Neptune's Seafood House

It's not often I get a hankering for seafood. Almost never, in fact, though I like it fine. The quality of seafood suffers mightily when freshness starts to pass, and it starts to pass mighty quick. Unless you're willing to pay the price to get that fish from the water to your plate in very short order, you just ain't gonna get no really good fish. So in a town like San Antonio, close to God but far from the sea, I have pretty low expectations of seafood.

Tonight, though, the wife had a hankering for fish. I, who generally disagree for mere sport, know better than to resist those rare desires, so I went to my trusty local Urbanspoon website to see what places in town were well thought of by people who could be bothered to state a preference. There were a surprising number listed, but that turns out to be distorted: anyplace that offers a fried fish filet sandwich or popcorn-shrimp appetizer gets a listing as a seafood restaurant. (I mean, come on: Bill Miller Barbecue, listed under seafood? There needs to be some discernment in the passing around of those rubrics.) But with a few clicks, I was able to come to a choice between two local restaurants, actual seafood restaurants, that had perfect ratings from the general public. Admittedly, not a lot of votes were cast for either -- 15 for one, 17 for the other -- but that's the way it is with the smaller local restaurants. That's why restaurants with high ad budgets and glitzy locations near freeways tend to win all the best-of competitions; it's a popularity contest. But I figure that if everybody who voted said they liked a place, it must have something to recommend it.

Here's what Neptune's Seafood House on Goliad Road has to recommend it: moderate prices, down-home atmosphere, and reasonably good service. Judging from the number of people in the place, all of whom looked like they were regulars, they do good fried fish, too. I don't generally eat fried fish, because (a) it's fried, and I have beach-related hopes for later in the year; and (2) the upside on fried fish is small, while the downside is very large. In other words, it's hard to excel at fried fish, but easy to do it badly.

They do have, though, a few grilled options on the menu: grilled fish (variety unspecified), grilled shrimp, a combination of the two, and grilled catfish; plus grilled chicken, for those who like feathered seafood. Tonight they also offered grilled tilapia and grilled salmon, but we'd already placed our orders long before we noticed that sign. 

The place is a throwback to the 1960s or '70s, back to an era when nobody really paid any attention to a salad. Remember when restaurant salad meant iceberg lettuce, a slice or two of tomato, and maybe some colourful third ingredient? They still serve those salads at Neptune's. The lettuce is fresh enough, but utterly tasteless, and it comes in gigantic chunks that no person could get a mouth around with any kind of aplomb. The tomatoes were sliced, I'm guessing, a week ago at some processing plant in California. The colourful third ingredient is carrot, julienned by machine into little sticks about the size of those little boxed matches that self-important night clubs and hotel bars used to give away to show they were a cut above. The shredding of these carrots pre-dated the tomato-slicing by perhaps a further week.

But salad ... well, y'know. People don't come to Neptune's for salad. Salad, there, is a vague bow toward the concept of healthy eating; it's not meant to be actual healthy eating itself. Salad exists to assuage the guilt that people get when they order a plate of fried seafood: they can hear their mothers in the back of their minds, telling them to eat their vegetables, so they have this salad. And it is what it is meant to be. It comes, you eat it, and then, duty done, the fish comes.

We both chose the combination plate of grilled fish and shrimp. From the five sides on offer, I chose the salad (here's to healthy eating) and a baked potato; the Mrs. picked the salad and rice pilaf. Perhaps if the waitress had mentioned that the plate came with rice pilaf already, she would have ordered something else as one of her sides, but the fact was not disclosed on the menu, and the waitress thought it best to keep mum as well. So the wife ended up with two servings of rice pilaf. And if I had known that my starchy urges would be thus attended to, I know I would not have opted for the baked potato, a $1.39 extra.

As it turns out, the rice pilaf was the best feature of the combination plate. It was well-cooked and had a good, nutty taste, helped by generous inclusion of pignoles. The baked potato, on the other hand, was regrettable. A little rock of potato, barely cooked through, kept too long in a warmer set to too low a temperature, and offered up with a handful of Country Crock margarine capsules and a tube of Daisy sour cream, plus a little plastic tub -- the kind you put your salsa in at Taco Cabana -- of what can only be HEB Mexican Mix Fancy Shredded Cheese. 

Now, the fixin's for the potato -- the margarine, the sour cream, the cheese -- would all have been fine had the potato been good, or had the price been lower (like, nothing). But for $1.39, even at a restaurant of this unpretentious ilk, you ought to get better than what they're serving up.

The fish and the shrimp were okay. I thought the fish was a little on the soggy side; my wife thought it was just fine the way it was. The shrimp were nicely seasoned and properly cooked. They were the size that grocery stores sell as medium, so four make a pretty good portion alongside two filets of some white fish. 

The only other thing on the plate was a dinner roll, of the packaged variety. I considered it dry and tasteless; my wife thought it heavenly. Go figure. (She only ate half of hers, but that's because she, too, plans to be on the beach at some future point, not because it was dry and tasteless ... though it was.)

Neptune's strong point (besides, presumably, fried fish) is the atmosphere in the place. Unless you require someone to recommend a wine, you can't help but feel relaxed and comfortable in this place. There's no rush, no stuffiness, no pretense to be anything other than what it is. It's busy but not crowded, noisy but not loud. (The curmudgeon in me wants to point out here that this encapsulates the difference between restaurants on the North Side and restaurants on the South Side, but I don't really know that this is so; I just have a feeling about it.) It's just a pleasant place to be on a Friday evening. (That might be different during Lent, but now, at the inception of Carnivál, I stand by what I say.)

The service was good, as far as performance is concerned, but the waitress's failure to point out the board showing the day's specials, and her reticence regarding the rice pilaf, count against. And the place is a good value (I see it's rated at two dollar-signs on Urbanspoon, but it's not that expensive; all of the grilled options on the menu -- the things I paid closest attention to -- were under $9; our total bill, including that baked potato add-on, was less than $20.)