El Pescador Fish Market – SD

Fresh seafood shouldn’t be hard to find or serve in ocean-adjacent Southern California, but the number of locally legendary (rather than merely nice) fish restaurants is fairly small: Orange County has the well-established but somewhat underwhelming Bear Flag Fish Co. and King’s Fish House, while San Diego has a better option named El Pescador. Originally opened as a Del Mar fish market during the summer of 1974, El Pescador soon evolved into a market and bare bones restaurant, later becoming a full-fledged La Jolla restaurant with a beautiful raw fish display case inside.

Today, El Pescador sports a sprawling menu focused largely on raw items (crudos, ceviches, shrimp cocktails), grilled seafood sandwiches and salads, and riceless burritos called “burros,” plus a handful of sauteed seafood items, soups, and drinks. Proteins range from local yellowtail, sea bass, halibut, and swordfish to Hawaiian ahi tuna, Scottish salmon, Japanese scallops, and Mexican shrimp and octopus. Most food items are priced at $20 to $25, which is to say that visitors can expect to spend $50 or more per person here if they order a drink, appetizer, and entree, but between Pescador’s fresh flavors and sometimes unique items, those dollars are generally well-spent.

Consider, for instance, the New Caledonian blue shrimp crudo ($24), a plate of large and atypically blue shrimp served quartered, their sweet bodies lightly but deliciously cured with salt, lime zest, and olive oil, and heads grilled until crispy and red. Or the Hokkaido sea scallop carpaccio ($24), a plate of similarly flavored and sliced raw scallops garnished with cilantro. As contrasted with El Pescador’s East Coast Sweet Petite mussels ($21 for 6), which rely on their natural brine and freshness to pop, the crudo and carpaccio offer more complex flavors and textures, in addition to doing a slightly better job of sating a hungry stomach. Clam chowder, billed as the “West Coast’s best,” is dense with meat and vegetables, thick in New England-style creamy base, and filling for only $6 per eight-ounce bowl. Adding a couple dashes of salt and included oyster crackers helps it live up to its billing.