Spoils of the Ocean

This one can be filed under the "local effort" category, as I continue posting the ventures of my early meanderings into my thirty-first year. ABC Seafood is a pleasant Portland discovery for all of your live seafood needs. Even though Portland is about an hour away from the coast and great fisheries, the majority of all that is caught off shore is shipped out of state, primarily to the East Coast and to International proprietors. So it is rare that you can find a market that has a variety of seafood such as this little shop. Even more rare is that they have so much live seafood in stock. Lobster, crab, tilapia, catfish, prawns, cockles, clams, oysters, and more; it is like walking into an aquarium that you can eat. Which actually sounds like a really great marketing idea that I should pitch to some wealthy millionaires.

I can see it now: Picture this, you take an escalator down a giant plexi-glass tube to the dining room which is actually submerged under twenty feet of salt water. Crabs feed on the floor, fish swim around. There are decorative ones, and then there are your stock fish for dinner. Your waiter brings you a menu of the variety of live fish and their preparation, and via com system, a diver already in the tank is sent to catch your live prey. Maybe he just picks out a great looking crab from the aquarium floor, maybe he has to spear a fish, but the fun is watching the chase. Think of it like those restaurants where they do live jousting, but MORE AWESOME because it is underwater and actual hunting is involved.

Now I just need to find some extremely wealthy eccentric willing to fund such a folly. We could be on the front page of Travel and Leisure...or GQ...or Highlights or something.

But in the meantime, until I open my underwater restaurant, you can purchase live fish, or fish heads at ABC Seafood all of the time.

Hell, they even had live crawfish! Sure you could set up a trap in almost any stream outside of town and get just as many for free, but if you don't want to work or spend a day in the wood, this is your place.

My folks and I got lobster. Two of them, in fact, for a really good price.