Chasing wild seafood down the East Coast

A publicity photo from Rusty's Seafood and Oyster Bar, where you can watch cruise ships leaving Port Canaveral, Fla.

By VICTOR E. SASSON
EDITOR

When you leave home on vacation, all bets are off on the origin of the meat and poultry served in restaurants. 

Most restaurant menus fail to deliver any detail on how the food is raised, and that's one of the reasons I usually eat seafood wherever I go.

On our first stop, Washington, D.C., we had a wonderful meal of wood-grilled farmed tilapia and wild catfish at Tackle Box, a family-friendly place where you share a large picnic table with other customers. 

Sides included grilled asparagus and sweet potato fries.

At the Noisy Oyster in Charleston, S.C., I had a beautifully grilled mahi-mahi sandwich and fished 10 steamed oysters out of my wife and son's seafood hot pot.

In Mount Pleasant, outside Charleston, Gullah Cuisine served us a whole fried wild catfish (minus the head), delicious crab cakes and a spicy fish-head soup (again, fish but no head) that we liked so much we ordered more for takeout. 

We even found a homemade corn and crab chowder at Buck's Diner, which occupies half of the convenience store at the Lucky 7 Truck Stop in Loxley, Ala.

In Cape Canaveral, Fla., we had a great lunch after our visit to the Kennedy Space Center at Rusty's Seafood & Oyster Bar: 

A wild grouper sandwich with mashed potatoes instead of french fries, jerk-style jumbo shrimp, a dozen local oysters on the half shell and ahi tuna, the rare slices fanned out on my plate and served with seaweed salad, wasabi and pickled ginger. Awesome.