Pacific Grove - Passion Fish

Passionfish is a restaurant that I read about on Chowhound. It is run by a husband and wife team and located in an unassuming town along a small coastal city called Pacific Grove. The executive chef and owner, Ted Walter, believes in serving ecologically sound meal choices such as local farmers' organic produce and purchase sustainable seafood and his philosophy behind his food intrigued me enough to stop by.

I would later come to realization that Passionfish must be a neighbourhood gem. The restaurant was the only light in the lifeless downtown and brimming with life. On that night, it was freezing so we hurried our way into the restaurant, attracted to the warm lights like bees to honey. Once in, we only had to wait for about ten minutes for the table to turn over for our 8pm reservation. Yes, it was that packed on a weekday night.

The house bread was really good, biscuity-crunchy outer crust, super fluffy innards. The soft whipped butter melted into the warm bread. We want to devour all of it but we remembered what happened at Bouchon and held back.

We shared an appetizer.

Dungeness crab salad with avocado & spicy ginger vinaigrette (US$13) would be perfect if the dressing was not so salty. But avoid the dressing, and the creamy avocado and sweet crab meat was a delight to eat.

My main course was sturgeon with chickpeas and carrots stew, zucchini cake and tomato chutney. The white, firm fleshed fish was clean tasting, made good foils with the more heavy sides. The stewed chickpeas and carrots was cooked with spices that seemed to have a Morrocan influence. I didn't care too much for the zucchini cake though because it was slightly undercooked and still had a mild floury taste.

We were stuffed but wanted to make room to try a dessert. The Chocolate Truffle Torte with Five spice syrup (US$6) turned out to be too rich for us but the spicy syrup added an interesting twist to the otherwise mundane dessert because it had a kick that cut the heaviness of the chocolate truffle.

Service was average but pleasant. I would not hesitate to come back again in future if only it was not so out of the way.

Passionfish
701 Lighthouse Ave
Pacific Grove, CA 93950
www.passionfish.net