Gulf Coast Fish Cuts & Flavor Profiles

What the plate gets wrong

The picture was generated, and these are its errors of fact, checked against the kitchen and the Lexicon. Read the plate with them.

• Grouper prints “Flavor: Rich, firm, buttery”. Grouper is a lean, firm white fish with a mild, faintly sweet flavor and large chunky flakes, not a rich or buttery one. The Floor Deck's Grouper card says it is lean but holds moisture well with a flavor that is mild and faintly sweet, and the Lexicon's Fatty vs. Lean Fish entry puts the reef white fish among the lean fish that store fat in the liver, not the flesh.
• Snapper (Mutton) prints “The card pictures a uniformly red snapper like the Red Snapper card.”. Mutton snapper is olive on the back shading to rosy red on the sides, with a small black spot below the rear of the dorsal fin and blue lines on the face, so the black spot is the mark to look for at the case. The drawing repeats the Red Snapper card and would teach a cook to identify mutton snapper by the wrong fish.
• Trout (Sea Trout) prints “Trout (Sea Trout), Gulf Coast”. The Gulf Coast sea trout is the spotted seatrout, also called speckled trout, a silver drum with round black spots along the back and tail that is related to redfish and is not a true trout. The Floor Deck's Trout card describes farmed rainbow trout, a freshwater salmonid, and the plate's name and drawing invite a cook to confuse the two.
• Tarpon prints “Cuts: Head, Collar, Fillet, Tail; Flavor: Rich, firm, clean; Best prep: Grill, Bake, Pan sear”. Tarpon is a catch and release game fish that is not sold, cut or cooked as food, so treat this card as a mistake and not as a table fish. Tarpon flesh is bony and poor eating, there is no commercial tarpon fishery, and Florida allows possession only with a special tag for record attempts, so no fish case or restaurant carries it.