryland blue crabs, which Di Yin cooked Singapore-chili-crab style. Gosh, crabs are a pain to eat. They're also a pain to kill. I tried to many techniques, all too gruesome to describe here.

* at some point we removed most species of mackerel from our regular rotation due to their high levels of mercury