fish food
Danteish delights at Chowder Barge
At the upper end of the Leeward Bay Marina in Wilmington, surrounded by the looming, corroded superstructures of harbor refineries and shipping cranes, the Chowder Barge floats atop a layer of scum and motor oil.
The interior of the Barge is a rectangle with a peninsular bar at one end and wrap-around windows exposing views reminiscent of a Siberian gas facility. Opposite the bar, a television cycles automatically through channels of static. The walls are covered in faux-clapboard paneling and kitschy maritime souvenirs. On a quieter day, I imagine I might be greeted by a bagpipe wailing plaintively in the fog. But today there’s a party on, and the partygoers are shifting their bulbous bodies awkwardly to the Beatles’ “Yellow Submarine.” The girls wear pink blouses or pajama tops, bleach blond hair and horn-rimmed glasses. Outside, a line of oxidizing Sea-Land containers slides along one of the railroad thoroughfares that ring the restaurant, their locomotive blowing its horn and vibrating the windows.
The bar is full, so I take a seat on A-deck behind the gaggle of smokers outside the door, men with handlebar mustaches and greasy pants arguing loudly about who’s drunker. All around is a Chinese puzzle of sailboat rigging. The deck is about four feet wide, overhung by a sagging trellis and a crooked old television antenna. At the table before mine a customer berates a young waitress for calling her a drunk and a freeloader the previous night, and the waitress claims to have been too drunk to remember.
Another waitress arrives to take my order while lighting a cigarette. She looks 60 but is probably younger. Wearing a pink tank top and a miniskirt, she’s bone thin with crooked teeth, covered in leathery skin, varicose veins, and faded tattoos, and she speaks in a foaming rasp. The lighter is dead. She rattles it against her ear. “Fish food!” she says, turning around, and she tosses it into the marina. “What would you like, sweetie?”
For the sake of convenience, and to avoid straining my budget, I take the Fish Dinner ($9.95). It comes with both a choice of salad or chowder ($3.95 by itself) and a choice of home fries, freedom fries, or a baked potato. After careful consideration, I choose the chowder and the baked potato. As I finish ordering, the waitress spots a vagrant loitering on the dock and suddenly runs off to accost him.
The chowder comes four minutes later. Judging by the odd angle it assumes in the bowl, the Barge is listing badly. With the chowder comes a basket of individually wrapped Saltine crackers, a paper napkin, and a fork. I figure they expect me to eat the chowder with the crackers, possibly a seaport custom of which I am unaware, so I oblige them. It’s viscous, salty and oily, like the water beneath my feet.
Shortly after I finish my chowder, the leathery woman appears again to deliver my Fish Dinner. The fish is supposedly cod. Arranged tastefully over a leaf of lettuce, it comes as four deep-fried fillets of uniform shape and color that extrude oil when I push on them with the fork. I’m pleased to find the flesh intact, not reconstituted, but it’s suspiciously boneless. The breading is so greasy that I can’t finish it, but I leave feeling like I have a lump of lead in my gut nonetheless.
Alongside the four fillets, the potato remains wrapped in aluminum foil. It’s the only unprocessed item on my plate, ringed by plastic tubs of whipped butter, sour cream and tartar sauce, the last separated into its constituent ingredients. Adjacent these is another leaf pointed in the opposite direction and sprinkled with canned corn. The corn has apparently been microwaved for 30 seconds; not quite warm, but sweet enough for my philistine palate. I manage to choke it down, hoping it’ll help push the fish and potato through my colon. Within 10 minutes I’ve eaten as much as I can stand.
Along with a Mexican beer and a generous tip, the total comes to $17, which I find steep for said dining experience. But judging by the number of regulars there on a Saturday night, the Barge won’t soon flounder.
The Chowder Barge, 611 N. Henry Ford Ave., Wilmington, (310) 830-7937. Open Wed.-Mon., 8:30 a.m.-8 p.m.
Published: 07/23/2008
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it's great to read a food article about a really horrible dining experience. and i don't mean that the napkin was on the wrong side of the plate. i mean a really horrible dining experience.
that was FUN!