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Some fish I’ve bought recently, and some dishes I’ve made with it:

Massachusetts sashimi-grade bluefin tuna with some medium-fatty meat on the edge of the steak, a mix of Faroe Islands and Scottish sushi-grade Atlantic salmon, and Massachusetts jumbo sea scallops. Also safe for sushi.

Oysters—not in the stuffing—for Thanksgiving dinner!

Pistachio-crusted swordfish steak (a recipe from Sicily!)

It was all as delicious as it looks.

But this isn’t a piece about cooking or even fish per se. It’s a small business appreciation piece, because all of this fish is from Lobster Maine-ia, little family-owned fish shop in a low-slung light industrial building off an arterial in Chantilly, Virginia.

I wonder sometimes if folks think I’m being paid somehow, or doing the “influencer” thing, when I write these illustrated pieces about seemingly randomly selected small businesses (see the ones in the “Related Reading,” for example). The answer, if you’ve ever wondered that, is no. I only spend money at these places I write about. I just like to give some visible appreciation to business where I actually enjoy being a customer.

The general experience of buying things is pretty much drudgery these days for me. So many stores are understaffed, have trouble retaining people, offer minimal customer service, etc. I understand that. It’s hard to hire people. It’s tough to train them really well when there’s a good chance they’ll leave in a few months. They need to be paid enough. The big-box stores and national chains and Amazon have their perks, but they come at a cost, and they’re sort of joylessly efficient.

It truly is a joy to shop at a really great small business, where the people know their industry or craft and enjoy their work and take pride in it. There’s an Italian deli in Arlington, with a couple of locations, where I bought some meats, cheeses, and bread for Thanksgiving. It was the most enjoyable shop I stopped at for the holiday food shopping. Except for this fish store.

I’d seen their sign five or six years ago, out on a nondescript road south of a big intersection with U.S. 50. It says “Live Lobster” with an arrow pointing to a light industrial park. “Who’d ever buy fish out of a building like that?” I think I said, back in 2018. I had no idea there was a proper store there—there was no name on the sign board, at least not that I could read in the car.

A few months ago, I was searching for fish markets in the D.C. area on Google Maps, this popped up, and I realized it was the place I’d dismissed years ago without even knowing it was there. And what a lucky find.

H-Mart, where we’d buy sushi-grade salmon once in awhile, recently switched from Norwegian—the stuff that convinced Japan to eat salmon raw—to Canadian, which is considered lesser quality. Same price—$24.99lb. Steep, and not worth it even as a treat. Wegmans has tuna, usually around $36lb, which often looks a little pale or old for sashimi. Whole Foods often doesn’t have tuna, and their salmon, while maybe safe to eat raw, isn’t advertised as sushi grade.

We like fish in general too—grilled, fried, baked. But it’s so expensive. A lot of it is previously frozen and mushy or spongy. I’ll happily eat conventional chicken breasts, but bad fish isn’t worth eating.

So the store. You might not think much based on the outside:

Here’s a hint at what’s inside—a lobster pot boiling!

We pre-ordered our Thanksgiving seafood—a bunch of scallops to wrap in bacon, and tuna and salmon for a sushi night the evening before. I mentioned in the email note that most of this would be for sushi, so I’d appreciate a really fine, fresh cut of the salmon and tuna. I even asked if, were I to see an even prettier piece of tuna in the display case, I could swap it out when I picked up. When I’m eating something raw I’m picky. The owner assured me that while I was free to switch the piece of tuna, he was sure I wouldn’t want to. And he was right. That was some of the best quality fish I’ve ever eaten or probably even seen.

The salmon? About $16lb. Bluefin tuna with medium-fatty meat, just like I’d asked for in the preorder note? About $33lb. Scallops? Around $30lb. None of this is cheap. But I can assure it’s less that what you’d pay at an upscale supermarket, if they even have anything this good. It’s far less than what I’ve seen in other independent fish markets (even one out in central Jersey near my parents!)

Here’s the display case:

There are a relatively small selection of fish fillets and steaks, plus scallops, lobster, shrimp, clams, and other products, some of which are packaged and frozen. Most, however, is stuff that comes in fresh. There are weekly specials, and the special will be a shipment of Scottish salmon or a single bluefin or yellowfin tuna. There’s a certain randomness to it, but it’s the randomness of chef’s choice. You can trust it.

The other week they had a Christmas party at the store—stop by throughout the day for free food (oysters, crab dip, Cajun shrimp, and a couple of other items) and drinks (beer and non-alcoholic sparkling cider). The special prices, just for the Christmas party, were amazing—the sushi-grade salmon was just $11.99lb! And it’s better than the salmon sushi you’ll get at 90 percent of the sushi joints around here. I don’t even know how they make money.

How many businesses do something like this—make you actually feel appreciated as a customer? Make spending money there feel like a privilege and not a grudging, frustrating thing? Every time I go we chat with the staff, get recipe ideas or tips, get asked how the last batch of fish was. It’s just pleasant like few consumer experiences are.

It’s almost like a trip back in time, when this was just the way business was done.

And that brings me to a couple of broader thoughts. One thing that strikes me is that they’re able to reliably stock relatively rare items: wild yellowtail, bluefin, jumbo sea scallops. They also offer various seasonal specials like tilefish and red drum, which rarely if ever show up in chain supermarkets.

My guess is that these fish just aren’t economical or plentiful enough to make them fixtures of the fish case in a supermarket-scale enterprise. There isn’t enough bluefin to put it in every Wegmans display. But there is enough for these guys to offer it regularly. A chain needs consistency. A small fish shop has more flexibility.

This illustrates a much broader point: the scale at which business is done alters the way business is done, from the closeness of the staff to the management to the inventory. It’s not just a question of size. Business at a small scale is a fundamentally different creature than business at a large scale.

I drew this out in a piece about a small regional discount department store chain:

In some ways, Walmart is constrained and limited by its business model and ubiquity. There are over 4,000 Walmart stores in America, and they all need to stock more or less the same things. That limits them to suppliers who can 1) offer rock-bottom prices, and 2) supply amounts sufficient to fill shelves and displays in thousands of stores.

I have this idea that a huge element of what we call “urbanism” is really about scale, and to the extent that cities are about commerce, commerce at a small scale. So it’s neat to see a business like this in a middle suburb, where everything is built and scaled against it.

Some would say that contradicts my understanding of urbanism. I make a more complex point: under the form of car-oriented suburbia, something else is concealed.

And amazing fish, too.

Related Reading:

The Curious Phenomenon of the Garden Superstore

Roses Are Red, Walmarts Are Blue

The Sugar Shack

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