Sinaloan-Style Grilled Fish

BY The Editors

PUBLISHED March 5, 2024

Last year, after Lucky Peach closed, I told Jonathan Gold that I was coming out to his city and I wanted him to show me some live-fire foods that we didn’t have in New York, he said, “I’m sure you’ve been to CONI’Seafood, you know that Sinaloan snook…” and he trailed off to list other foods that, much like Sinaloan snook, I didn’t know, or take for granted. The menu at CONI’Seafood—the place that put this dish on the map for Angelenos and Americans not previously acquainted with the grilling traditions of Nayarit, in Sinaloa, a state south of Baja along Mexico’s Pacific coast—tells you it will be a 30-minute wait before your pescado Zarandeado is ready. That pescado is a snook—a long, narrow, silverskinned fish that the restaurant has brought up from Mexico specifically for this dish—and, once you’ve ordered, it is dressed in a secret marinade (as the telling goes, it’s an odd mixture of bottled umami products and mayonnaise that I have done what I can to recreate), clamped into a grill basket, and grilled slowly for a half hour, rendering the fish fully but not overcooked (there are no wiggly bits at the bones). Served with a basket of piping-hot tortillas and a bowl of onions cooked in Maggi down to sweet softness, it speaks to the transmutative work of the cooks in Nayarit who devised it. It is hard to guess at why this fish and that sauce were combined—it seems to speak of not the inspiration of the bounty of the land or sea but a “hey let's make something delicious with all this bottled crap”—but the end product is unassailable, a wonderful example of fish cookery that I immediately knew I wanted to replicate at home. — Peter Meehan