Noshing with Sandi: The Fishery

The Fishery, 5040 Cass Street,  San Diego, California 92109 

SAN DIEGO — There are a lot of restaurants on Cass Street in Pacific Beach but only one is also a wholesale seafood company.  The Fishery is the restaurant in front, and in back it’s Pacific Seafood.  The fish they serve is fresh and well-served.

When you walk in you will notice the fish counter, and models of various fishes decorating the walls.  There is a small section outside for al fresco dining, and a rather large inside restaurant.  The tables are fairly close together, but not to the point that you feel like you are part of your neighbors’ conversation, so it’s a nice restaurant to go if you want to catch up with someone, as I did with my bestie.

We ordered some appetizers to start and had a really hard time choosing between the poke and the ceviche.  In the end the poke won out, but they gave me a taste of the ceviche and it was really good.  The poke was okay, but I felt it was missing something in the flavor… not sure what, maybe sesame oil or something like that.  We also got the Fishery soup, which was fin fish in a Mediterranean broth.   That was really good, very flavorful with decent sized cubes of fish in it.

On the menu was Market Piccata, which is a market fish with mashed potatoes and spinach.  I subbed out the mashed potatoes for broccolini, and the market fish for a piece of the local line-caught Yellowtail.  It was delicious, although with only a 4oz portion of fish I think it could have been bigger.  The piccata sauce was flavorful with a lot of garlic.

All in all, it was a nice afternoon, both in terms of the restaurant experience, and catching up with my friend.  The waitress was friendly and attentive, the bread, which I ate before Passover (from a local baker down the street) was served warm and crusty, with a really nice salty butter spread – an addictive combination actually. We had to take some of our lunch home because we ate so much of the bread.

It was hard for me to come up with the score for The Fishery.  The ambiance was nice, the service was good, the food was good, but I don’t know that I will be dreaming about it, so for that reason, I’m going to go with 8.75.

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Sandi Masori is the food and restaurant reviewer for San Diego Jewish World.  When she’s not eating out or hanging with her kids, she helps people self-publish their non-fiction books.