The fire still has to be checked

Mike’s great-grandfather Jacob Baker fished the lower Columbia in the 1870s. Anton and Signey Josephson came from Finland. For sixty years the only product was Grandpa Anton’s traditional cold-smoked Chinook. “This was the only way they ever smoked fish, and I did it for a lot of years, too,” Mike told the Astoria Co-op. Friends used to joke that he would leave a dance because the fire had to be checked. Cecil, Mike’s father, gillnetted for forty-three years; the loft where the nets were stored is still in the main room. Avis, Mike’s mother, called about forty years ago and said Cecil wasn’t feeling well and needed a little help. Mike took the helm. He and his wife Linda ran it for years. He had started at twelve, with a wire brush on steel hooks.

Three smokehouses now — the old gravity house they still use, AFOS units from Hull, an Enviro-Pak from Clackamas added in 2008. Seven flavors of salmon jerky, twenty-three canned fish, eighteen hot-smoked fish and shellfish, three cold-smoked lox. Chowder in the shop. Mail order that started with Signey’s handwritten holiday postcards. No preservatives, dyes, or additives, they will tell you, since the beginning. Hours are roughly nine to five-thirty, a little later to open on the weekend.

The customer is often someone whose grandparents got a Christmas box. The other customer is a chef who wants a cure the house will not print on a card. Mike will still show you the hand-cranked hoist that lifted Chinook off the boats. The hole in each strip of salmon is where the hook went. That is not décor. That is the process, twice smoked, hanging.

It is west of downtown Astoria on Marine Drive, not a Seaside Prom shop, and it is the reason a north-coast food story has to go to the river. The cold-smoked Chinook is the original. The jerky is the last forty years. If you want the building, look at the photographs in the old living room, which is now the storefront. If you want the fire, they still have to check it.