Go ahead and ask Tom Butler about haddock.
You might want to whip out a notebook. Or call that lunch date to report you will be a bit late.
Because Butler, the owner of Tom’s Seafood and Specialties in Lakewood (767 S. Xenon Court, 303-969-9334), can tell you a lot about haddock, as well as shrimp, cod, oysters and soft-shell crabs. And more than likely, he will.
Did you know the only reason the skin always remains on a fillet of haddock is so you can tell it apart from cod? Do you understand why shark often smells like ammonia (it’s got something to do with its unique urinary tract)? Where do most “bay scallops” come from? Butler’s answer is Chinese farms.
Spend five minutes with the Kennedy- coiffed, wide-smiling Butler, and he’ll lard you with trivia tidbits like this, and more.
Plenty of places along the Front Range sell seafood, but few know as much about it as Butler.
“Being brought up in Colorado, it’s not something you think about,” says Butler, 59, who grew up in and around the Denver area. (Here’s a telling detail, though: Many of his close relatives come from Isle au Haut, a remote island off the coast of Maine, where Butler spent some summers growing up). “In retrospect, I probably would have been a marine biologist. I find it fascinating, period. When something stumps me, I go to research it. I never could understand soft-shell crabs, for example. Why do they let people take female soft-shell crabs, when they don’t let them take female blue crabs that are not soft? It bugged me. There is a valid reason. Once a crab goes soft, it never reproduces again.”
Butler grew up in Denver, went to Vietnam during the war (where he first encountered, to his delight, the pleasures of soft-shell crabs), worked in a Denver ski shop, and knew little about seafood until the day, in 1980, when he purchased a seafood shop in Denver.
He bought it because a girlfriend asked him if he knew anybody who wanted to buy a fish shop.
“No,” he answered. “How much are they asking?”
At one point, in the mid-1980s, Butler’s shop, Seafood Landing, was the largest in Denver, he says. After about six years, though, he saw the major grocery stores begin to open fish counters, and he sold the business. He got involved with one business after that, he says, and lost all of his money (the business had nothing to do with seafood). Then he began working at fish counters for a major grocery-store chain, where he lasted about 10 years before, a decade ago, opening Tom’s Seafood and Specialties.
Nearly 30 years after wading into the fish business, here is Butler, in white shorts, white tube-socks and a white apron at 9:30 a.m. in his vest-pocket shop, scooping 300 pounds of crushed ice from a stainless steel ice maker and using it to fill the long counter where he’ll lay his bounty.
He examines every mussel, clam and oyster he sets on the ice, holding them up in the air and tapping them. A bunch gets tossed in the garbage can. He yanks a whole halibut from his refrigerator, slaps it on a counter, quickly sharpens a knife, and plunges it into the fish, removing the tail and the skin, cutting steaks from the area around the fish’s spine and fillets from everywhere else.
A familiar customer calls — many of his customers are regulars — and tells him she’s making clams casino that night. He gathers the number of clams she wants and uses his stubby oyster blade to shuck them for her before she arrives.
He talks about shrimp. Much of what is available anymore is farm-raised in Asia and not very good. He makes sure all of his shrimp is pulled, wild, from the Gulf of Mexico, usually from somewhere around Louisiana.
This is a healthy slice of Butler’s life — in whites, alone behind the counter in his shop, turning whole fish into steaks and fillets, cleaning up. And talking to anybody who will listen about oceans and rivers and estuaries, about anything edible that lives in water. A recent verbal jag involved Hurricane Katrina and crabs; the Cheseapeake Bay and pollution and crabs; the environmental horror that is the mouth of the Mississippi River; why he won’t eat shark fin soup (fishermen kill sharks just for their fins; Butler reveres sharks); how mackerel and tuna are related species; and so on.
“The intricacies of the ocean are unbelievable,” he says. “It’s amazing. I might as well have gone to school, I’ve done so much reading. It’s a hard business. It’s not easy making a good living at it, it’s not easy at all. I don’t make much money, but I eat well.”
Douglas Brown: 303-954-1395 or djbrown@denverpost.com
