Calumet Fisheries

04.23.07

I'm from the Deep South. Many, but not all, of my ramblings for this blog will be based on Southern eats. Today, however, I want to wax poetic about smoked fish.

A Georgian by birth, a Mississippian by marriage and, now, residence, I've eaten barbecue—hardwood-smoked pork—since I was a tot. Smoked fish came later: In my 20s, while living in Atlanta, I ate occasional bagels with smoked sable. In my 30s, I fell for smoked sturgeon at Russ & Daughters in New York City.

In March of this year, I found the place that allowed me to merge my love of sawdust-on-the-floor bbq joints and gleaming-tile-and-stainless-steel smoked-and-pickled-fish emporiums: Calumet Fisheries of Chicago, a squat hut on the edge of the Calumet River, down on East 95th Street. I first read about Calumet, opened in 1948 by brothers-in-law Sid Kotlick and Len Toll, on www.lthforum.com, a Chicago-based food-obsessive web site. A poster described the smoked chubs as "fish crack" and the smoked shrimp as "seagoing spareribs."

It was right. Smoked over oak and cherry, both chubs and shrimp were gobsmackingly sweet and fluent. Twelve-count shrimp were $20 a pound, chub a piddling $8 a pound. Factoring in the $80 round-trip cab fare from the Loop, it was a bargain. And the view from the bridge that runs alongside—the same bridge that Elwood and Jake famously jumped over in The Blues Brothers—was gritty enough to conjure favorable comparisons to the smoke shacks of my youth.

Calumet Fisheries
3259 East 95th St.
Chicago
773-933-9855

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