Restaurants

Fisher Clark Urban Delicatessen

Man does not live by bread alone – but you could come close here.

By Jason Sheehan 

When I was growing up, my family and I spent most weekends at our summer cottage in the Thousand Islands region of upstate New York.

When I tell people this, they imagine a tanned and happy nuclear unit cavorting on the manicured lawn of a nice Cape Cod on the shores of a pristine lake. They think of the Kennedy clan playing touch football, of weenie roasts and star-filled night skies, of canoe trips at dawn with the fog lifting off the water like folds of washed silk.

But nothing could be further from the truth. My folks were what you might politely call "outdoorsy" — meaning my father owned more pairs of boots than he did shoes; that our long succession of used cars were chosen not for their looks or creature comforts, but for how many aluminum-frame backpacks and five-gallon jerricans of potable water would fit in the trunk; that no family vacation was considered a success unless a mountain had been climbed, a trail cut through a wilderness that not even loggers considered passable, and one of the four of us was nearly killed after falling into a crevasse or playing with dynamite (which, at the time, was still sold openly in the hardware stores of the villages we frequented — an undeniable temptation to my father, who hated cutting down trees but loved blowing them up).

Being outdoorsy people, when my parents got the chance to buy a little bit of property in the woods for a weekend getaway, they chose to spend about seventeen bucks on a tract of land set high atop a vertical cliff, backing up on a bajillion acres of dirty, stony, tree-choked, bear-infested, occasionally swampy territory affectionately referred to as "The Hogback," which, to this day, remains completely uninhabitable by humans. My parents and my little brother took to this environment like a three-way clan of Jeremiah Johnsons (not surprisingly, Jeremiah Johnson is one of my dad's favorite movies, along with anything starring Chuck Norris). I, on the other hand, want nothing to do with any outdoor activity that doesn't involve barbecue and a wet bar, and my intense dislike of nature and everything in it was born during these happy weekends at the "lake."

The lake itself was at the bottom of the cliff, across a grassy and snake-filled field, at the end of a sixty-foot dock that my parents built to traverse a disgusting, smelly, weed-choked and plague-ridden swamp full of enormous and foul-tempered turtles. Every year, when the lake froze, the ice would smash the dock. Every year, when the ice thawed, my parents would rebuild the dock, and I would help — insomuch as standing around in a pair of waders, submerged up to my nipples in mud and brackish swamp water and loudly listing off the Disneyland and Jersey Shore vacation destinations of all my normal friends could be considered helping.

Though I don't have a lot of good memories from those years spent among the swamp turtles and bears, I do remember one thing fondly: the local grocery/general store, which was at the end of three miles of dirt road and five more of rural routes that were only paved in the most generous sense of the word, in a tiny town that otherwise consisted of three bars, a video-rental store, a liquor store and two more bars. It carried two dozen brands of beer but only two kinds of bread (IronKids and another sub-generic called simply Sandwich); milk that might not have come from the cow tethered in the back parking lot, but certainly from one that could probably see the back parking lot from its enclosure; and bologna stored in the same cooler as the live bait.

I loved this store, and would gladly have spent my entire weekend there. I found it endlessly fascinating how such a small place (about the size of your average Chipotle) with only a passing concern for things like proper refrigeration and a laissez-faire attitude toward the sale of cigarettes to minors and dynamite to my father could possibly supply an entire region with all its beer, bread, bologna and bait. There were ice creams in the freezer, really good cheeses (farmer's variety, as powerful and puckeringly tart as the most artisan cheddars and Italian hard cheeses) stacked right alongside the bricks of Velveeta, a butcher who would skin and dress a deer for you if you slid him a few bucks, and two or three dimly lit, crooked and rickety aisles with shelves holding what I now assume were the combined results of years of mis-orders and unclaimed special deliveries. Hair dye (two shades only), pantyhose, first-aid kits, camp-stove propane cylinders, men's pomade, breakfast cereals of dubious provenance, a brand of oatmeal whose mascot was some sort of retarded moose — that kind of thing.

I was reminded of this general store, no doubt by now a victim of the Wal-Martization of America, the first time I walked into Fisher Clark Urban Delicatessen. The two spots could not possibly have been more different — and yet, in their genes, these two very disparate operations were inextricably linked. Maybe it was the sound of my boots on the hardwood floor that brought the memories flooding back, or the closeness of the place — the small space, the crowded shelves, the strange intimacy of being crammed in among the neighbors, the locals, the friends of the owners: Mary Clark (ex of Tante Louise and the beloved Bluepoint Bakery) and chef Adam Fisher. Certainly, the grocery store I remembered never had anything like the short, polished counter by the big front windows at Fisher Clark (four seats, almost always taken) or the Italian-cafe patio seats on the sidewalk alongside University Boulevard (set with heavy cans of Italian tomatoes for holding down napkins and thwarting the breezes). And Fisher Clark definitely did not smell of chaw, dust and blood, or offer live bait.

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