People have coffee shops they visit out of habit. Every morning, same time, same order, same faces. It’s the comfort of the routine, the reliability of it all.
My version of that is Saturday afternoons at a Lincoln Park seafood shop.
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About 20 years ago, I started visiting Dirk’s Fish, located at 2070 N. Clybourn Ave. in Lincoln Park, every Saturday.
One day I was driving along Clybourn and noticed smoke wafting from a strip mall. Usually, when there’s smoke and no fire trucks, my brain goes to grilling.
Sure enough, when I pulled into the lot, I saw a Big Green Egg, a table set up alongside it, and people gathering.
At the grill was a genial, mustached fellow, flipping fish over charcoal. And he was handing it out! These weren’t Cheez-It samples at Jewel. They were paper boats with hunks of grilled salmon and vegetables, and a lot of it.
I would come to befriend this genial fellow: Dirk Fucik, the namesake of Dirk’s Fish. He opened the shop in 2003, and before that, he ran Burhops seafood. All told, Fucik has been in the seafood trade for more than half a century.
Back then, as a poor recent college graduate, I’d make lunch...