The Fishue Issue | Wherelse 002

Wherelse is the Living Guide to Living Good: Salty Stories from Three Threshold Cities

Jul 21, 2025

In This Issue:

📝 From The Author’s Desk
📖 Now Reading: A good book that’s sort of, but not really about fish
✔️ The Best Fish-based Meals in Morocco, Egypt, and Turkyë
💡 A thought, and an answer
✍️ Storytime: “The Fishes Dishes”
📍 Next Week in Wherelse

From The Author’s Desk
I was on expedition to the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul with a family-friend and traveling partner a while ago. He wanted to have a big shopping day, and we travel well together because we both enjoy long afternoons in foreign markets, trading colorful bills for small, shiny things. I ended up finding a little silver fish necklace that I now wear every day. As a March-born Pisces, I’ve always found myself with an affinity to the fish. I’ve had one tattooed on my arm since 2019. I like to eat them. This issue of Wherelse is dedicated to the Fish.

Love Wherelse? Forward this to a friend who’d drop everything for a seaside meal with no menu. The more the merrier.

Now Reading: A good book that’s sort of, but not really about fish

Why Fish Don’t Exist, by Lulu Miller. A fantastic story/memoir/biography about a man who is obsessed with taxonomy (and, spoiler!!— eugenics) and discovered one-fifth of today’s known species of fish. He loses his life’s work one night in an earthquake, and comes up with a plan to get his work back.

I recommend this book.

The Best Fish-based Meals in Morocco, Egypt, and Turkey

These three fish-based restaurants each offer completely unique dining and ordering experiences. In one, you order from a pile of recently caught fish and sea-things. They cook it and bring it to you with all sorts of accoutrements. In another, there’s only one thing, and you order that. And finally, one has no menu at all. You just sit down and they start bombarding you with fish products until you have to be carted out in a wheelbarrow and pushed down the street.

Le Saveur du Poisson — Tangier, Morocco. See today’s full essay, below.
Farag Fish Restaurant — Alexandria, Egypt. Take your pick from the day’s pile. It’s grilled and brought to the table. We had humongous shrimps and a whole mullet and rice and baba ghanoush and all kinds of other stuff.
Balık Dürüm Yildirim Usta — Istanbul, Turkey. The sign on the door says it all: “Fish Wrap With No Bones, Delicious”

Hey!
I’m looking for photos of the messiest meals Wherelse readers have ever had. If you’ve got em, I want em. Especially if they’re from one of these spots.

Tag Me on Instagram

A Thought, and an Answer

Thought: Do more Arabic people, due to the right-to-left nature of their script, write lefty? Would make sense if so.

Answer: They do not. In fact, less so, because of the historic gauche-ness of the use of one’s left hand for anything besides personal hygiene.

The Fishes Dishes

Transcribed directly from my Little Yellow Pocket Notebook

I don’t know whether the charcoal smoke is going to my brain via my lungs or if you really can have too much of a nice thing. An hour and a half ago, I was compelled by something outside of myself to go stand in line at Tangier’s “Le Saveur du Poisson”, so here I was. I’d been waiting in the sun for over 20 minutes, and I told myself that I had better sit down and wait it out, even after coming down with a wave of nausea from the combined effects of no food, two coffees, mint tea, and two cigarettes — and it already being 2:30pm when I got there. Maybe it’ll be a Super Rica situation — shocking to the uninitiated, but for those who know, always worth the ever-present line. The thick charcoal smoke smelled delicious when I walked up and is now contributing to my nausea in violent way, making me wish I’d had a little bread to soften the blow of my liquid breakfast.

The line moves. My tummy rumbles. I make it in after waiting just under an hour. The centerpiece of the room, in a sort of altar-like space between the entrance, the dining area, and the kitchen, is a sink. I sit down at my table and it’s the first thing I notice. I’m watching diners walk up mid meal to periodically bathe the fish off their hands. It seems to me that there may not be many utensils here.

Once I’ve finally sat down, I’m immediately served a bowl of mixed nuts, marinated olives, and a spicy red bell pepper paste, like a sort of mix between tapenade and hot salsa. The waiter pours (in everyone’s glass) a pulpy juice from some crushed fruit blend. Stone fruits, maybe. I can’t really guess. Looking around the room now, I can confirm that this a true hands on dining experience. No forks or knives to be found.

I’m waiting to order, but I’m already feeling better. The harissa/bell pep paste is really good. Sweet and bright with a deep and lingering slow burn spice. I’m still waiting for a menu when I’m brought a bowl of soup and it dawns on me that I may not need — or be getting — one. It might just be the kind of place where you sit down and they start bringing you food. It is much easier for everyone, I think, that way. The soup is fishy, brothy, chunky, and the kind of good that makes you line up your molars and squeeze and clench and grit your teeth and growl a little because it’s just so good. It’s got a rich, buttery stock with huge hunks of grilled fish inside.

The best way I can describe this — and bear with me — is that it encapsulates everything that I love about the experience of eating lobster, without all the hassle. That’s to say, there’s something about the flavor and texture of the fish and the broth that it’s in which reminds me suspiciously of drawn butter that it’s just giving afternoon on Martha’s Vineyard. I’m here for it.

Fuck me, they’ve brought out a Tajine. Oh boy howdy, they done did it now, it smells insane and I can’t keep up. This is course three if we’re counting the pepper paste, and, sorry, I forgot to mention that they did serve my soup with a long wooden spoon. I say that now only to reiterate that the tajine is non-inclusive of silverware. Again, that’s fine by me.

Tajine, like “Casserole”, is at once the name of a dish as it may appear on a menu, as well as the name of the dish it’s cooked in and served from — the large clay pot with a pointy dome-hat that’s designed to capture the condensation, and create its own sort of microclimate while your dinner sits on an open fire. Meat cooks, letting off liquid. Liquid evaporates, getting caught on the concavities of the dome above. Liquid drips back down onto dish, garnering a whopping +5 succulence points. This one has a base of spinach and garlic, with more hunks of shark or swordfish or some other hunky specimen of fish. If that was the appetizer, then God help me for the main.

The prune(?) juice is starting to taste like a delicious tropical smoothie and the charcoal is starting to smell good again.

I think my soup must have been Nurse Shark.

The room is, however, thick with so much smoke that it makes my eyes sting. I keep eating olives while I wait for a refill from the Juice Man, who is making his rounds table to table, making sure everyone is topped up. I ask him when he gets to me and learn that I’m drinking “un cocktail des fruits de saison mixte”. Strawberry, pear, apple… not what I imagined but makes sense.

The room itself is adorned with old photos and paintings. One directly in front of me depicts a beach scene where six shirtless fishermen build a fire in the sand dunes. A sort of origin myth, possibly. The shelves on the wall that run the perimeter of the room are lined with clay pots and jars like amphoras. The same pots, its worth noting, that they’re ladling soup from and pouring juice into glasses from. This is no performative decor — everything is functional here!

My main course was daunting, if not noticeably portioned for one. An entire grilled fish was placed before me, head and gills and all. This was served unto me alongside a shark meat shish kabob armed with just a lemon wedge. Still nary a fork in sight. The grilled skewer was immediately eaten. For the fish, I employed a belly-out method, eating by the fistful. Right hand, fish in. Left hand cocked at the ready to extract bones from teeth. Total time to complete both sides of the fish, leaving behind a cartoony head-bones-tail skeleton was just over twenty-three minutes.

I get up, staggering, and waddle to the sink. I get why it’s here now. It’s a place of reckoning. I look at my face in the mirror and wash sticky oils and skin bits from my once-so-eager fingers. Before I can even catch my breath, I”m presented with a bowl of the brightest red, most delicious raspberries and strawberries. The waiter sets it down, smiling warmly. He asks how everything was. I admit I haven’t had a better meal in recent memory.

Next to my bowl of fruit, before walking away, with a wink, he gives me a final parting gift: a gigantic wooden spoon.

Total price for lunch: 250 DAH, or $27.02

I recommend Le Saveur du Poisson, and would go back.

Next Week at Wherelse, we’re looking at how to spend a perfect weekend in Paris.

Want to read about something I haven’t covered yet? Write me an email! I love love letters.

If you’re new:

Welcome!! So glad ur here. I’m Jackson Greathouse Fall. I’m American, based in Paris, live on the road, and write stories about the places I go, the people I meet, and how it all fits together.

I’m also on Instagram and TikTok, where I share reels and engage in more visual storytelling. If you like this, you’ll love that.

If this issue made you hungry, please send it to someone you love. Or post it somewhere with a lil note. It helps more than you know.

I write Wherelse as a living guide to living good, for people like us who love life, good stories, and silver fish necklaces that mean more than they should. Thanks for being here