Eating Paddlefish in Haikou Hainan China • Best Fish Soup I Ever Tasted 鸭嘴鱼 大嘴鱼乡 海口

My first time tasting Paddlefish known colloquially in Chinese as 鸭嘴鱼 or duck mouth fish for obvious reasons 🦆

Paddlefish (which is from the same fish family as the Sturgeon) is farm raised in freshwater in China.

At RMB168 (SGD32) per fish at 大嘴鱼乡 restaurant in Haikou, Hainan, it is an affordable indulgence. The fish were kept alive in display tanks.

Don't worry, these farm raised American Paddlefish is not an endangered species. (On the other hand, the native Chinese Paddlefish was indeed declared extinct since 2020.)

China first imported Paddlefish fingerlings from the US in 1988. By 2001, some fish matured and spawned, while many more fish were further imported from the US and Russia since. Hundreds of millions of Paddlefish are raised in over 20 provinces across China, particularly in the east. Source

I forgot to ask how heavy was our fish but it looked around a kilo.

The staff cut the large meaty fish into steaks.

The chunky Paddlefish steaks were cooked by boiling in soup which was itself made by boiling Paddlefish for six hours.

Paddlefish fish soup was the best fish soup I have ever tasted. The soup was milky with viscous body like milk and tasted sweet savoury.

The restaurant provided generous refills on request.

Paddlefish meat was tender and slightly springy to the bite. The meat was sweet with a subtle bit of river fish earthiness which I like.

The scaleless fish has a cartilaginous spine but not a single spiny bone. The spine was soft crunchy and edible.

The bony paddle mouth and head were deep fried and were crisp like crackly biscuit.

The paddle mouth was filled with jelly fatty tissue.

We had our Paddlefish at 大嘴鱼乡 restaurant in Haikou, Hainan.

The well appointed restaurant is an upscale lao ba cha (Hainan style tea house / coffee shop) by day and at night it is a hotpot place. The night we were at 大嘴鱼乡, it was windy and raining heavily as a typhoon was passing through Hainan's south, so the restaurant was relatively quiet.