The Fish Peddler Restaurant on Foss Waterway — Restaurant in Tacoma

Stopped in there for a much anticipated birthday experience today and was unfortunately let down by the quality of what should be the bench mark and staple of any great seafood house. The fish and chips! My dad and I ordered the 4 piece cod and chips with an appetizer of 10 prawns and a bowl of clam chowder. The prawns were a sign of things to come, the cooks do not ever take any time to drain the grease in the basket above the fryer. They come out on the plate with oil still bubbling and cooking the batter at your table. The waitresses seem to know the cooks skip the oil drip draining step of deep frying from the jump because as soon as you receive anything deep fried, you also receive an entire plate of napkins stacked 4 inches high in anticipation of your obvious next request in a feeble attempt to drain and soak up some of the oil you you carelessly received. Unfortunately the cod was a similar situation with one extra problem to add to the grease fest. The beer batter breading while normally light and delicious was literally a half inch thick on both sides of the cod. This would indicate the careless or rookie cooks behind the counter are also not allowing the excess batter to drip off back into the mixing bowl before laying the fish away in your hot oil. What you're left with at the end of the meal is about 2lbs of beer battered pancakes you peeled off of your fish that was inedible to a fish and chips purist. There was a bright side to the meal surprisingly, it was the clam chowder. Which was simple, fresh and delicious containing lots of generous sized clam pieces. Although the addition of the one whole clam shell is needless and takes away from the enjoyment of actually eating the chowder as you have to fish it our or eat around the shell. All in all a delicious well made chowder though. As far as the one teaspoon of jalapeño coleslaw that come on the plate with your fish, this slaw was a flavorless disaster. You can't really tell iff the hint of jalapeño in the low to no flavor coleslaw is the food going bad or the jalapeño taste. It's terrible by concept and execution. The only good thing about the slaw is the fact they only serve you one teaspoon of it thankfully. Also the tartar sauce was abysmal, it was mostly just mayonnaise and not much else! In desperate need of fresh kerbs, vinegar and lemon juice. I,ll be the first to admit irs hard to impress a trained chef. But these cooks failed at the very basics of deep frying methods such as dredge and DRIP before you drop. And DRIP DRAIN OIL in basket above the oil reservoir for a minute or two before plating. Never take breaded deep fried foods directly out of hot oil and immediately plate it. This shows either you don't know what you're doing or you don't care about the quality of the food! Either way it's unacceptable,especially when the customer drops a hundred dollar bill before tip! Now to the service. The wait staff is exactly that, they seem to make you wait. Despite knowing exactly what we wanted it took a half hour for our order to be taken. After that we had no help until it was time to pay and we got up to wave someone down. It was a pretty bad experience, yet despite all that I'm willing to give it one more visit and try something other that what should be a basic home run in the beer battered fish and chips. This is due to me reading other great reviews from customers that ordered unique menu items. I'm curious as well if they will take this constructive criticism to heart and make the simple yet necessary changes to knock the fish and chips out of the park in the future. So....I may or may not return. I really hope they fix these issues though as I had high hopes in anticipation of...

The goal of all restaurants should be repeat business, today our repeat business was not earned. The one comment on our server is that she did not tell us when we ordered the dozen oysters that they would be $70 for the dozen. Otherwise, she was actually really attentive, warned me about the egg in my salad dressing and put it on the side for me when I mentioned I had an intolerance, gave an honest opinion when asked about cocktail choices and I do think what we got reflected her opinion. She was appropriately attentive, efficient, and friendly and deserved the 20% tip we gave her. The 4 stars for service are because of the lack of warning for the oyster cost.

The atmosphere is ok, not impressive and though the dining room was pretty empty when we came we were sat in probably the least comfortable table which was just right in the middle of the trafficked area which probably should have been the last table anyone should be sat at not the first in an otherwise empty dining room.

The food was the biggest problem we had. While the oysters were very nice the sauces they provided were generic. The horseradish and cocktail sauce bury the flavor of the oysters. At almost $6 an oyster I want to taste the oyster. The wine sauce got lost. The best choice was really just a drop of lemon. The shrimp and crab salad came with crab which still had it's shape implying they are using crab they shelled rather than canned which is good. The shrimp was bay shrimp and at nearly $20 for a salad, that's not ok especially when it was mostly cheap romaine lettuce and truck ripened tomatoes (which were flavorless). For that price I expect maybe 5 grilled decent sized shrimp, bay shrimp screams grocery store shrimp salad. It's cheap. The fish Tacos my husband had, however, had a nice chunk of sturgeon on it and the salsa that came with it tasted freshly house made.

The cocktails didn't pass for me but I get what they were going for. Both cocktails were sugar bombs and the watermelon MaiTai is more of a Trader Vic imbalanced monstrosity that even a house made orgeat (they just called it almond syrup) couldn't save. For non bartenders I will decode this: the Trader Vic (often credited as the original mai tai) uses generic white rum (often these are column distilled and filtered to remove the sugar cane character leaving a lightly sweet vodka like character rather than a light grassy funk found in pot still rums) and a dark rum (this gives the drink some body and molasses character), curacao (orange), orgeat (marzipan), lime, and a dark overproof float (makes it boozy without adding actual character to the drink) and sometimes Hawaiian bars add orange juice or pineapple juice to hide the cheapness. This maitai doesn't have much watermelon and too much orgeat and not enough lime (if there was a sour element at all) making it very candy-like. It didn't have the cheap boozy quality of a Hawaiian resort mai tai but it really didn't do much for me either. Now, Mai Tai specs are a point of contention among craft bartenders but I would have rather had something that shows some care and thought than something that is just mindlessly sweet and boozy. I would say that this is safe for the masses but far from a worthy cocktail. My husband also noted that his quince margarita leaned too sweet as well, might have been better to lean into the mezcal a little more to balance it out and use less syrup maybe. A Tajin rim might also help balance out the sweetness.

We walked out spending over $160 for two people but not a single thing we ordered was remotely worthy of such a price tag. Not a bad experience but again, not worth a...

Several years ago, an old buddy introduced me to the Fish Peddler which initially seemed decent. The food was relatively good, the seating outside was very nice, and the service wasn't bad at all. Could the Fish Peddler possibly be a new go-to waterway seafood spot? NOT.

The next dinner at the Fish-Peddler, a friend and i ordered a pair of "signature" pink salmon entrees, with broccoli and mashed red potatoes. Although a little slimy, the meal seemed alright going down. Unlucky choice. After dining we both started feeling dizzy and soon became wicked nauseous. Obviously the $25 tip was my next error. Walking out to the parking lot is when it finally hit. it was not pretty, Folks. Right there in the fish peddler parking lot, one and then the other.... HURRRRL!

Overcome by pink salmon food poisoning, we projectile vomited our signature entrees across the parking lot, out onto the ground.... NASTY. (i can still smell the bitter sting of botulism.)

Fully recovered, a few days later, we sought out an explanation, and possible apology from the Peddler. So we made the effort to constructively critique the preparer of our previous peddler meal in person. Unsure if the fish peddler's people would behave with any semblance of pride, we took the time to gently voice our experience to the former "kitchen manager." Sadly we discovered that our rotten signature entrees were prepared by a know-it-all self righteous dullard only masquerading as a kitchen manager. An absolute goofball of a head cook stumbled out to meet us; disheveled, yellowish shifty eyes, and face swollen red with guilt. He hastily responded with a well rehearsed defense... probably years in the making. We listened as goofball cook boss jumped about, desperately accusing us of refund scams and highway robbery, before he slinked back into his grease-pit. GROSS.

Deciding then to never revisit, we retreated from the over-priced slop-house kitchen boss. CYA. Maybe there's a new menu now? Maybe an entirely new cooking staff & new management, and hopefully a new seafood buyer too. That would almost be a whole new restaurant. But i can only recall the Peddler's great waterway view, expensive menu, and their slimy signature pink salmon topped with extra...