Tasty travel (part 9). Thai red snapper cooked whole: Fresh fish from ocean to plate in hours

After currywurst, the second most memorable meal I had in Phuket was dinner at a Thai seafood restaurant called the Savoey. In and of itself, the neon sign looked rather inviting. Surely nowhere that served lobster could be that bad.

Though I still had my doubts after walking down a road that advertised tattoos and questionable hotels. I guess you could say the same thing about Times Square. Of course, come to think of it, I would not recommend eating at many tourist traps there. Then again, we were mere steps from Patong beach in Phuket and almost all of the food I had in Thailand to that point had been spectacular.

So Bill and I sat down with our friends Myong, Jeremy, and Dew. The waiters were fast, filling our glasses of water when we could barely notice. I also drank my first mai tai at the Savoey, but that is not what set this meal apart. What I remember most is selecting our own fish. At the restaurant. With no seafood market. And no middle man. The day’s catch was visible fresh on ice as we entered the restaurant.

I chose a colorful red snapper, yet this simple task was rather astonishing for someone from landlocked Pittsburgh. Sure, I had spent my youth fishing with my dad in North Carolina but we always brought home our own catch and cooked it ourselves. I had never been to a restaurant where I could pick the exact fish that someone else had caught just hours earlier. Americans, myself included, are too isolated from the actual foods we eat. We point to something on the menu and expect it to be more or less the same as what the last person ordered. If we’re lucky, we’ll get a picture and some people will complain if it doesn’t match precisely.

Things are different on the other side of the world. Why would you trust a photo when you can see exactly what you will eat instead? For some reason, this concept seems relegated to lobster in America. I never really saw the thrill in picking out live crustaceans, but I can appreciate choosing a particular fish to eat. There is certainly less of a need to translate from Thai when you can see the before and after.

Not to be outdone by the fisherman, the Thai chef equally amazed me by presenting the whole fish I had picked out minutes earlier but now cooked on my plate. I exchanged glances with my friends. Where’s the fillet, I thought to myself? I had never seen that kind of preparation growing up since my dad was a master filleter. I can remember picking out bones very rarely despite having fish perhaps a hundred times — to say nothing of scales. I tried to play it cool and did not take a picture of the final product. However I can attest it is possible, and indeed very delicious, to eat a whole fish cooked in this way.

I now know to look for whole Thai red snapper and the best I have had in NYC is undoubtedly at Sripraphai in Queens. Yet the ambiance is still not quite the same as having fish at the beach where it was caught, like back at the Savoey in Phuket.