There Will Never Be Another Calumet Fisheries

When Javier Magallanes was 16 years old, he decided that it was time to get his first job. It was 2011 and the labor market wasn’t exactly booming, but Magallanes felt lucky to have a hookup in his own South Side neighborhood. His uncle, Edmundo Campos, happened to work at a place Magallanes grew up visiting with his father, which together they dubbed “shrimp from the bridge.”

His employer, it turns out, was actually the Chicago institution better known as Calumet Fisheries, the famous red-roofed smoked fish shack at the 95th Street Bridge. The name meant little to Magallanes, but he knew his uncle had vouched for him despite his inexperience. “I was a little nervous,” he admits. “I didn’t want to mess up.”

Unbeknownst to the then-high schooler, Magallanes had stumbled into a position at one of Chicago’s most treasured culinary landmarks and a point of pride for generations of South Siders.

Calumet Fisheries was originally founded in 1928, but its eventual fame was set in motion two decades later when ​​Sid “Fish” Kotlick and Leonard Toll — the late father and uncle respectively of current owner Mark Kotlick — bought the business, located just minutes away from their homes. Much like Magallanes, Kotlick grew up around the bridge-side shack. “Dad was always the funny guy with the customers and was good with the employees,” Kotlick recalls. “My uncle was the businessman.” Though they’d occasionally tangle with one another, “they were great as owners.”

When the shack changed hands in 1948, smoked fish were popular among travelers on the Calumet River, as well as the then-large Scandinavian community in the area and foundry workers in nearby Indiana. The river, a significant system of industrialized waterways, runs between Chicago’s South Side and the city of Gary. “Cal Fish” took on the allure of a cave of wonders where treasures — that is, buttery sable, tangy pepper garlic trout, and snappy, smoke-kissed shrimp — are retrieved from the sooty depths of the smokehouse. When Kotlick was a teenager, he recalls smoking up to 200 pounds of chub a day for crowds of ravenous regulars.

Shacks are a relic of Chicago’s past with icons like Haire’s Famous Gulf Shrimp, Lawrence Fish & Shrimp, and Goose Island Shrimp House keeping the tradition of grabbing a bag of fried seafood and eating in the car. But Calumet’s legacy is even more particular; it’s one of two remaining smokehouses that are allowed to burn wood and smoke fish in Chicago, alongside 78-year-old Hagen’s Fish Market in landlocked Portage Park on the Northwest Side. Both long-standing businesses were “grandfathered in” by officials, but Environmental Protection Agency regulations prohibit new commercial smoking operations from mimicking the approach. Under the tutelage of his uncle, Magallanes learned to manipulate the conditions inside Cal Fish’s tiny smoking sheds to produce the desired flavor and texture for each variety of farm-raised fish or seafood. Delicate wild-caught whitefish, for example, spends about four hours bathed in the smoke of natural oak logs, while fattier, richer farm-raised salmon needs five hours in the hazy shed.

By the 1980s, Calumet Fisheries’ local cult status evolved into the stuff of Hollywood legend thanks to a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo in comedy staple The Blues Brothers. Just as Jake and Elwood hit the gas for their gravity-defying bridge jump, that singular red roof is visible in the background. But as the decades passed, even movie magic couldn’t compensate for a major drop in demand for smoked fish as river traffic dwindled and neighborhood demographics changed. Calumet Fisheries expanded its menu to include fried seafood to help make ends meet, and things eventually grew so dire that Kotlick considered shutting down the smokehouse entirely.

In yet another cinematic twist, that plan was derailed by a visit from the late Anthony Bourdain, who featured Calumet Fisheries in a 2009 episode of No Reservations. Suddenly the business was, to put it mildly, booming. Kotlick didn’t even know the episode had aired when one day, the shack’s door chime began to ding nonstop. “I thought, ‘Oh it’s stuck,’” he says. “I come out and there’s 30 people inside and a line down the block on 95th Street. We sold an entire week’s worth of smoked fish in three hours.”

The shack’s legacy reached new heights in 2010 when the James Beard Foundation dubbed it an America’s Classic, an award for timeless restaurants that have demonstrated skill and excellence in a community. The accolade allowed Calumet Fisheries to endure and tap into a key market — tourists. The shop’s range among local customers is typically about 10 miles, but visitors land at O’Hare International Airport and make the 30-mile commute straight to Cal Fish, where Bourdain’s impact remains as potent as ever. Out-of-town fans should note that flying out of Midway International Airport makes for a shorter 10-mile drive south.

Fifteen years after the episode first aired, customers are still mentioning the episode and ordering the same items (including pepper-garlic smoked salmon), says Kotlick, who wishes he could have hosted Bourdain one more time before his death in 2018.

It took Magallanes two years of working at Cal Fish to realize this wasn’t just any hospitality gig. “I found out they had a Beard Award and Bourdain had visited, but at the time I didn’t know what either of those were,” he says. “I did some research and was like, ‘Wow!’ It built up a little pride. I don’t just work at a restaurant, I work at Calumet Fisheries.”

This revelation set Magallanes on a path to climbing the ranks to his current role as general manager, taking over the position in 2020 after the death of Carlos Rosas, the face of the business for more than two decades. Now overseeing the business from Florida after Rosas’s devastating death, Kotlick says he feels fortunate to have a dependable manager in Magallanes, especially after Calumet Fisheries was ravaged by an electrical fire and forced to close for six months of repairs.

Though some adherents feared that new construction would drain Calumet Fisheries of all its humble charm, those concerns fell by the wayside in early June when the shack reopened as a clean, fresh version of its former self. Kotlick flew into Chicago for the reopening on a sunny Saturday that saw fans lining up around the block for a taste of the shack’s smoked and fried delights.

Magallanes hasn’t taken much time to reflect, but a recent visit from Campos — who spent three decades working at Cal Fish — has surfaced emotions. “It’s an honor for me to be managing that restaurant,” Magallanes says. “[My uncle] told me, ‘Yo, this is a big deal. You might see it as a job, but it’s not just any regular job — there’s history and prestige with this restaurant.”