Sea… Food… Run?

After a long day of driving (from 9:45am until 1:30pm), we didn’t feel like cooking lunch for ourselves. So, for a change of pace, we decided to eat at the restaurant whose RV park we were staying at. It was famed by several testimonies to be excellent.

El Mirador Restaurant and RV Park

Turns out the menu was all seafood, minus a beef or chicken fajita. If you know me, you are probably aware that I don’t like shellfish or strong-tasting fish. That makes it kinda hard to do seafood places. Jonathan isn’t a seafood connoisseur by any stretch of the imagination either, just very little experience with it in the land-locked Midwest.  We have branched out on occasion, but it is always an adventure and a surprise on whether it will be good or not.

This time was definitely a surprising adventure. We asked the server what was good, and he suggested the shellfish platter. I nixed that and asked about fish. He suggested the parga frita (fried red snapper), Jonathan agreed to it and we succeeded in telling him that we wanted one meal to share between the two of us. He left, but then shortly returned to find out how many kilograms we wanted. I tried to tell him 0.5 kilograms, but I had trouble communicating and he had trouble understanding that that was sufficient for the both us.

Then he left and brought back a frozen fish with the grams shown on them. Just so you know, this wasn’t the nice filleted fish planks that we Americans purchase at the grocery store, it was the whole, scaled fish, and it was even curved like it had been making a turn when it froze into place. I knew we weren’t getting what we were expecting then, but I didn’t voice my concerns too strongly to Jonathan. We selected our choice of fish: a single 700 gram fish, and then waited for it to be cooked.

Now, Jonathan had been expecting a filet of fish, pan fried. I doubted that was what we would get after seeing the frozen one, but I hoped. Nope, we got the whole fish, skin, bones, eyes, fins, and all. Ooh, what were we getting into?



Bravely, I pulled off a chunk of flesh and tasted it. The meat was pretty bland, but the crispy skin was very flavorful and added texture. So we ate it. Overall, it was decent. I have discovered that I find traditional Mexican food very bland (I like more depth in flavor), but adding salt (and beans) helps.

Unrelatedly except that it was on the same beach, there were these interesting invertebrates washed up on the shoreline. I have no idea what they may be. They kinda look like large slugs with ruffles or perhaps squid without tentacles…