Where to find this secret menu item at Seattle Vietnamese restaurants

This story is part of this week’s Vietnamese Food Guide, a special edition dedicated to Seattle’s vibrant Vietnamese cuisine. Find more at seattletimes.com/life/food-drink and in Sunday’s edition of The Mix.

For as long as pho and banh mi have been around Seattle, there’s been a dish just as popular within the Vietnamese community that’s rarely mentioned outside it: the “baby shark.”

Stretching as long as 2.5 feet and weighing up to 10 pounds, the giant catfish that emerges from the deep fryer is served on a platter. With its body slit down the middle and its tail upright, the fish resembles lil’ Jaws, hence its nickname.

But there’s little evidence that the baby shark exists if you check most Vietnamese menus around town. Still, this dish has become a social media darling, thanks mostly to second- and third-generation Vietnamese Americans who post sightings of this dish on TikTok and Instagram.

In the Vietnamese community, the catfish is served whole and head-on at Thanksgiving, family gatherings and reunions. Outside a handful of local cafes, the dish is a secret menu item made on request. It helps if you’re on a first-name basis with the chef.

Seattle-area restaurants often require advance notice to make this fried catfish, typically up to 24 hours due to logistics. Most mom-and-pop spots don’t have the real estate in the kitchen to store these 10-pounders to fry on the spot. And these giant fish spend so much time in the hot oil that it delays other deep-fried orders during a dinner rush, like wings or egg rolls.

Rainier Restaurant and BBQ in Rainier Valley remains most synonymous with this dish because the three-story cafe has the storage capacity and several fryers to cook multiple catfish without advance notice. It’s where most Vietnamese folks hit for a catfish dinner.

Around the Sound, other spots include Lang Viet in Kent, Sago Kitchen in Renton and VK Viet Kitchen in Tacoma.

You might see Vietnamese families around New Holly gathering around a giant vat of sizzling oil in their yards to cook the catfish like a deep-fried Thanksgiving turkey. But I doubt many family fry their own these days. The secret is out: Hit 99 Ranch Market in Edmonds or in Kent, where they fry your fish for free. Just buy a catfish ($4.29 per pound) and the fishmonger will gut and clean it then drop the fish in the deep-fryer. Request it “extra crispy.”

The results can be mixed. Sometimes the fish gets overcooked. Most times, the skin isn’t crisp enough, especially after it turns soggy from being cocooned in butcher’s paper. To get that signature pork-rind crunchy-like skin, ordering at a restaurant is the only way to go.

Now, this prehistoric-looking fish is not photogenic. But the beauty here is in the skin. The whole fish gets burnished about 30 minutes in the hot oil until the skin crackles and mirrors that of the exterior of a porchetta. It’s the chicharron of the sea.

The sweet spot is the contrast of textures; that crispness is offset by the unctuousness of the pale underlying fat on the opposite side. The soft fillet possesses none of the muddiness often associated with catfish.

The Vietnamese version bears little resemblance to the fried catfish found in the American South. The Vietnamese style showcases more of the skin, the fillet a mere filler or bit player in this family-style meal.

Andrea Nguyen, a leading historian on Vietnamese cuisine, believes the dish comes from the Mekong Delta, where villagers would catch a snakefish to roast over a bundle of hay, serving the whole fish with rice papers.

If you order the baby shark, you’ll know it’s cooked correctly because the skin will possess a crackle that can be heard across the dining room.

The feast comes with a garden of lettuce and Asian herbs, a mound of vermicelli noodles and a stack of rice papers.

Wondering how to eat it? Wrap the crunchy skin, soft fillet, Thai basil, crisp lettuce, pickled jicama, fried shallots, peanuts and noodles in the rice paper. Dip the roll in the accompanied fish sauce or the pungent fermented shrimp paste. Your mouth should get a symphony of fatty crunch and meaty flesh along with bright and sour elements similar to a banh mi.

This dish — this glorious baby shark — is a reminder that Vietnamese food is often a cuisine of textures as much as flavors.