A fishmonger is someone whose job is to sell fish to people for food — and by extension, the shop where fish is sold. The fishmonger buys whole fish from markets, auctions, or boats, and prepares it for the customer: scaling, gutting, filleting to order, with the knowledge to judge freshness by eye, gill, and smell. It is a skilled trade — the filleting knife work, the species knowledge, the ice-bed display — and the independent fishmonger remains the quality benchmark against which supermarket fish counters are judged. The shop itself, with its marble slabs and crushed ice, is among the oldest forms of food retail. In an era of supply chains, the fishmonger is the short one: the person who knows where the fish was yesterday and how to cook it tonight.