The Jersey City Independent "

Exterior photo: dotpolka; Food photos: Michelle Weber

Fish. Fish and Brazilian guarana soda that tastes like bubble gum.

If you don’t want either of these things, then there’s no reason to wander down to Suez Canal. But if you want fish, and you want fish that is uniformly fresh and excellently prepared, then hike to Tonnele Avenue, ask the nice woman who brings you the menus what’s fresh, and get ready to have some of the best fish you’ve ever had. They do fish — fried, grilled, in sauce — they do it right, and they don’t do anything else.

We wanted to try one of each preparation, so we turned back to the proprietress, asking which kind of fish would be best for each treatment. We ended up with a deep-fried porgy, shrimp and calamari in red sauce and a grilled striped bass, along with a pile of rice to soak up every last bit of goodness.

OK, wait, they do do a few other things. A plateful of herb-flecked tahini and pile of pita comes to your table as soon as you sit down. Salads are also available; we skipped the run of the mill dish of iceberg in favor of a fragrant, garlicky pile of eggplant, peppers and tomatoes. (That’s another thing — if you don’t like garlic, this might not be the place for you.)

The eggplant had none of the bitterness eggplant can sometimes have, instead being simply, deeply … eggplant-y. Nutty. Rich. The peppers added a bright note; the tomatoes, a hit of acid that kept things from getting too heavy. Hang on to some of that pita to sop of the broth that collects on the bottom on the plate. You’re gonna want to do that.

Don’t get too filled up on bread though, because in a few minutes this is going to hit the table:

One thing to note before you dive headfirst into this: This is a whole fish. I mean a WHOLE fish. It’s got the head. It’s got the tail. It has not been gutted. There are organs, organs which you may or may not wish to consume; luckily, they are easily distinguishable.

The first thing to get past here is the skin. Perfectly crisp, not at all greasy and doused with a hit of a thin, salty tomato and garlic sauce. Peel it off in sheets and fight your tablemates for it, unless you’ve been smart enough to order a whole fish for yourself (you can choose your fish size, so you can go solo without being saddled with 3 pounds of fish all to yourself.).

Underneath, the porgy is perfectly cooked — moist, succulent, a twinge of extra flavor from the sauce. Porgy (aka sea bream) is a firm fish with a sweet flavor that takes extremely well to frying; here, the white flesh flaked away from the skeleton in hunks. You have be a little vigilant against pin bones, but the effort is well worth it. Pile the chunks of garlic-flecked fish on some rice, which will soak up every last drop of salty-sweet flavor. It tastes, to be cliched, like the sea. If the sea was also a little garlicky.

It’s helpful to have an advanced skeleton-picker at the table to help you get every little bit of meat off the bones. I’m sure you could borrow my friend J., who is especially skilled; I know for a fact that she’d welcome the chance of a return Suez Canal visit.

At the same time, another metal tray came out heaped with calamari and shrimp covered in a scallion and dill-steeped tomato sauce. Like the porgy, the seafood was cooked not a minute over, not a minute under. Calamari especially tend to resemble rubber bands when cooked too long, and it’s a rare treat to find specimen as wonderfully tender as these were (ditto for the shrimp). The gentle sweetness of both was enhanced, not masked, by the flavorful sauce.

This is another one of those times when you’re going to need to make sure the pita basket is well-stocked and you’ve got enough rice to go around, because this sauce is not something you want left behind.

We wished we’d ordered the large platter of shrimp and calamari, partly because it was so very good, and partly because the grilled bass took a bit more time to come out and if would have been nice to have been able to go on eating. Because as we quickly learned, at Suez Canal, you really don’t want to stop once you’ve started.

The bass was presented by Suez’s owner, who explained how to peel back the blackened skin to get at the meat underneath. The grilled fish is coated in wheat flour, grilled until black and doused in salty garlic water (I know it sounds odd, but work with me here) before being served.

We understood that we weren’t supposed to eat the charred skin, but felt the need to investigate in the name of comprehensive journalism. To our surprise, it was delicious. Salty, garlicky (I told you about the garlic) and smoky; we quickly stripped the bass of its skin while the owners looked on, amused.

The bass had a more delicate, neutral taste, but got a shot in the arm from the garlic and grill-imparted flavor. As in each other case, the flesh itself was cooked to perfection — cooked through and impossibly moist. This time, my dining companions didn’t shy away from the offal, chowing through the roe sac and (what we’re fairly sure was) the fish’s liver. (In the interest of full disclosure, I’m not an offal fan, other than sweetbreads, and was not among those at the table who partook.) Those who did report that fish liver tastes remarkably like other animals’ livers, FYI.

We killed half the fish, flipped it and killed the other half. Again, it was good to have an expert skeleton-picker:

It’s a tough call as two what the highlight of the meal was; we all agreed that each dish had been exemplary, but ended up split 2-1-1, porgy-bass-calamari/shrimp.

Suez Canal might not look like very much. You might never walk by it (it’s on Tonnele, just south of Newark, so you can wander over to India Square for some dessert afterward). If you did, you might never realize it was anything other than a hole-in-the-wall fish market. If you peeked in, you might look at the cartoon fish festooning the front windows and the plastic flowery tablecloths and decide to pass it by.

You’d be making a mistake, though, and a big one. Suez Canal may not be much to look at, but it will serve you some of the best fish you’ve ever had at prices that can’t be beat with the cheapo stick — the salad, two whole fish, the platter of calamari and shrimp, never-ending rice and pita and guarana soda for four came in at just a shade over $40, and 4 people left full and content. So don’t make that mistake, and I promise you a meal you won’t forget.

Suez Canal
117 Tonnele Ave.
Jersey City, NJ 07306
201-333-5305

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