Calumet Fisheries

Calumet Fisheries is a shack on the 95th Street bridge, wedged between Lake Michigan and the Chicago Skyway, and it has been doing exactly one thing since 1948: smoking fish over oak after a proper brine. That's the whole operation, and it's enough. The smoked shrimp is the move, lightly smoked and clean-tasting in a way that makes fried versions elsewhere feel like a shortcut. The garlic and pepper salmon backs it up. Fried shrimp is on the menu and it's fine, but ordering it here and skipping the smoker is missing the point of the place.

It's cash-only, strictly takeout, no seating, no ceremony — you eat standing on the bridge or in your car, and that's correct. Anthony Bourdain shot here, the Blues Brothers bridge scene is a few feet away, and neither fact has anything to do with why the place still has a line. The fish does that on its own.

A James Beard America's Classics win and repeated national recognition confirm what regulars already knew: this is one of the country's great smokehouse seafood counters, unchanged and better for it.