The Catfish and the Salmon — Ordering Fish at a Steakhouse

If you want fish here, this is the one. A straightforward fillet, grilled and seasoned, served with the same two included sides as everything else.

It is also the genuinely light option on this part of the menu, and one of the more sensible entrées on the whole board for anyone watching the evening. Grilled fish with two vegetable sides is a materially different meal from anything in the fried sections.

Ask for it without added butter if you are ordering it for that reason. A steakhouse grill finishes most things with butter by default, and it is the difference between a light plate and a moderately rich one.

This is worth saying plainly because "fish" gets treated as a health choice regardless of what has been done to it. Catfish here is battered in cornmeal and deep-fried, which puts it in the same category as anything else that comes out of a fryer.

It is a genuinely good version of the dish — cornmeal-crusted catfish is a Southern staple and the kitchen does it properly. Order it because you want fried catfish, which is an excellent reason. Do not order it because you are avoiding the steak on nutritional grounds, because that logic does not survive contact with the batter.

Tartar sauce and lemon come with it. Take the sauce on the side, for the same reason as everything else fried on this menu.

Honestly: it cooks it competently and without much ceremony. The grill, the seasoning blend and the whole kitchen culture are built around beef, and the fish is a well-executed secondary item rather than something anybody is fussing over.

The specific risk is overcooking. A busy grill cooking steaks to varying doneness is not an environment optimised for a delicate fillet, and salmon in particular goes from right to dry quickly. If you like it less cooked, say so when you order — it is a reasonable request and it is the only lever you have.

If seafood is what you actually want from the evening rather than what you are settling for, this is the wrong restaurant and there is no ordering trick that changes that.

Steamed vegetables or a house salad with the salmon, if the point is a lighter plate. Loading a baked potato alongside grilled fish undoes most of what you gained by ordering fish in the first place.

With the catfish, green beans do more for the plate than a second fried side. Two fried things on one plate is a lot, and the catfish is already doing that job.

And the free rolls apply here too. A light entrée preceded by four buttered rolls is not a light meal, whatever the entrée was.

The practical situation this section exists for is one person in a group of five who does not eat red meat. In that case the grilled salmon is a genuinely good order and nobody should feel they have drawn the short straw.

What helps is ordering it with intent rather than apologetically. Ask for it a touch under, ask for the butter on the side, and choose two sides that suit fish rather than defaulting to the ones the rest of the table picked for their steaks.

What does not help is treating it as the diet option and then adding a loaded potato, which is the most common way a sensible order stops being one. If the point of ordering fish was lightness, the sides have to agree with that decision.