Sharon Cohen walked through the door of Fish Bar and immediately I regretted asking her to meet here. Fish Bar has a large painted fish on its brick facade; and the smell of fried squid inside catches in the wind outside and carries across Sheffield Avenue.
And yet Lakeview doesn’t smell like the ocean, the sweet sting of salt doesn’t hang in the air. This is no clam shack. Fish Bar is super fancy. It has air conditioning. We sat beneath an expensive canoe suspended from the ceiling.
Fish Bar was not really evocative of the unpretentious, roadside fried-seafood temples I was promising.
Cohen wore a look of suspicion.
I had told her that Fish Bar made good fried clams, that it was possibly the only restaurant in Chicago that served decent fried clams, which means, fried clams with their bellies still attached and a coat of breading nuzzling its contours so lovingly the bivalve emerges from its hot-oil bath resembling a gnarled semicolon. Cohen is a New England transplant like me, and those are the clams we crave in vain each summer — whole belly fried clams.
She tried to rectify this: A decade ago she opened a restaurant in Bucktown named Glory. Her thing was Northeast specialties, fried clams, johnnycakes, coffee milk. Chicago magazine said her lobster roll was the best sandwich in Chicago in 2003. But then Glory closed in 2004.
She brought Shaun Duffy to Fish Bar. Duffy is her chef at Macy’s Seven on State, where she’s now the general manager. They slid into the booth across from me, and she looked down at the Fish Bar menu.
Eastern belly clams $9, it read.
We got two orders. While we waited, Cohen said she occasionally puts fried clams on the menu at Macy’s. “But they’re expensive to ship.” At Glory she flew in whole belly clams every other day from Massachusetts, battered them in yellow cornmeal, served them in a paper boat. They didn’t sell. People didn’t understand. But that’s an honest fried clam, Chicago.
Howard Johnson lied. So did your neighborhood shrimp hut. A fried clam is not a skinny strip.
A fried clam has a gut.
As we discussed this, and how hard it was to find a real fried clam in the Midwest, and how we had always wondered what Chicago offered in the way of fried clams — and how Fish Bar was actually not the only local restaurant that served this elusive whole belly fried clam — the waitress arrived with our order.
“Wow,” Cohen said. These clams looked like the real thing and even came in a red and white cardboard boat. Yet they didn’t overflow the container, as is traditional. “Wow,” she said again. “My clams were like three times the size of this! This is … crazy small. I’m out of business? I’m shocked.”
She took a bite.
“Hmmm. Small, but good.” She reached for the tartar sauce. “If they fancy this up, I’ll be angry.” She dipped a clam. “Not sweet. But not bad. The clams, though — pretty good. You can actually taste ocean.”
Duffy, from Texas, made a face: “But this ocean tastes like a million miles away.”
“Yeah, but there’s no ocean in Chicago.”
“So why make them at all?”
“They’re not the real thing. It’s not like being at a clam shack in summer, eating fried clam bellies at the beach, next to the ocean. But at least they’re not clam strips.”
Amen. Clam strips?
Beach, please.
Hell is clam strips.
Michael Kornick knows. He doesn’t say it so bluntly. But he relates and he’s part of the solution; he wants to rectify wrongs. He knows that clam strips are what Chicago and the Midwest think of when they think of fried clams, he knows how sad and removed from reality this is — like knowing about the moon only because of conspiracy theories that astronauts never walked on it.
Kornick grew up in Highland Park. He has been a Chicago chef for years, founding MK restaurant, co-founding DMK Burger Bar and last spring, next to DMK, opening Fish Bar — partly because Chicago has no idea what it’s missing, clam-wise.
See, there are cherrystones, which are big; and littlenecks, which are small (and best eaten on the half-shell). There is the flat surf clam, which is tough. And there is the soft-shell clam, or steamer, a plump, delicate creature — the perfect clam to fry.
“I started eating clams young,” Kornick said. “I would eat them on the half shell. My father would say that all you need to do is squeeze a little lemon on them — that cocktail sauce was a sin against clams.”
He didn’t eat a real fried clam until he went to culinary school on the East Coast; later, he began stopping at clam shacks around New England; and even later, he bought a house on Martha’s Vineyard, when his appreciation deepened. When Kornick moved back to Chicago, fried clams were served only at staff meals, and strips were a joke — “after the real thing, it was hard to believe that something could be so washed of all flavor.”
There is, though, a reason for strips.
The fried clam was popularized (and probably invented) on the North Shore of Boston, in the ocean-side, clam-rich flats of Essex and Ipswich, where a clam digger named Thomas Soffron (who died in 2004, at 96) began cutting the thick, bland “foot” from hard-shelled clams and selling it as a strip. Clams use their “foot” to dig; but the rest, that ugly mess inside the shell that includes the belly and neck, makes for juicier fried clams. Soffron disagreed.
He ate only the strip because he didn’t like that bulbous squish of clam belly. He was on the right side of history. By the 1950s, he was selling strips (which shipped better than soft clam belly) to the hotel-restaurant chain Howard Johnson.
This is how Chicago met clam strips.
By the late ’60s, there were more than 1,000 orange-roofed HoJo’s nationwide (only three remain, all on the East Coast) and the strip was its big seller. That’s how Mike Urban was introduced to fried clams. He grew up in Winnetka, but lives in Connecticut now and recently published “Clam Shacks: The Ultimate Guide to New England’s Most Fantastic Seafood Eateries.”
On the North Shore of Chicago, the HoJo strip “was what my parents ordered when I was a kid,” he said. “Strips were faddish — the only clam I remember around Chicago for a long time. I was a meat-and-potatoes Midwestern boy. When I moved to New England and had my first fried clam experience … honestly, I was squeamish.
“To me, belly meant digestive tract, which meant who knew what was in it.”
The typical clam strip is processed, pre-breaded and arrives at the restaurant frozen. “Actually, we sell an extruded strip,” said John Griffin, manager of Lawrence Fisheries on South Canal Street. “Rather than a solid strip of clam, which can be rubbery, it’s shaped into a strip from cut-up pieces. People here tend to prefer that. We get it from an East Coast seafood supplier.”
A traitor.
“Sorry.”
Meanwhile, the soft-shell clam gathered a reputation for damaging easily in transit and not holding as long as oysters. “I’ve been in the fish business a long time,” said Carl Mitsakopoulos, a distributor with Chicago-based Euro USA (formerly Plitt Seafood). “And I like whole fried clams very much. You would think with modern refrigeration it wouldn’t be an issue anymore, but restaurants in Chicago never request whole clams for frying, and really, there’s no legitimate reason why.”
To be fair, the clam strip has one thing going for it:
Shrimp huts and rib shacks and fried seafood emporiums tend to be vaguely reminiscent of clam shacks, atmosphere-wise. When I pulled alongside Calumet Fisheries, a modest red-roofed, family-owned hut on the 95th Street bridge that has specialized in smoked fish since 1948, a tumbleweed hit my car.
A sign hangs inside that reads: “This is our only location. We have no other stores.” And Calumet’s clam strips carry almost exactly the same brownish rusty color that clings to the smokestacks and steel trestles that make up the landscape around the Calumet River.
The Fish Keg on Howard Street, on the Evanston-Chicago line, is not as cute but has better strips. So yes, there is such a thing as decent strips: Monty Williamson, the manager, buys his pre-cut but breads them himself. His mixture (which gets fried too long, until it clings to the strip like a molding) carries a welcome, mild kick.
The strips even carry a surprising, slight fishiness, as if they were still dreaming of ocean. The real draw, though, is the Fish Keg itself, which Williamson’s father-in-law opened in 1951 and has a neon sign shaped like a barrel, kitschy local art and The Fish Keg Cove. This is its stark outdoor dining room. It’s surrounded by thick chain-link fencing, has picnic tables and gravel and all the charm of a prison yard.
Fundamentally, that’s a clam shack.
The traditional clam shack is a seasonal, middle-class thing, synonymous with summer, found from Maine to Long Island, chaotic in May (when the college students manning the fryers are still being trained), smooth in June, hectic in July (the peak of the beach season), nostalgic and sloppy when Labor Day rolls around. Said Jasper White, the Jersey-bred, Boston-based celebrity chef and seafood expert, “The clam shack is an organic thing. It grows out of a local fishing business and is usually owned by a family that just decided one day to shuck and fry their own clams, maybe right there on their property.”
Said Urban: “If someone in Chicago wants to understand the clam shack, go to Superdawg on Milwaukee. You kick gravel around a parking lot as you wait for food, order from a window. Just leave out hot dogs and insert fried clams. It feeds the same craving — some places it’s hot dogs, some places it’s clams, which are to New England what hot dogs are to Chicago.”
Down to the heated arguments.
“My family on Cape Cod, they eat (fried clams) twice a day,” said Bill Dugan, owner of the Fish Guy Market on Elston Avenue. “Growing up in Connecticut I would dig steamers and sell them at my neighbor’s gas station. But I never liked eating them. That belly is a filter system. To me, it’s kind of gross.”
The type of breading, the size of the belly, neck or no neck — the perfect fried clam is considered from many angles. All of which Dugan sidesteps with “The Clamwich,” his only fried clam. He takes two heart-shaped surf clams, pounds them and coats them in panko crumbs — basically, schnitzelizing the clams. Then he fries and serves them on a nice ciabatta roll. For only $8, it’s a heavy lunch, but not super juicy.
Sadly, the juiciest clam in Chicago is the fried oyster, which isn’t delicate enough to be a genuine substitute. Still, the raw oyster outsells any clam in Chicago, partly because it “retains a splash of ocean longer,” Kornick said. His oyster-to-clam ratio?
Twenty-five to 1.
Indeed, White told me he occasionally gets asked to open a restaurant in Chicago. Every time he says no; when soft-shell clams are great, a primordial brine is evident, and it’s too much trouble to import the ocean.
Which brings me to Peter McCarthy, the owner of Kingfisher in Andersonville. It opened last winter, with whole belly fried clams on the menu. They didn’t sell for him, either.
But he has not given up. He still makes them now and then; he’ll make usually make them if you ask. They’re sweet and wonderful. The batter flakes off at the curve of the belly, always a good sign. The order is a little small; and there’s no tartar sauce. But you take what you can get.
Twitter @borrelli
