By Ron Jackimowicz

Cuisine editor

Chef Joseph Zamora has a long memory, and a creative mind when it comes to seafood.

My wife and I and a couple of our friends dropped into the Hilltop House in North Bend recently to celebrate their newly remodeled kitchen.

After we ordered from the bar menu, the chef dropped by our table for a chat.

“I’ve got Manhattan-style chowder on my menu,” the chef said, referring to a question I asked when we did our “favorite clam chowder” story a few months ago. “You’ve got to try it, I’ll send out a bowl.”

He did, and it was very good. But, our discussion quickly turned to seafood (his specialty) and what local restaurants were doing this summer to replace  locally caught salmon.

He said he could give our readers an easy, yet elegant recipe and suggested one for Petrale sole.

When we came back to do the photos, Chef Zamora had made the recipe even more friendly to everyone’s budget and decided to use a fish which can be caught locally.

“Rockfish is one of your better priced fish,” he said, saying you can get them at your local fish market for about $7.50 a pound (that’s two very large fillets). “It’s one of your best bargains. And locally, this is pretty much available 12 months a year. And most of this is caught hook and line.”

The recipe calls for two pounds of rockfish for four servings, but the two rockfish fillets in the photos to the left, actually came out to exactly one pound. So for lighter appetites, Chef Zamora suggested you might just want to cut the finished fillets in half and make four servings out of one pound of fillets.

He also used six or seven prawns for each fillet — depending on the size of the pocket — so one pound of prawns will be more than enough for this recipe even if you use two pounds of fillets.

“You could actually serve four people for about $15,” the chef said while placing ingredients on his kitchen scale. “These fillets are big enough to cut in half. With two fillets, we’re only using six or seven ounces of prawns. Serve them over a bed of rice, with a salad or a vegetable and you have a really nice meal.”

Among the tips he included for this dish are to not over-garlic the fish. “It’s a stronger fish than halibut or Petrale sole, but you don’t want to overpower it.”

Also when moving the fillets from the baking dish to the serving plates, you’ll want to use two spatulas to keep the long fillets from breaking apart.

Finally, the chef suggest a nice Oregon Pinot Gris to go along with the dish.

“It has just the right tartness to go with the garlic,” he said.

One of the chef’s better selling menu items at the restaurant is another stuffed seafood dish, a baked-stuffed halibut.

“It is a six-ounce portion of halibut, stuffed with three ounces of bay shrimp and three or four ounces of Dungeness crab,” he said.

As long as he keeps creating seafood specialties like these, it’s going to be his guests who have the long memories.