Fish: That was the extent of my certitude.

The thing on my plate was purportedly Texas striped bass but in the dimly lit restaurant, no stripes were visible. The state of origin was even more obscure, though I'm enough of a connoisseur to rule out West Virginia striped bass.

But I had myself a $24 hunk of some kind of marine life, heaped with what seemed to be crab meat, shrimp, crawfish and a sauce that buried the health benefits of seafood under enough fat-laden calories to rival a Whopper.

Piquant sauce dripping down my chin, I was happy as an (alleged) clam.

Judging by genetic research at the Guy Harvey Research Institute at Nova Southeastern University, chances were 50-50 that my morone saxatilis wasn't. Professor Mahmood Shivji told The Miami Herald that after testing more than 100 helpings of pricey restaurant fish, gullible diners might as well have been hunkering down for the evening at Catfish Johnnie's in Lake Panasoffkee (``All-U-Can-Eat, $12.95'').

SCANDAL-LADEN STORY

Fish fraud has become a favorite scandal-laden news story around the world since the St. Petersburg Times introduced the concept of fish dish DNA testing in 2006. The newspaper hired a lab to probe the genetic origins of grouper purchased from 11 Tampa Bay area restaurants, including ``champagne braised black grouper.'' Seems diners were pigging out on tilapia, catfish, hake. Hey. It's a big ocean.

That was the year a Panama City seafood wholesaler was nailed by the feds for importing more than a million pounds of cheap Asian catfish and selling it as grouper. (The owner was fileted: 51 months in prison, $1.13 million fine.)

Since, news operations have regularly gone fishing for DNA scandals. Counterfeit fishmongers have been nailed in Kansas City, Phoenix, Baltimore (23 out of 38 dishes in those four towns were low-rent fish), Vancouver, London and Cape Town. In Washington, the Senate has taken up legislation to get tough on seafood fakery.

But as rip-offs go, fish fraud hardly tips the scales. Here's a kind of artifice that only works because the unwitting consumer, suffering the happy and tasty perception of fine dining, has no clue he's devouring a no-account trash fish.

The illusion expands the concept of fine dining as theater. In reality, the waiter doesn't think your jokes are funny. The flirtatious hostess would sooner go home with the bus boy. And that prosciutto-wrapped Chilean sea bass actually grew up on a low-down Mississippi catfish farm.

ENVIRONMENTAL WARRIORS

Think of the chef as less a flimflam artist than environmental warrior. Every tilapia sautéed in a lemon caper butter sauce under the alias of red snapper means another endangered fishie swims free. Southeast Fisheries Science Center reports that the red snapper populations off the southern U.S. Atlantic Coast have plummeted to less than 3 percent of 1950 levels.

The state of Florida, despite its depleted fisheries, has run DNA fish stings. Last year, giant distributor Sysco Food Systems agreed to start checking fish IDs as diligently as bar bouncers.

Checking fish DNA was an ironic pursuit for a state previously reluctant to check DNA for -- as it turned out -- wrongly convicted prisoners. But at least a condemned prisoner ordering his last meal of grouper almondine wouldn't be dining on low-rent tilapia.

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