Is Salmon Over?
The outside world holds a vision of Seattle's relationship to salmon that has us spooning pink fish flakes from a bowl of milk in the morning or simply grabbing one from the nearest body of water for an anytime sashimi snack. This view is not altogether unfounded. Is the tide ebbing, though? Maybe your last out-of-town guest ordered the tilapia after countless past visits spent tentatively ordering blackened salmon from the foreign seafood menu. Or, if they ordered the salmon maybe they asked for it by brand, "I'll have the Copper River salmon. I believe it's in season. Medium-rare, please." When these houseguests arrive from airports such as O'Hare you know the unthinkable has happened. Salmon has become passé.
On Wednesday the culinary culture yogis at Slate posted an article saying as much:
These days, there's a numb and slightly uneasy feeling when you see a lump of the pink fish dumped on your plate. The feeling, the opposite of the salmon worship of the late 1980s, is more like salmon fatigue—an abiding sense that the wonder-fish has become déclassé. Ordering salmon in a seafood restaurant produces a mild feeling of shame, the kind of embarrassment one feels when a dinner companion requests spaghetti bolognese at an Italian eatery or pad thai at a Thai joint.
To Seattlest, that's just fine. The sooner we do away with the Puget Sound fish fams and the rest of the country turns its fickle attention to the mythical Chilean Sea Bass, the better. In the meantime we'll continue taking our salmon intravenously and we'll continue to get ever snobbier about its source. "This salmon is from the upper Iron River."
