Fish

This review of Fish will be about as useful to fish eaters as mainstream restaurant reviews are to me. Not very.

Fish is the bigger (but still small) and newer sister to Mike Stollenwerk's tiny (and currently closed due to building structure problems) Little Fish, a restaurant that got the whole town talking about Stollenwerk's simple but spectacular fish dishes. Bigwigs also took notice, as he's cooking up a meal this August at the James Beard House in New York, no less.

If you don't eat fish, like I do, you probably have no business eating at Fish, a restaurant with almost nothing but fish on the menu. But what if you have a loved one that adores Little Fish, never gets to eat there (because a certain someone doesn't eat fish), and has a birthday? You suck it up, and take them to Fish, the next best thing to Little Fish — and currently the only option if you want Stollenwerk's work.Complementary bread is dolled out by the piece from the waitstaff on an as-needed basis, and is accompanied by a tangy goat milk butter.

As a vegetarian, I could eat four things from the menu: a salad, and three of the four sides. I've seen worse at restaurants that were significantly lesser in quality, so I can't complain. And I'm not. I know where I was.

Even a simple salad of arugula, Feta and tomatoes dressed in a vinaigrette gets attention — each grape and cherry tomato half was of a different variety, making each mouthful interesting.For my main, I ordered the spaeztle side. The crispy, pan fried German egg noodles were perfectly salted and seasoned, and topped with musty slivers of white truffle. Not skimpy, but not large — it's a side, after all — the spaeztle left me with enough room for dessert.The bacon ice cream sounded fabulous, but I went with the thick, ganach-like chocolate tort with pretzel crust and salted caramel ice cream. After the sweet and only slightly salty ice cream was no longer around to balance the overwhelmingly rich tort, I put my fork down and called it an evening.

Even though I couldn't eat the main attraction at Fish, I could tell that everything was cooked and prepared with care and skill.

Each of the six varieties of oysters available were ordered by my partner, as well as some fish dish. He loved it all. Asked to compare Fish to Little Fish, he said they both were equally good, but Fish seemed more refined, and he preferred the more relaxed dishes of Little Fish. So there's that, if that is more helpful to fish eaters than my review

Fish
1708 Lombard St., Philadelphia, PA 19146
215-545-9600
Mon-Sun, 5pm-close