You can get fried fish anywhere. You can’t get this anywhere.
Every Friday night in the U.P., the same beautiful thing happens. The supper clubs and corner taverns start to fill, the fryers get going, and before long a plate of golden, beer-battered Lake Superior whitefish lands in front of you, flanked by a heap of fries and a scoop of coleslaw. If you grew up here, you can already smell it.
The Upper Peninsula fish fry isn’t a meal so much as a standing appointment. Friday rolls around, and you go. Maybe it’s the VFW, maybe a church basement during Lent, maybe the same tavern your dad took you to when you were eight and could barely see over the table. The fish changes a little place to place, whitefish, perch, walleye, cod, but the ritual never does.
It started, like a lot of Friday traditions, with religion. Catholic immigrants who poured into the Great Lakes in the 1800s didn’t eat meat on Fridays, so fish took its place, and the region’s lakes were packed with it. Then Prohibition gave it a shove: when the taverns couldn’t sell a drink, they sold fried fish to keep the lights on. By the time the supper clubs boomed in the 1940s, Friday fish was a full-blown institution. The church rules eventually loosened. The fish fry never did.
Up here, the gold standard is Lake Superior whitefish, pulled from the biggest, coldest, clearest of the Great Lakes and fried until the batter shatters. It’s mild, it’s flaky, it tastes like the lake it came from, and a downstate freezer-case fillet doesn’t come within a mile of it. Along with the pasty, it’s the food every Yooper craves the second they cross the bridge and leave home.
But ask anybody who moved away what they really miss, and it isn’t just the fish. It’s the room. The fish fry is where you run into your old teacher, where three generations crowd around one table, where the bartender already knows your order before you sit down. You can buy fried fish in any city in America. What you can’t buy is a Friday night that feels like home.
So if you’re reading this from a kitchen in Chicago or a cubicle in Detroit, and your mouth is watering and your chest is a little tight, that’s the U.P. calling. Some traditions you carry with you. This one you have to come back for. We’ll save you a seat. Friday, like always.
Featured image credit: A classic fried fish plate with fries and coleslaw. Photo by Jana Ohajdova on Unsplash.
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