Up In Smoke From brunch to break-fast, Acme Smoked Fish celebrates 50 years of luring the faithful.

Martha Mendelsohn - Jewish Week Correspondent



It’s “Fish Friday” at the Acme Smoked Fish Corp. in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, and with two weeks until Yom Kippur, Judy Wachs isn’t wasting time.

At the company’s retail outlet, she snaps up six jars of pickled lox and pickled herring. She slaps quarter-pound packs of nova on the counter. (Not to worry — these have a shelf life of a month.) Her catch soon fills two shopping bags and a carton — enough for a break-fast feast for 20 at her Long Island home.

“Is Robbie around to say hello to?” Wachs asks about Acme’s vice president, Robert Caslow.

“I’m his daughter,” pipes up Emily Caslow Gindi.

She’s Acme’s sales and marketing director, but on Fish Friday mornings, she waits on customers.

Caslow comes straight from the factory, still in smock and shower cap. He hugs Wachs, whose son used to work with his wife, a retired physician, reassures an old customer that his order will be shipped to his synagogue, and welcomes other supplicants lining up for a fish fix at the bargain rate of $12 a pound.

Make no mistake, despite its heimishe aura, Acme is no quaint mom-and-pop operation. This family-owned company, which just turned 50, is the largest producer and distributor of smoked fish in New York State, and one of the largest in the country.

Most of the half-million pounds of Kof-K kosher-certified smoked salmon and herring produced during the Days of Awe are not sold at the factory outlet in Greenpoint but in world-class specialty stores such as Russ and Daughters, Zabar’s, Citarella, Fairway and Balducci’s in Manhattan, and by national chains like Sam’s Club and Costco.

“It wasn’t always this way for Yom Kippur,” Caslow recalls in his office, where the faint smell of fish has followed him. Families used to break the fast with meat recycled from dinner the night before. As break-fasts became more festive and crowded, “people started thinking a dairy meal might be a better way to go.”

“I first saw the future one morning about 35 years ago when I was driving a truck in Manhattan,” says Caslow, 56. He was waiting for a storeowner to pay him when “I saw a nurse come in and buy a coffee and ‘bagel and novy.’ ” Her choice surprised him; lox and bagels at the time were still strictly Jewish brunch fare.

“Maybe there is hope in this business,” he thought.

Caslow’s grandfather, Harry Brownstein, sold lox and chubs to small appetizing stores from a horse-drawn wagon when he came to New York from Russia in the early 1900s. In 1954, when he was in his 60s, he opened his own smokehouse — a risky venture, since there were hundreds of smokehouses in Brooklyn.

Not anymore. “There are two-and-a-half left,” Caslow says with a grin.

Brownstein immediately brought his son and son-in-law into the company. Today, seven Caslow and Brownstein family members, including the fourth generation, handle various aspects of the business.

Eric Caslow, Acme’s president, acquires the raw materials from fish farms or fishermen on Canada’s East Coast, and in Alaska, Scotland, Norway and Chile. His 30-year-old son, David, is in charge of new product development. Rubin Caslow, 84, Eric and Robert’s father, has given up the night shift, but still reviews orders and invoices.

Gindi worked for UJA-Federation after college — she is still active in the Young Leadership Division — but admits, “I always knew I would end up at Acme.”

Family is the secret ingredient to Acme’s success, she and her father agree.

“My father and uncle instilled in us how important family is,” Robert Caslow says, “and how hard it is when you work together. My brother and I haven’t let anything interfere with our having a happy, harmonious relationship.”

The Caslow brothers had to follow their grandfather and father’s orders or else, but they welcome their children’s suggestions. Two years ago, David presented a plan for revamping the company’s slicing operations.

“We gave him a big budget,” his uncle says, “and he spent it.” The improvements increased production by 30 to 35 percent, Caslow reports.

As if all that workplace togetherness (not to mention fish) weren’t enough, some 30 Caslows and Brownsteins gather every year at Eric’s home in Port Washington, L.I., to break the fast with baked kippered salmon, whitefish, pickled lox, herring, nova and noodle pudding — 18 to 20 pounds of fish, with 3 to 4 ounces of nova per person. Even in the age of jalapeno-, mesquite-, and pastrami-flavored smoked salmon, plain nova is still the favorite.

“Can I tell the story about …?” Gindi begins tentatively, hinting at a past break-fast blunder perhaps or a split-second of family discord.

Dad shakes his head no. The story goes untold.

Buffeted by fishy whiffs and whooshes of antibacterial foam, 150 workers gut, trim, cure, cold- and hot-smoke, slice and vacuum-seal lox, nova, chubs, sable, whitefish, kippered salmon and trout in the 80,000-square-foot factory’s smoking, slicing and packing rooms.

There’s sturgeon, too, but Rabbi Jacob Fogel, Acme’s mashgiach, confines it to separate quarters. “Sturgeon isn’t kosher,” he says without ambivalence. The fish bottom-feed and have the wrong kind of scales.

Lox, incidentally, is not saltier smoked salmon. Lox isn’t smoked. It’s cured in a brine of salt, sugar and water. And the word “nova” refers to a style of wet-cured, cold-smoked salmon rather than to a place of origin.

In the slicing room, workers deftly place overlapping fish slices on thin boards for vacuum packaging.

“Packaged goods were once considered to be inferior,” Caslow says. “There was the idea that the fish slicer knew which fish was better. Today the packaged product is equally good.”

High-end stores tend to be fussy about their vacuum-packed fish.

“Acme is our biggest supplier, but we don’t want what’s sold in the supermarkets,” Dan Lewis, corporate chef and deli merchant for Balducci’s, says in a phone interview.

Balducci’s stocks Acme’s Blue Hill Bay brand, a preservative-free, dry-cured line of nova, gravlax, hot-smoked salmon, cold-smoked yellowfin tuna, brook trout, jarred herring fillets and more. Blue Hill Bay products are certified by Kof-K, too, but sporting a snooty-looking salmon on the label, they “appeal to a different kind of audience,” says Caslow.

A particularly perfectionist deli czar whose name begins with Z visits the Acme factory every week. He gets his fish bespoke smoked for his celebrated Upper West Side emporium. This has been going on for 20 years. Nobody else gets that kind of treatment, Caslow makes clear.

In the outlet, the line grows longer and louder. A woman bellows into a cell phone: “You want a whole whitefish?”

A middle-aged couple deliberates, partly in Polish. She likes the farmed salmon; he prefers the wild. Wild is what they get — in a single unsliced slab. “I have a good knife at home,” the woman says.

(At one time, all salmon was “wild,” Caslow says, referring to the recent flap about contaminants in farm-raised fish. But PCBs are found only in the skin, he explains. Facts about farmed salmon are posted on Acme’s Web site, which also features a fish glossary and recipes.)

Scott Gaynor, 26, a local businessman, arrives with friends from Williamsburg in head-to-toe noir. His grandfather used to work for Acme. He’s buying lox and smoked trout for the weekend, but he’ll be back in two weeks to load up for a break-fast party at his Upper East Side apartment.

Before Kol Nidre, the line will stretch into the garage, Gindi says.

“Yom Kippur is hands over our busiest time,” she says.

But Gindi’s ambitions for the company transcend the Jewish holidays. “I want to make Acme a household name, like Boar’s Head Turkey,” she says. “People go into a store and ask for a pound of nova; I want them to ask for a pound of Acme.”

Whether they go to Costco or Balducci’s, when they ask for nova, chances are they’re getting Acme.