The Day O’Fish No. 8 – Humdingers Amberjack Fish Sandwich

By Cat Taylor on August 11, 2014

Today, we’re breaking all the rules. We’re reviewing a non-fast food restaurant with just two locations to serve you… in Tennessee. So, consider this a worthwhile recommendation for your next road trip to Nashville or Memphis.

The atmosphere at Humdingers is similar to a Buffalo Wild Wings or something like that. I guess they call it casual dining but there aren’t any servers. Therefore, I don’t really know what kind of restaurant it is except that they specialize in fish. There are all kinds of fish options here too: amberjack fish, salmon fish, crispy fish and chips, swai fish (I think they made up that one), ahi tuna fish, rainbow trout fish, mahi mahi fish, and I reckon that’s about it. Thank you, Forrest Gump. It’s a pretty impressive selection and it was difficult to decide what kind of sandwich to try, but guess what made it even more difficult? A fish sandwich during lunch at Humdingers will set you back $10.49! For a sandwich… at lunch… before tax… without a beverage!

In case you are wondering, neither Brophisticate nor the restaurants pay me to write this column or reimburse me for my meals (notice our ad spaces are blank —Ed.). As a result, Humdingers would have gotten a walk out before my order and that money would have been used to buy a big dinner if my friend who recommended the place hadn’t agreed to treat me to the experience. So, thanks to Eric for the food. Since these were completely unchartered waters, I decided to order a fish I had never eaten before and went with the amberjack. I looked it up online and it didn’t look dangerous to eat so I thought it was worth the adventure. I had trouble remembering the name and kept wanting to call it jackalope or crackerjack, but I finally got it right. Humdingers does just about everything a little differently from the fast food restaurants.

First, they don’t put tartar sauce on their sandwiches, which warmed me up to them a bit, but they do offer something called pirinaise. Pirinaise is their own brand of mayonnaise. You may recall my opinion of mayonnaise from my Subway review. Therefore, unique or not, it wasn’t going to be on my sandwich. However, there were various other sauces on the table that they called piri piri sauce. At this point, I was starting to suspect the place was making up words to name things just to confuse me, and that was getting me irritated. Fortunately, it was easy to figure out that piri piri sauce is pretty much the same thing as all those wing sauces at various sports bars. The sauces came in three grades of heat and a fourth lemon-pepper sauce. Since I have no aversion to hot sauces and lemon-pepper sauce, I thought I’d give each of them a shot. There was nothing surprising about any of them. They tasted like they were named. Perhaps the extra hot wasn’t hot enough for you hot chicken freaks, but it was plenty hot for me. The only problem with these sauces was that even a little drowned the natural taste of the fish. Since the fish was grilled, rather than fried, I wanted to make sure to get a few bites that were undoctored in order to get the full effect. Once I got past the overly thick bun (which was good quality but still too much bread), I got a taste of some really tasty fish. It was good with the sauce too, but you can only get the full fish flavor when you go sauceless. To paraphrase John Travolta in Pulp Fiction, “That’s a pretty f***ing good fish sandwich. I don’t know if it’s worth $10.49, but it’s pretty f***ing good.”

Final ratings:

Appearance: 5 out of 5 shark bites

Taste: 5 out of 5 Big Kahuna burgers

Overall value for the money: At that price, I should have been able to make two meals out of it, but it’s not that big. So, 2 out of 5 shrimp boats